Thumb and One (and lots of other teaching tools)

I thought of this little "slogan" while teaching a lesson the other day, and drew a nifty picture to help remind my students (and I guess other people's students, now that I have shared the image) that order to play the violin or the viola confidently in tune in the first position in keys that don't have flats, it is helpful to have the position of the thumb on the neck and the first finger (on any string) directly across the fingerboard from one another.

Sometimes I put a "like" (thumbs up) sticker where the thumb goes (if I have one handy), but any sticker will do. It helps if it is a sticker you can feel.

I was surprised to see that I have made forty-seven teaching posts on this blog. Some of the ideas are a little wacky, but some of them are pretty good.

You can see for yourself!

The number forty-seven has a particular (and I guess peculiar) meaning in our family. So I'll share this little bit of family lore.

Elbow under reminder for violin and viola students

I always use a golden colored pencil in addition to a graphite pencil when I teach. When I find something I need to highlight, like a finger number or a dynamic, I draw a circle around it with the graphite pencil, and color the circle in with the golden one.

A few weeks ago I came up with the idea of drawing a piece of elbow macaroni to remind a student to keep her elbow under the instrument, and coloring it in with the golden pencil gave us both the impression of macaroni and cheese. Needless to say, my student responded really well.

So I thought I'd share this idea here.

NB I made the above demonstration picture with an ink pen, and, because I could, I added some yellow to the gold to give the piece of elbow macaroni more of a "cheesy" sheen.

Of plumb bobs and bow arms

I believe that my violin playing has improved significantly since my attention to my right arm while practicing has been "in the toilet."

[See this post for reference]

But upon returning to serious viola practice (my mother, or perhaps father tongue), I noticed that keeping the bow stick lower than the arm simply doesn't work if I want to make the sound that is in my ear. With my eyes glued to the mirror, I notice that the bow stick feels and sounds best when I have it either at an equal level to my arm, or in some cases a little bit higher. Instead of feeling that my right hand is like a weightless ball floating in a toilet tank, it feels (staying with plumbing water metaphors) more like there is a gently weighted plumb bob hanging somewhere between my forearm and my elbow, and my hand, while not being tense, responds slightly to that weight.

Except for the fact that moving around on a smaller instrument is easier, my left hand feels pretty much the same on both the violin and the viola (I have large hands for my height, broad fingers, and a square palm). I have always known that I had to do things differently with the right hand in order to sound natural on the violin, but until yesterday I never knew exactly what.

Practicing the Campagnoli Opus 22 Caprices with a viola-specific (perhaps my viola-specific) stick-to-arm relationship provides mind-expanding bow-arm-height awareness.

[N.B. The violist Paul Silverthorne gently pointed out to me that plumb bobs are not used in plumbing, although both come from plumbum which is Latin for lead.]

Of bow arms and toilet tanks

My obsession with improving my bow arm continues. And Casorti (mentioned and linked to in a post I made last week) has revealed a secret to me, which I will share with you.

That sentence about keeping the arm lower than the stick is a little bit different from the advice he gives in the beginning of the book, where he says, in item number six, to keep the elbow below the height of the stick:

This thought has been, as they say, a game changer for me. My arm, which is shaped like a stick when fully extended, is easy to see with my eyes, and also easy to "see" with my inner vision, so my attention can get to it immediately. My elbow, being a joint that is often in motion, feels farther away: it takes more of my visual imagination to figure out where it is in space, so adjusting it can come too late for a given musical "situation."

And then I started to think about the inside of an old-school toilet tank.

If the tightness or looseness of the screw that attaches the floating ball mechanism to the tank is incorrect, making the angle of the "stick" a little too acute or obtuse, the toilet runs. If it is correct, allowing the stick that attaches to the ball to let it float to the best place, it doesn't run. I have somehow been able to connect this image with my bow arm very quickly, and make corrections mid stroke. Just keeping my mind in the toilet, I guess.

Accidental Doorways

Steven Millhauser's stories always involve imagination, and sometimes they involve explorations of rooms, pathways, rabbit holes, and doorways that lead from room to room.

While teaching a lesson yesterday, with Millhauser on the brain, after reading "Alice, Falling," one of the stories collectd in The Barnum Museum, I stumbled upon a way to help my eleven-year-old student understand the accidentals that kept popping up in her Vivaldi concerto.

