Productive Procrastination

I'm procrastinating from practicing. I have lots of wonderful excuses for this, but I'll spare you the grisly details. Instead, I'd like to share the fruit of my procrastination.

While researching viola teachers at various schools in the NYC, NJ and Philly area, I listened to some music recorded by Nadia Sirota and I decided I liked the track "unspeakable truths".

Maybe it's just my mood. Anyway, it seenms that the powers that be are going to usher me into a new music career, so listening to new music is part of that research!

Playing the viola has gotten a lot sexier in the past twenty years :)

Squeezing the neck

Don't squeeze the neck of the violin - use a grape!

Viola Spaces no 3 - One finger - Garth Knox

This is how a relaxed violist looks!!!

Just a warning, there's going to be a lot of modern music posted on here in the next little while!

Victor Borge improvising on the piano

Chord progressions & Philip Glass

Here's a very funny de-construction of the music of minimalist composer Philip Glass:



All musicians should know how to play chords on the piano, and Philip Glass's music is a fun way to explore those chords!

Concertmaster responsibilities

When the conductor can not be on stage, the responsibility of leading the orchestra falls on the concertmaster:

I tried some violas today.

My favorite was one made by Erik Hesle in Trondhein in 1982. The bridge was a little too low, so the strings hit the fingerboard and buzzed, but I really liked the dark sound. The response was pretty good too. It was 6000$ and was 16 1/4". It was a manageable size for me.

I tried one by Roberto Defanti, made in 1983; it was 16 1/2, 8000$ and I really liked the C string, which had the most "viola-like" sound, but was a little unwieldy for me because of the size. The lower bout was quite fat. It was yellow in colour.

I tried a 16" Nicolas Vuillaume, 1849 (? - hard to tell from label), made in Mirecourt and selling for 6000$. I wasn't particularly taken with it.

I tried a Gaetane Chiocci made in 1868 in Padoua. It's timbre was medium, not what I was looking for, but it had a nice eveness in tone on all the strings. It was selling for 17,500$

I also tried a Giuseppe Ornati - made in Milan, 1954 - it had the best response and was really loud, but far too bright for my taste. It was very orange. Selling for 45,000$


Anybody out there know of some dark-sounding 16 1/2" cut-away violas? All the nice ones are too bright for me!

I tried a few violins - notably one used by some Norwegian soloist one day when his instrument broke and he had to use a replacement. All the other violins sounded like crap after playing that one. I was afraid to ask about the price...


Edit 04/04/10

I just found the notes I made on some violas I tried in Montreal in August 2009. I'll post them here. They're very brief.

Paulus 16 1/2" $8125 - my favorite that I tried out of this batch. (serial #080)

Hoibakk 16 3/4" $7000 - liked it fine

Cormier 16 1/4" $13 000 - holy **** nice instrument. It was too bright for my taste, but the response and playability were unbelievable. It was so sensitive that the adjustment period would be quite a while before I'd stop making scratchy sounds on it because of the sensitivity.

Bauer 16" $15 000 it was very bright and great response, but I liked the Cormier more

Lavoije 16 1/8" $12 000 - again liked the Cormier more.

Duplain 16 1/4" $6000 - very nice.

Joel Samuel Rion 17" $8000 - too big!!!

Schmidt 16 1/4" $8000 not as nice as Paulus, which was more playable


Wilfer 15 1/2" $5000 - nice

Seilenhof 15" $5000 - okay, but you just can't get the sound you need at 15".

I did these trials with a super kun rest and chose a Marco Raposo bow selling for $1300 as my favorite.

A friend made an interesting comment the other day. With the nicer instruments, he said, it's the dolce tone that projects.

I want a cutaway model around 16 1/4 - 16 1/2" for about 8000$ eventually. For now, I'm looking for something around $3000 and I want to get it by January, so I have time to adjust before I perform Kol Nidrei with the symphony.

Todd Ehle talks about double & triple string crossings

For anyone who is having trouble with multiple string crossings, you should check out Todd Ehle's video on how to avoid hitting the in-between strings. It's really a very clever technique. Check it out:

Kreutzer #10

Bow Arm

If anyone is unsure what a great bow arm looks like, check out violinist Hilary Hahn playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto.



Note the height of her elbow, how her wrist leads to her nose, the roundness of her hand (the tunnel of space between her thumb and fingers), how her finger balance changes a split second before changing bows at the frog, and how she's playing really close to the bridge.

Tension in playing

Here's an excerpt from an article from violinist.com where the interviewed violinist speaks about studying with Nathan Milstein, and her views on tension.

Dylana did spend time with some of the great violinists of the 20th century, for example, Nathan Milstein.

"It was like sitting in front of God," she said of the two-week stints she would spend with Milstein in the summer. "It was profoundly life-changing in so many ways. Speaking from a purely technical standpoint, the only thing he encouraged me to change was to bring my fingers back together in my bow hand. I had met Itzhak Perlman when I was 10 or 11, and Perlman suggested I separate my fingers and use my index finger more to help draw out the sound. When I went to see Milstein, he was playing the way I had grown up playing. So I changed that back. It took a little while to be comfortable with that, it was like I was holding a club in my arm, it was not refined in any way."

By fingers together, Milstein meant, "together, touching. If you look at Milstein and Heifetz, their fingers are squished together. I would say mine are not squished, they are just relaxed in that position, and touching," she said. "He was trying to encourage me to use back muscles for bow technique, to support the arm and to have greater control over small movements by using larger muscles, rather than trying to use small finger muscles to control a small movement."

