An angle on shifting

I have a ten-year-old violin student who is ready to move beyond first position. I had her slide up the fingerboard, just for fun during the interval between last week's lesson and yesterday's lesson, and during the week I wrote a set of little pieces to teach her to shift using the first finger as a guiding finger.

Needless to say, I was very excited about yesterday's lesson.

I showed her how the angle of the elbow gets narrower when we shift to third position. She was very excited about this because she had JUST LEARNED IN SCHOOL that day about angles: acute, right, and obtuse (though we both needed to search for the word "obtuse"). And now we have vocabulary.

If the shift needs to be a little higher, the angle of the elbow needs to be more acute, and if the shift is too high, the angle of the elbow needs to be more obtuse. After a casual reminder that the "elbow bone" is connected to the "ear bone" and that the thumb and the first finger move as a team, this student was confidently shifting in fifteen minutes. We read through the fifty-measure piece I wrote for her, identified the new pitches, and incorporated some third position in the piece she is playing.

She happened to mention that shifting was easier than trying to do vibrato, but since vibrato is easier to learn in third position than it is in first position, we started learning vibrato yesterday too.

I'm at work now on a whole series of pieces to help with shifting, which I will make available to others in some way. I presented the idea to Mel Bay (they have such excellent distribution), but if they aren't interested I will make the set available in the IMSLP.