It suddenly occured to me that sharps and naturals are like little doorways that lead us into periods of another tonality, not unlike the doorways that lead from room to room in a house (or museum) with many rooms. They even look like little doorways. And in this case the B-flat in measure 77 functions like a window you can pop your head through for a moment, and then go back to the path. This is certainly not intended to serve as any kind of a harmonic analysis, but it definitely was enough for my student to understand what she was playing while she was playing it.

A piece of music, particularly a piece of common-practice music with a tonal plan is a little like a house or a self-contained world of its own, isn't it?

sdawkcab gnicitcarp (practicing backwards)

Molly Gebrian, a terrific violist and a superb teacher (of subjects musical as well as subjects neuroscientific) talks about the way the brain processes patterns after doing an activity. After playing a series of pitches, for example, the brain will play that series back many times, and at a super-high speed. If you make an intentional pause for ten seconds or so in your practice, it gives the unconscious mind a chance to work through the pattern. This time of inactivity is apparantly where the actual learning takes place. It is as if the mind gets a chance to separate itself from the body in order to work out the most efficient way of executing the pattern at hand.

The brain plays the pattern in a backwards direction as well. Molly says that nobody knows why. So I have been trying to think of reasons why the brain would do such a thing.

My friend and teacher Danny Morganstern taught me to practice passages both forwards and backwards on the viola and the violin, and I find that doing so really helps me "hear" with my left hand, which helps make my intonation more secure. I do it with my students too, and it works wonders.

Today, after considering that nifty Haydn Minuet from the 26th Piano Sonata, I posted about the other day, I gave practicing backwards on the piano a try. I combined it with Molly's ten-second pause, so my backwards playing would "play" forwards in my brain while I was resting between repetitions. (I did it with a different piece, since the A Major Minuet makes complete musical sense both ways.)

It is quite challenging to do with two voices, particularly because flipping the rhythms so that the beginnings of notes sound together complicates the task. Anyway, when I played passages forwards after playing them backwards, I found that it was much easier to play accurately than before I did my two-handed backwards practice.

I wonder if our brains are "wired" to backtrack when we make a journey so that we can find our way home. I have, particularly while walking in the woods, found myself recognizing landmarks on a return trip that I didn't particularly notice on the forward trip. Isn't a musical journey through passages of pitches similar to a journey through physical space?

Also, when we build or assemble things like houses, clothes, or machines, we sometimes need to take them apart in order to clean them, repair them, or simply figure out how they work. We sometimes have to reverse our steps when we are trying to locate a lost object, and it is often not as difficult to do as we might have anticipated.  

Using Scale Tales with Students

It has been about half a year since Violin Scale Tales came into print, and I have not yet seen any kind of printed review. So in this post I will show how I use the material with students.

I currently have three students working in this book. One is advanced, and can make her way around the fingerboard in the first six positions. The other two have not yet learned to shift out of first position.

My more advanced student is working on the pieces in the book in order, beginning in A minor with "Atlas Moth." As you can see from the first two lines, the piece uses a mixture of sixteenth notes, eighth notes, triplets, and longer note values that require the student to count and change the speed of the bow in order to follow the dynamic contours of the piece. This piece includes a mixture of meters. These changes of meter are necessary for the musical line, and offer a good way to teach the "why" of meter in addition to the "what" of meter.

There are also places in the piece that proceed as normal scales would, with regular rhythm:

Phrasing is built into the music, and dynamics and textures keep things interesting. Thinking about the appearance and behavior of the animals stimulates the musical imagination.  It is fun, for example, to imagine how this very large moth might act during its short life.

The other eleven moth pieces (Elephant Hawk Moth, Io Moth, Rosy Maple Moth, Luna Moth, Garden Tiger Moth, Dysphania Militaris Moth, Cecropia Giant Silk Moth, Twin-Spotted Sphynx Moth, Comet Moth, Cinnabar Moth, and Giant Leopard Moth) bear a family resemblence to the Atlas Moth piece, but each has its own character. "Waltz of the Moths," which comes at the end of the book, an elaboration on "Twin-Spotted Sphinx Moth," makes its way through all of the minor keys beginning in F minor, and going through the circle of fifths.

I started one of my less-experienced students with "Ostrich" in the key of G major. This one is totally in the three-quarter time, and incorporates a chipper tune as well as left-hand pizzicato:

It ends with a scale that uses the whole first-position range of the violin:

"Komodo Dragon," in D major, also uses left-hand pizzicato. It has a lot of drama, because the Komodo Dragon is a dramatic creature. This piece incorporates a more extended scale passage than the other portraits of lizards in the collection ("Armadillo Girdled Lizard," in B major, and "Eastern Collared Lizard," in F-sharp major).

