What I Learned Today

Eleven years ago, I took up the violin for the first time and embarked on one of the most humbling learning experiences of my life. As an adult, it is easy to intellectually grasp your instructor’s advice, but it simply takes a frustrating amount of repetition before your body can learn to execute it. I worked my way through the first Suzuki book, supplementing it with etudes from other sources, and gradually gained some basic competency. Then I moved, and got sucked into the final push for my dissertation, and the violin fell by the wayside.

Today I finally returned to the instrument by signing up for classes with a new instructor. And wow, the sheer volume of things I’d forgotten! “You’ve played violin before?” she asked. “Yes, but let’s pretend that I haven’t,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

Here’s what we covered:

• Holding the bow: loose, draped hand, with the middle and ring fingers over the frog, the index finger resting ahead of them, the pinkie perched behind them, and the thumb curved under.
• Holding the violin: bring it in to your neck and let it “land like a helicopter” on your clavicle. The chin lowers to grip the violin, and does most/all of the holding (so the other hand is free to move about for fingering), but aim to minimize strain.
• The fingering hand is also relaxed, wrist straight. The thumb rests against the neck but does not grip it. The fingers bend in little table-shapes to press straight down on the strings.
• Bowing: Relaxed, with enough pressure to generate a nice sound. Breathy sound indicates too little pressure and crunching/squeaking indicates too much.
• Tuning: Mainly I just watched her do this. I’ll need to play around with it to re-learn how to listen and tune on my own.
• Reading music: I probably should have reviewed this before the lesson! Violin strings are G-D-A-E, and the treble clef has spaces for F-A-C-E, so with some thought you can figure out how the notes map to open strings and the intermediate finger positions between open strings. Hard to do on the spot without prior review, though.

We concluded by loosening the bow (I’d completely forgotten that too!), and she gave me some photocopies of exercises even more basic than the starting Suzuki ones. I’m to practice holding the bow, open-string bowing, and simple string changes. I’ll also dig up my music theory book and start reviewing its contents. This is so exciting!