44 minutes is a long time to spend practicing long tones. I imagine that you could spend the time meditatively counting breaths, or reading, or thinking about just about anything besides your bow stroke. So I began experimenting, and recorded the results in this video. Don't worry. It's short. But I could easily imagine doing this for 44 minutes.
The Casorti book, from 1909, is full of excellent bowing exercises. They are sort of mindless, but then again the idea of bowing exercises is not to engage the mind but to train the muscles of the fingers and hands to become efficient.
2 comments:
The singing makes it much more fun to listen to. I also think it challenges the bow arm to remain autonomous of what is going on in the voice.
Exactly! And when you sing it makes it clear that you really do have to breathe, and it is interesting to separate the breathing from the bow changes. It is fun to do with regular double-stops too, not just open strings.
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