"Emu" is an E-major waltz that is similar to the G-major "Ostrich" above (those large running birds are somewhat similar). And at the end of the book, right before the "Waltz of the Moths,"  a "Waltz of the Emus" runs its way through all the major keys.

All the animals in the collection, including the Green Sea Turtle, Galápagos Tortoise, Royal Python, Barred Owl, Scaly-Breasted Woodpecker, Dwarf Scaly-Tailed Squirrel, and the Screaming Hairy Armadillo are animals that have scales.

I'm having as much fun practicing and teaching these pieces as I did writing them.

There are twenty-eight more musical portraits of animals with scales in the second volume, Advanced Violin Scale Studies, a book that uses the whole range of the violin and twenty-four keys (alternating minor and major, like the first volume). The first-position book can also be used to great advantage on the viola, particularly for violists eager to practice in the second, third, fourth, and fifth positions. They are great for practicing intonation because each piece remains in a single key (though the mode of the major pieces sometimes shifts to the natural minor). Pitches move stepwise up and down, repeat at the unison, or jump the octave. Even in keys with many sharps or many flats it is still easy to hear where the next pitch is going to be.

My hope with this book is that it will help students find that scale playing can be enjoyable, imaginative, and even entertaining. I also hope that it can help "normalize" keys that have many sharps or many flats, and that it can help introduce elements of very basic music theory into lessons.

Getting from one note to the next

It has taken me decades to figure out how to make it from one note to the next expressively, effectively, and efficiently. I now find that paying attention to how one pitch follows another, how one group of pitches follows another, and how one phrase follows another is the most difficult, creative, and satisfying part of practicing violin and viola. It is rather difficult to write about, but I'll give it a try.

Julius Baker, my flute teacher at Juilliard, had a warm-up routine that he required all of his students to do. It mainly involved double-tonguing. Actually, come to think of it, it was totally about double-tonguing. The way he phrased the Allegro of the C major Bach Sonata, BWV 1033 (here transposed to F major) created a long and virtuosic phrase, particularly because he played it very fast:

After my time at Juilliard I went off to Austria, and I studied recorder in Vienna at the Hochschule with Hans Maria Kneihs. Though 21st-century recorder players incorporate double-tonguing, 20th-century recorder players who were attempting to sound like early-18th-century recorder players used a single tongue, and they (we) used it in approximation of the way we imagined string players used their bows. Here is what my (uninformed by actually being a string player) recorder phrasing would look like:

Hans Kneihs talked about keeping harmonies together, and actually making psychological spacings between beats, allowing one group of four sixteenth notes to lead to the next without creating false accents. Hans had been a cellist, so he saw recorder playing as a way of freeing himself from the difficulties and complexities of bowing.

And the complexities of bowing involve making false accents because the "cocktail" of speed, pressure, where you are in the bow, if you have a string crossing, and your dynamic level all have to be factored into getting from one note to the next in a satisfying way. This illustration reveals the dangers of trying to move from the last sixteenth note of a measure using only the last note (and an up-bow note to boot) to do the heavy lifting (the "red" version).

It is so much easier to have the last group of four sixteenth notes, piloted by a down-bow (the purple), deliver the phrase into the next measure. For me it's a little like using a plastic cup to move sand rather than using a cup made of less-reliable fingers.

And by doing this you begin to see possibilities of phrasing that involve features of the phrases--ways of hearing that you may not have thought about. The red example below is a rather straightforward way of thinking about directions that the phrases could go effectively.

The purple example below is a little bit more creative, and technically and intellectually more difficult:

I find it to be stimulating to think like this while I am practicing, particularly when I am practicing Bach, because his phrases are so durable and so interesting. Sometimes I aim for consistency, but more often I look and listen to see the patterns that can be revealed though observation.

Often I use this kind of mindset to tackle the questions of how much bow and where in the bow a useful up-bow might function well. Sometimes I incorporate slurs, and sometimes I reverse bowings, giving a chance to my bow arm to figure out how to do "heavy lifting" without making false accents.

I do it with etudes, and I even use this mindset to organize lyrical phrases and phrases in music from all periods. I strive to write durable phrases that can be interpreted in many ways, because this mindset has (finally) become hard-wired and permeates everything I do.

I used to tell my flute students that they needed to pay attention to where every note is, where it has been, and where it is going, but I didn't know how to teach them "how" to do it. I also could not figure out how to eliminate false accents aside from using the "baroque" method I learned from studying recorder.

