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.