Milstein often used the example of an eye surgeon. "When a surgeon would make an incision in the eye, which was very delicate and very tiny, that the surgeon would use a weighted scalpel, using the bicep muscles to make the cut, not using the fingers with a tiny little knife trying to make an incision." With the little muscles, there would be less precision and more error – when you get nervous, little muscles shake. "You gain a tremendous amount of control, I think, from using larger muscles."

Dylana enjoys teaching, and she addresses these kinds of issues in her own students.

"I'm setting up their body, so that they can practice and play as long as they want, for the rest of their lives without pain," Dylana said. "It has to be an evaluation of the different issues. I see a lot of problems in the left arm, in the left elbow, for instance; or in the neck, or twisting. Where teachers are recommending ice and rest, I'm saying, that's not really the answer. For instance, with the left arm: it would be bringing the violin more around to the front, untwisting the arm, bringing the violin down, getting the shoulder rest off, changing the way the thumb works so the hand can be straighter, facing you straight instead of twisting. In the right arm, in the bow arm: if the fingers are very separated, that creates a lot of tension in the hand.

"So I recommend – Suzuki always set up students this way – you shake the hand out and the hand falls – that should be the maximum you stretch the fingers apart. If you allow the child to stretch their fingers, then you have already set up a tension in the hand that's going to be there for however many hours they're practicing. So my whole approach is to get back to the the basics, to the tradition of what has worked for a long time and with a lot of wonderful great masters of the past."



You can read the rest of the article here.

Great student concerto

I just found a great student concerto to feed my students with! (I think of their needs as like watering plants - when they need sun, shade, and fertilizer!)

A concertino by Oskar Rieding is the piece I found on www.violinist.com. I studied his e minor concertino when I was growing up, and I used it as my de facto showpiece on violin for many years. It was all about tone production and energy.


If you read music, watch the violin line and keep the beat while reading it. If you're a student, imagine playing it as you read through it.

Pros might enjoy sawing through this once in awhile as a warm-up. It's a really well diguised etude, so you can use it to practice anything from spiccato to double-stop intonation to exploring vibrato and articulation. It's very simply rhythmically and harmonically, but is very engaging for a student who is still in the process of finding a level of finding a true comfort of facility with their instrument, or a pro who wants a fun way to brush up in a technical area once in awhile.

Viola da Gamba

I've been watching the TV show the Tudors lately, after getting home from teaching, and it inspired me to look up music of that period (they featured historic composer Thomas Tallis as a character on the show, which was most entertaining).

Being a string player, I searched youtube for clips featuring a viola da gamba, an ancestor of the modern cello. I found a performance of a piece by Abel, a contemporary of Mozart (about 200 years later than Henry VIII)

This piece features performer Nima Ben David, and she is just out of this world. Watch the bow speed for how she maximizes the ring of the instrument. The structure of the piece itself is meant to maximize the resonance of the instrument.

Check it out here.

February's concert season

The next three weekends are concert weekends for me, and since February has Valentine's Day, that means all three concerts are pop music!

I think the Timmins Symphony concert this weekend will have the least amount of pop music - we're doing the overture to the Barber of Seville which is great fun. Does anybody know where the english version of this is hiding on youtube?

We're also doing Hoe Down from Copland's Rodeo (and it not pronounced "rodeo" as in Calgary Stampede, but ro-DAY-o. It's just one of those classical music things).

North Bay is doing a "Broadway Heroes" show next week, and Sudbury is doing an Elton John Tribute concert.

Come out and see the Timmins Symphony Saturday night at 8pm at Theriault High School.

Local talent Adrianna Ciccone is one of our guest soloists, doing some fiddle music, backed up by the Timmins Symphony. We also have Nigel Robbins playing an oboe d'amour concerto, which is not something you'll have many opportunities to hear, so it's definitely worth catching this concert.

An oboe d'amour is like a viola-oboe.... . It's the middle instrument in the picture.

The Accidental Music Lesson

An article from a New York Times blog by composer Micheal Gordon, who recalls learning musician's life lessons.

You can read the article here, and I've excerpted my favorite part below:

Once, at my last piano lesson before heading off for vacation, I asked Mrs. Kutzen what her plans were for the summer. Her reply: “Michael, musicians don’t take vacations.” I filed this line away in a special part of my brain, an informal collection of “accidental music lessons.” My interpretation of Mrs. Kutzen’s words has changed through the years, like a Talmudic discourse that is argued from different points of view:

1. Musicians just don’t ever feel quite right going an extended period of time without playing their instrument.

2. Music isn’t a job that you punch in and out of. It’s an obsession, a calling and your purpose in life.

3. Musicians don’t make a lot of money and you’re not going to be able to afford a vacation anyway.

Rhythm Exercises

Becoming comfortable with feeling a beat and different rhythms can be quite difficult when playing a string instrument because so often our attention is taking up with just trying to figure out the notes, work the bow and our left fingers.

It can be helpful to practice rhythm without the instrument, as well as with it.


Here are a few places on the internet where you can practice developing your sense beat and rhythm.



www.tedviera.com


emusictheory.com has one of the best collections of exercises I've seen. You need to have Java enabled in your browser for this site to work.



More later!

It's time to go practice now!

Welcome!

Hello students, teachers and fellow musicians!

My name is Ariane Alexander and I am a professional violist living in Northern Ontario, Canada.

I'm starting this blog as a place to post exercises for students, discussions on violin and viola technique, classical music, and to help young musicians find helpful resources on the internet.

A little about me:

I'm originally from Saint John, New Brunswick, and I studied violin in Newfoundland with professor Nancy Dahn and now I live in Timmins, Ontario, and play with a number of orchestras in Northern Ontario, including the Timmins Symphony Orchestra , the Sudbury Symphony, and the North Bay Symphony.

You can read more about me here.