Flutists have to use their imaginations for such things because they do not have a physical way to move their notes around aside from using their tongues, and there is no real resistance to play "against," unless it is music written specifically to employ the newer techniques that have expanded flute possibilities in the 21st century. Flute teaching and playing has also improved greatly since I left the fold. I have never heard Emmanuel Pahud play with false accents or unimaginative phrasing.

Brass players and reed players have the advantage of resistance, and singers have diction.

We all have rhythm, though.

I believe that all musicians who play music that is written have the obligation to make getting from one note to the next as pleasurable an experience as possible for themselves, they musical partners, and for whoever might be listening.

OH MY!

I used to struggle with reminding students about the placement of the first finger. "Low first finger" takes so much time to say, and for beginning students who are not sure about note names, saying "F natural" or "B flat" doesn't always register quickly enough to keep a musical line going.

But this little device I thought up a while ago and am sharing here for the first time works like a charm.

It is also very easy to write an "M" or a "Y" on a student's music to serve as a reminder. The one-syllable nature of these letters also makes it possible to provide an efficient verbal reminder while someone is playing. With one student I use a catchphrase: "Engage the dolphin, (i.e. use your intelligence) and apply the Y."

This opens the door, of course, to a discussion of the "why" of music, or the "why' of anything concerning the content of anything in a given piece of music, but that is the subject of another blog post.

Shifting Autumn Colors

"Dancing on the Fingerboard" has four brief autumn-themed violin or viola pieces for learning and practicing shifting from the first position to the third position. The first is in the major mode, is played with separate bows, and is mezzo-forte throughout. I call it "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Green. The second piece has the same pitches and rhythms as the first, but it has dynamics and bowings. It is called "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Yellow.

The third piece, "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Orange," is in the minor mode, uses separate bows, and maintains the same dynamic level throughout. The fourth piece, "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Red," marked at a slower tempo than the first three, has the same pitches as "Orange," but it has dynamic markings and bowings.

While Michael and I went walking in the woods today (Fox Ridge and Lake Charleston), I took some video of the yellow leaves to pair with "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Yellow." Yesterday I took some video of red trees for "Shifting Colors of Autumn: Red."

Now I have two videos to share.

Dancing on the Fingerboard

I think that shifting from position to position on the violin and the viola should be a pleasure, and think that practicing in order to teach the arm and hand to shift should be an expressive activity rather than a mechanical one.

After years of teaching students to shift by using tried and true methods and materials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which tend to bore them), I decided to try my hand writing at a set of twenty-first-century lighthearted pieces with whimsical titles that employ guiding fingers in their melodic material.

Initially I imagined a small set of short pieces to introduce the shift from first to third position, but my project grew into two sets of twenty pieces (one for violin and one for viola) that cover the first six positions and dip a toe into the seventh position.

I thought of having it published, but I am too impatient to wait. Plus, I really wanted to use this cover image, which I cobbled together from two very old books (one about folk dancing, and one about violin making), to celebrate the dance-like joy of moving the fingers of the left hand from place to place on the fingerboard.

I often tell my students that the four fingers of the left hand are like four dancing feet. Publishers like to use the work of their own artists, which I understand completely, but priorities are priorities.

So into the IMSLP it has gone for other violinists and violists to use for practicing and teaching. I did my best to make the titles and tempo markings witty, so I hope that help keep practicing fun.

You can find both the violin and the viola music on this page of the IMSLP.

Atlas Moth

This is the first piece in a forthcoming book of scale pieces in first position that will be published by Mel Bay later this year or in 2022. Like "Weights and Measures," this set goes through all the major and minor keys, moving stepwise with repeated pitches that happen only at the unison or the octave. Working this way gave me a some sense of structure during the first wave of the pandemic, and now making videos is giving me some structure during this Delta wave, where it is more like a sunami here in the lower parts of Illinois.

I call this collection "Scale Tales," because each scale corresponds to an animal that has scales like moths and butterflies, birds, fish, lizards, turtles, and flying squirrels (!!!).

The second volume (again with scales in all the major and minor keys, but using the full range of the violin) will probably carry the title "Advanced Scale Studies," but it is structured the same way.

In Theory, In Practice

The word "theory" gets passed around often in online string teacher discussions. Suzuki-informed string teachers talk about it as something other than playing (like note reading) to include in their lessons. Piano teachers, at least from my experience, use it to analyze the music that students are playing. In my high school Music Theory class (where you could earn as many credits as you could taking a math class or a chemistry class) we were taught functional harmony, which would, in the 1970s, be considered "common practice." My teacher taught it functionally and rather dryly. I remember at the end of the semester, when he informed us that we now knew the whole harmonic vocabulary in music, I asked him (in all seriousness), "What about the harmonies that Brahms used?"

The next year I took counterpoint. We worked methodically through the Fux Gradus et Parnassum, and I learned a great deal. I didn't realize until decades later that the exercises we did were not written by Mr. Levenson, but I knew that they were corrected by him.

My next academic experience with music was at Juilliard, where we had a "Literature and Materials of Music" class, commonly known as "L and M," and informally referred to as "S and M." There were times where harmonic analysis was necessary. My theory experience in high school didn't help me much, so, regardless of how well I was taught, I was not able to identify harmonic progressions by theoretical names. It was not because I hadn't worked at it. It is because for me context is everything. I can identify most pieces of the "standard" repertoire within a measure or two (at any point in a piece), but I can't do an "on the spot" analysis of the harmonic progression. Some people can. I know many people who think of the harmonic analysis of something that they hear first, before listening for the things that I hear first, like voicing, instrumental or vocal color, and where the phrase has been and is going.

Perhaps it has something to do with absolute pitch. I know that my high school theory teacher had it, and I believe that the people I know who can do analysis on the spot have it as well. I wonder if context, for those people, is an afterthought.

Now that the roles I play in the world of music are pretty well set, I really enjoy the fact that my enjoyment of playing involves the delight of enjoying a harmonic progression without the burden of having to name it. As a teacher I also know that no matter how eloquently I explain tonality to my students, each student is on a personal path of musicianship, and each student will learn what is necessary to learn when they are ready.

And I have found that learning to understanding tonality through scale passages (and pieces) is the best tool. The other day a student was having trouble with a scale passage in a piece, and I opened up his "Weights and Measures" book to the scale piece in the key of the troublesome passage. He played some of the "Weights and Measures" (W and M, if you will) piece, and then went back to the passage he was struggling with. It was no longer a struggle because his ear could grab onto the tonality; and the hand, if all is clear in the ear department, can react in a relaxed way.

I remember back in the early days of the musical blogosphere there were a lot of people posting their unpublished writings concerning music theory. These people have moved their writing away from the general blogosphere and into academic spaces. I thought that I could find references to them in some of the posts I have made over the years about music theory, but I couldn't find anything specific. Here is my array of posts that mention "theory."

What I learned from my internet-based experience is that "Music Theory" as an academic field is now a far cry from analyzing form, voicing, and harmony, which are tools helpful to composers and performing musicians. It is now more a branch of musicology, and a person who writes about music theory is considered a music theorist.

Marked-up "Mole Unit" from "Weights and Measures" for Violin

One of my violin students suggested that I should make some tutorial videos for "Weights and Measures." I thought I could accomplish more (in less time) by marking up the first scale piece of the set. The beauty of keeping these pieces in the IMSLP on PDF is that teachers can print up multiple copies and apply bowings, fingerings, and dynamics of their choice. I find practicing this group of scale pieces a great way to warm up (on any instrument), and for students they provide a great way of actually hearing tonality (and its modal sisters) while they are playing. There is one one-page piece in each key-- first minor, then major.

[click for a larger view]

You can find the whole set, in the original for solo recorder, and set up as duets for any instrument to play with violin or viola, on this page of the IMSLP. The soprano recorder/violin set is particularly fun to play down the octave on the viola.

Solving technical problems with musical answers: thoughts about teaching

I got my "author's copies" of A Tunes this week, so I can assure you that physical copies are now available. It was a treat yesterday to teach lessons using a physical copy.

I thought that it might be a good idea to write a post expaining why I wrote it and what I hope teachers and students will get from using it. I have included a bit of my history for people who are not regular readers of this blog.

I have taught people to play, on one instrument or another, for more than forty years.  And I have also, from time to time, been in the position of being a beginner or a near beginner. When I showed up for my first day of my first real job, teaching at a music school in a small town in Austria (a week before the semester was to begin), I was shocked to see that the majority of my students were recorder students. I think that there might have been two flutists, and thirty (or more) beginning recorder players. I hadn't touched a recorder since I was six or seven--the age of many of my students. 

Fortunately there was a recorder in the top drawer of my desk, along with the beginner book my students would be using. I spent the whole week, when I wasn't studying German (which I barely spoke)  learning to play the recorder, and I fell in love with the instrument. As soon as I had enough money to do so (I arrived in Schladming with only pocket change), I bought a soprano recorder and an alto recorder.

I was shocked that my students learned to play the recorder and learned to read music. I attribute my succes to the fact that I taught myself to read music while playing the recorder when I was five or six (a Honer recorder bought with S&H Greenstamps that I put toothmarks in, because I didn't know not to--I can still remember the taste of the wood).

The kids I taught in Austria also liked the kid-oriented folk music that was in the excellent recorder book they used. It was probably used by all the kids in Austria who learned to play recorder in their music schools. In Austria recorder was the "entry level" instrument, after which you could move to any other instrument. Everyone learned to read music while playing the recorder. Just like I had.

[The mechanics of recorder playing at an elementary level are straightforward. The refinements, like bending your thumb in order to make a horizontal half hole when going up an octave, using the tongue to make a variety of articulations, mastering the fingerings in the upper octave, and adjusting the air so that you can play in tune, are not. I learned those through studying at the Hochschule in Vienna.]

I really wanted to play violin as a kid, but could not learn to play until I was seven because the smallest instrument we had in the house was a half size. And once I was big enough to fit that violin, my father gave me an "A-Tune-A-Day" book (OMG I just realized that the "A Tunes" title bears homage to that series of books!), and I vividly remember making a physical analogy to the written B on the A string using the first finger, just like the left hand (top hand) of the recorder, and that C used the second finger. And G used three fingers on the D string, just like the recorder. I made visual connections between what I saw on the page and what my left hand fingers could do to "get" the note to sound right.

When I moved to Illinois I had the idea of writing a beginner flute book for my flute students. I wanted to create the same visual and kinetic connections I had experienced when learning to play the recorder both the first time and the second time, and the way I learned to play the violin. I found that it was really useful. My students liked it, particularly the tunes that I made up myself in order to develop physical skills.

In my early 30s I returned to string playing. In my late  30s I started composing seriously. In my 40s I taught  violin and viola students using the Suzuki books, but not the method. As my abilities as a teacher improved, I started to see problems that every one of my students encountered while working through the Suzuki books. I do know that they were designed not to be "read from" by students, and that the main use was as reference for "by ear only" teaching, particularly for young students who were too young to read words fluently.

During in-person lessons with beginning students I could, by a multitude of means, get students to use a mixture of eye, ear, touch, and brain to get beyond reading by the numbers. I could use manipulative toys to help them to understand rhythm and the way it could relate to physical volume. They could listen and watch me play. We could play together. 

[nostalgic pause]

When I had to switch to on-line teaching last March, I realized that I needed to come up with new ways to help my students learn, so I started writing these "A Tunes" to address problems that I would normally need to be in the same physical space to work through. 

The first uses the pitches of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but in a different order, and with different rhythms. The "Starry Night" title is meant to draw a connection. A person who can play "Twinkle Twinkle" can play "Starry Night," a brand-new piece, written just for their skill level, doubling their repertoire.  It also sounds really good when students use the whole bow, from frog to tip, and the "sounding good" part is a great motivator for developing a bowstroke that is parallel to the bridge and can change speeds.

"Wait, What?" uses the same pitches as "Starry Night," and introduces quarter-note and half-note rests. There is one whole note, and a whole note that is tied to a quarter note, as well as easy and functional dynamics.

"Breeze in the Trees" introduces pizzicato and addresses the difficulties that students find in "Song of the Wind." There is a fermata that will be familiar to students who have played "Allegro" in the first Suzuki book. My students all really like fermatas.

"The Big Dipper" is in 3/4 time and it introduces slurs in a way that will feel nice and expressive in a beginning bow arm. It is a variation on "Starry Night," and uses the D string when it modulates to D major in the middle section.

"A Tunes" doesn't call for the lowered second finger until the "Solo Two-Step," which also introduces the idea of musical sequences (a melodic string of sixths going between two strings with a low second finger on the A string and the E string that my students really like). The pitches and rhythms are the same in the "Slurry Two-Step," but we get slurs and dynamics. It also begins up-bow, which introduces the idea of bowing logic early on. 

"String-Crossing Waltz" combines the meter of three with hooked quarter notes played on the same pitch. Many of my students have been befuddled by the down/up/up bowing pattern in the first of the Bach Minuets in the first Suzuki book. "String-Crossing Waltz" takes the pattern out of the Bach musical context and repeats it over and over. After studying this piece the Bach Minuet is far easier for students to play in rhythm because their arms know what to do.

"The Happy Farmer" is one of the most difficult pieces to teach (and learn) for beginner violinists. I wrote "Farmer's Crossing" to address each of the bowing difficulties separately. I also added left-hand pizzicato on open strings, which strengthens the left hand, and students really like doing. After working on "Farmer's Crossing" my students have been far happier farmers.

The two "Leading-Tone Gallops" (one slurred and one not slurred) in E minor teach students about the raised third finger and the fourth finger plopping down right next to it. The title gives a chance for a teacher to explain about scale structure. These Gallops,  "Gotcha!," and "The Fourth Heroic Muse" will help with the Gossec "Gavotte" and the Handel "Chorus" that begins the second Suzuki book. The Gallops also help navigate the fourth-finger waters found in the Bach Musette and the middle section of the Lully Gavotte (which, for the record, is really by Marin Marias).

The second Suzuki book works fine on its own for me until we get to the Beethoven Minuet in G, which is riddled with left-hand and right-hand difficulties. I wrote "Te Unim" to isolate the difficulties and put them in a vastly different musical context from the very familiar Beethoven piece.  The title is the word "Minuet" spelled backwards. I'm surprised how well it works with students.

"Goodnight Air" uses the rhythms of the well-known children's book Goodnight Moon, and introduces the way meter that changes in order to "hold" the rhythms of the music. The phrasing of the text becomes the phrasing of the music, and it playing the phrases expressively becomes a gateway for being expressive when playing other pieces of music. It can also serve as a gateway for students to write musical settings of poems they like. 

The Castor and Pollux Lullaby and Dance are harmonized (double-stop) versions of the "Starry Night" theme. They are in different meters, which provides an easy way to introduce compound time to students.

The "Vocalise" and "Appogiare with Variations" are just expresesive solo pieces, and they can be played by violinists at any level. One of my advanced students played some of these pieces as violin solos for a wedding she played this past October. 

All these pieces are written as expressive solo pieces that can be performed without the need for accompaniment. There is something empowering about being in charge of all of the music.

If "A Tunes" sells well in the original violin version, I'm hoping that Mel Bay will issue a version for viola.

You can order the music here.

Improvising and practicing scales

After having written (and finished) more than sixty scale pieces since the beginning of 2021, I'm taking a break and spending time practicing "normal" scales and other music. For a while there I couldn't play a scale without stopping to write down a scale melody (there are so many possibilities) I had just discovered (or uncovered).

Yesterday I gave myself the luxury of playing through the Hrimaly series of three-octave scales that lives on my music stand. Today I found the process kind of mindless (though physically useful), so I decided to try something different. I started by improvising using scale fragements and arpeggio fragments in the key of C major. Then I thought about the F sharp that would happen in G major, the next key in the circle of fifths, and made my way, via that "new" F sharp, to the key of G. When ready I added the C sharp for the key of D, and so on all they way through C-sharp major/D-flat major, and down the circle by removing flats. This took a lot of "head space," in the keys with large numbers of sharps and flats, but I gave myself ample time to think.

Then I did the same with the minor keys, sticking with harmonic minor. Tomorrow I think I might go backwards, adding flats.

What I find most interesting about doing this is the way my awarness of modulations when playing solo music is heightened. The solo Bach pieces that have been etched in deep grooves in my brain for more than half a century become new vehicles for exploring the way scale passages work as well as an elevated vantage point for observing the possibilities of how well music can travel along the circle of fifths from one key to the next.

Perhaps I am "late to the party" with all of this, but I grew up and came of musical age during a time when (at least in Western European-oriented music) tonality was considered obsolete by composers of new music. It was a time when "improvisation" seemed to be connected almost exclusively with jazz, and if it wasn't connected with jazz it seemed to be concerned with sound (including extended techniques) not connected to a harmonic structure or framework.

Twenty-four of the sixty scale pieces are part of a collection that I put in the IMSLP, and the rest, two books of violin scale studies (one in the first position and the other that uses the whole range of the instrument) that are all named for animals that have scales, will be available from Mel Bay sometime later this year (I submitted the final books yesterday).

Just for fun I'm including one of the "Weights and Measures" pieces here. That is the name of the collection in the IMSLP.

Needless to say, I had a lot of punny fun working on this collection.

Lessons I'm teaching, lessons I'm learning

I haven't written a teaching post for a while, so I'll take the time now. The student I would be teaching now rescheduled her lesson, and I'm in teaching mode. Maybe some of the teaching adventures from the past few weeks will be of use to somebody reading this.

But I'll start with what I have been practicing. Now that I'm spending so much time practicing the violin, I have decided that it is high time to try to speed up my vibrato, and vary its amplitude. There is a kind of habitual rhythm that you get into with vibrato, and mine is simply too slow and wide for the variety of sounds I would like to make on the violin. A slower and wider vibrato is acceptable in the lower registers of the viola, but I don't really want to limit my possibilities when playing the viola either.

I have been learning ways of breaking certain habits of thinking these past few months, and I'm also breaking out of habitual ways of musical thinking that have been limiting my creativity and progress. I am finding the experience empowering. It is very hard work, so I am attacking the problem in several different ways.

Listening to Augustin Hadelich's vibrant vibrato, a vibrato that is fluid, and is always responding to the demands of whatever phrase he happens to be playing, has inspired me to do the hard work of paying attention to the speed of my vibrato and the way it corresponds to the movement and comfort of my bow arm. I have noticed that if my right arm does not feel free and fluid, my left hand does not feel free enough to vibrate faster. But, on a positive note, if I focus my attention on the expressivity and freedom of my bow arm, it is easier to change the speed and amplitude of the vibrato.

Practicing slow and lyrical pieces helps. And I'm experimenting with playing lyrical pieces that are not slow (like the first movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto) with a faster vibrato than I would normally use, and the metronome set at a slow tempo. As I increase the tempo, I am also working to increase the speed of my vibrato, as well as the comfortable feeling in my bow arm. I do believe that being comfortable while playing allows us to be more expressive. And I believe that it makes the experience for the listener more comfortable as well.

[I consider myself to be a student at "Hadelich University" these days. And last night I had a dream that Augustin let me try his violin. It had a strange bow that had a set of comb-like teeth attached to it. Unfortunately I woke up before I really got to spend time with the instrument.]

I used this left-hand/bow-arm observation while teaching a lesson to a beginning student who has not yet learned vibrato, and she noticed that the tension she had in her left hand lessened when she paid attention to her bow arm.

And then I tried something new with her. She is just learning to use her fourth finger, and, like most fourth fingers in relatively new violinists, it wants to curl up rather than stay poised above the fingerboard. I tried a trick with her. I asked her to try to control the fourth finger of the left hand by tapping the right hand fourth finger on the bow stick (where it should be curved with the tip "standing" comfortably on the stick above the frog).

Then I showed her the way the hands and arms work together by asking her how to write her name in cursive with her dominant hand, and concurrently write her name in cursive backwards with her non-dominant hand (as a mirror image).

Try it! It's fun. It's also really challenging to demonstrate by way of videochat!

Then I showed her that if both hands work together it is not difficult to draw a square with one hand and a circle with the other.

I really wanted to share the fourth finger thing with another student, but I will have to wait until tomorrow.

Ethel Barns music for violin in the first position

To aid in the search for music written by women to offer to young (or adult starter) violinists, here's an example of some lovely and expressive music by Ethel Barns. It's part of a collection of eight pieces written to be played in the first position:



You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP. It is the first part of a two-volume set. I'm hoping that someone will add the second volume in the near future.

The pieces in the first volume also work nicely for violists who are comfortable playing in fifth position. I like the fact that the piano parts are "string-teacher" easy.

Barns also wrote difficult violin music that you can find on this page of the IMSLP. I check back from time to time to see the new (old) Barns gems that people have added to her page.

You can learn more about Ethel Barns here.

New Rhythm Block Labels

I finally sat down and plotted out a set of really useful labels to use with 1/2 inch blocks. A set of 200 1/2 inch blocks will give you enough for the whole set plus two music dice. This one costs about $6, this one costs a few dollars more, but the quality seems better, and this one costs twice as much for what looks like the exact same thing. If you go to a crafts store you can evaluate the quality of the wood yourself.

Everything on the PDF fits on three sheets, and it can be printed as is, at full size. I pre-adjusted the sizes of the note groups so that they will all fit on their corresponding blocks (no more printing pages at different percentages, which proved to be a confusing, wasteful, and messy endeavor).

You can find the PDF here.

I played with the idea of colors, for both the paper and the blocks, but it seems that natural wood and white paper proves to be the most effective and the least distracting. We do, after all, read music in black and white. And this is a tool to help people learn to read music. You can certainly paint them, if you want colors, but I have found that glue holds natural wood blocks together better than blocks that have been painted. For that reason I would glue the blocks before spray-painting.

You can find older posts about these rhythm blocks here. Have I really been working on this since October?

Music Block Activities: Compound Time

To learn more about these DYI blocks you can look here and here.

You can find a simple time activity here.

You can go here for a free PDF of labels to cut out for 200 1/2" blocks.