With various students I’ve tried different methods over the years to make the reading of the dots and lines on the page as accessible as possible. The verdict? All it takes is some good old mathematical logic, and a little intellectual ‘elbow grease’ to get into the grind of things, and surely enough, things start to make sense the moment we start stringing up all this information together, in the form of a simple piece! let’s start with some self-discovery to help illustrate what we’re really dealing with :)
STEP 1:
A little self-awareness experiment.
Take a look at your hands. Give every single finger a wiggle, up-down and left-right, trying your best to move that single finger and nothing else. What do you notice? Which two neighbouring fingers seem to always be affecting the other?
Maybe you’ve got it right, so here’s the answer! The middle and ring fingers, being the two center fingers, have a shared nerve which makes them naturally bound to the other’s movements. This poses a unique challenge to all instrument-playing musicians, but not to worry! We have plenty of ways to develop finger independence in our learning process! Also, if you happen to have all the other fingers wiggle in unison with whichever single finger you were trying to control individually, fret not! Me too, if I’m being honest :)))
💪💪💪
So, the whole point of this little experiment was to illustrate why we place our fingers the way we do on the violin, and at VSG, this is what we call the ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ first position. It looks a little something like this:
notice the natural spaces between each of the fingers?
Whilst the middle two fingers touch, the first two fingers and the last two fingers don’t! This gives us the natural configuration of the first-position hand: denoted by numbers per finger, starting with 1 for the index finger: 1__23__4 😜
And voilà, we’ve just discovered the most important basis for finding our notes on the violin! CONGRATS FOR MAKING IT UNTIL HERE!!!
Step 2:
Understand that every finger-space represents the ‘home’ of a note.
just imagine…
each note living in its very own home, and a whole long staircase to join them all up. And, much like real houses, not all notes occupy the same amount of space - something that we measure in ‘steps’. Lucky for us, the combinations all start from half- or whole-steps. As soon as we learn to recognise this, learning to read and to understand the relationships between notes becomes easy… all we need to do is to count the number of half- or whole- steps!
Step 3:
Understand how all of this fits into musical notation
Broadly speaking, the notes that we play are easily recognised in the form of the piano keyboard. You might be thinking, ‘but I’m here for the violin! What does that have to do with the piano?’, and to that, I’ll say, give it a minute! The convenience that the presentation of the piano keyboard offers us is the simple spelling-out of all the half- and whole-steps we’d ever need to understand the way music is written on paper, and it helps that everything is laid out, well, in black and white! Let us consider the piano keyboard at the bottom of this following diagram:
Let’s first ignore all the indications coloured in red for now. Looking at the arrangement of the black and white keys of the piano keyboard, we quickly observe the emergence of a recurring pattern - 2 black keys to each other (I like to think of them as two little front teeth), followed by 3 black keys, and so on! Where we have no black keys separating the white keys on the keyboard, the distance between these two next-door white-key neighbours is considered a half-step. On the violin, we create this next-door relationship by having two fingertips line up next to each other, touching, on the fingerboard. Easy enough, so far!
Now, what’s important to note is that any single sideways movement on the piano keyboard, stepwise, is similarly counted as a half-step. This includes a white key going to a black key, and vice versa. But the music that we play isn’t only composed of single sideways steps! In order to quickly and efficiently create the other sort of standard measurement that we briefly mentioned before, all we need is to separate the two interested fingers at their base (in the palm) and create just enough breathing space to introduce a small window between the two fingertips, thereby creating a full step! Now, this all sounds very simple, in theory, but as our current VSG-ers can attest, being able to successfully and reliably pull up a full step between two fingers takes a lot of method, and practice! But that’s of course what I’m here for, to make your life easier by accompanying your violin-playing adventure with constant guidance and heartfelt encouragement! But, you get the point :)
Now, there’s obviously a lot more that goes into actually being able to read the music in front of you, and to understand what you’re seeing. But for now, I think this is more than enough information to start, but if you want to know more, why not get in touch with me, Cheryl, and see how I can help you along your very own violin-learning journey, in as logical and enjoyable a way as possible, all while living the beautifully diverse life you already have?
Write in to violinstudiogeneva@gmail.com and be sure to add our address to your contacts page, in order to be sure you get our response (and not have it lost in spam, for example… sounds funny enough, but it’s happened before).
But above all, ENJOY your time here with us, and HAPPY PRACTISING!!!
X.O.
Progressing in our violin-learning journey, we often find ourselves needing a little more in the way of supporting materials, be they exercise books, étude anthologies, or just some good new strings to give our instruments a new ‘breath’. Here’s a slowly growing list of merchants I’ve had positive experiences with over the years, and in this very special part of the world where not all mega-online-retailers manage to ship things to :) ENJOY!
1) For books / music scores: SHEET MUSIC PLUS
This is a US-based sheet music source for the serious learner. They stock all kinds of method books and prints of the most-used classics such as collections of the Bach Solo Violin Partitas, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, etc. A fantastic resource offering great prices, and even with low-cost shipping (considering that much of their printed material comes from the US! I don’t remember which postage company they use, but what I do remember is always getting a knock on the door and having everything I order from them hand-delivered, with SMS-updates and all… even during COVID times, so this is certainly a service we can all appreciate! Just remember to wash your hands after you’ve removed and discarded the packaging :)
The link HERE will bring you to a credit-based referral system where a small amount of what you spend ends up in my account too, without affecting your final payment in any way, so that I can continue looking for amazing violin projects for all of you!!
Build your musical library over the years and enjoy the fruits of your labour!
2) For violin accessories: THOMANN and GEAR 4 MUSIC
These are two German- and UK-based online shops that offer a huge (and I mean, HUGE!) selection of all things you could possibly think of needing for your violin.. and perhaps even your violin itself! Although I really do not recommend buying a stringed instrument as sensitive as the violin from an online source without being able to try several variants of the same model and then being able to choose your favourite, I do appreciate the choices of accessories these two websites offer in the way of cleaning cloths, case/instrument humidifiers, and all that find stuff. Heck, you might even find an electrical adaptor for your Italian pizza oven!! Just saying :) They each have a slightly different selection of specific models of everything, so give them both a look! Thomann and Gear 4 Music links here :)
3) For Strings, and quickly: Violin-shop.ch
A ‘local’ Lucerne-based business, they offer local shipping charges and timings (YAY!) and strings and accessories at reasonable prices. Who knew?! I stumbled upon their online shop looking for a very specific Corelli E-string upon recommendation by someone else, and my first searches led me only to faraway shops based in other continents, and the necessity for bulk-orders and exaggerated shipping prices. And then I found this little corner, which not only had the strings, but also allowed me to order just a few to try them out before developing a taste for them :) But nevermind my Corelli adventure, here’s a direct link to the strings we have always loved - the Dominant strings for G, D and A. A word to the wise - whenever possible, spend a little more on the Silver-mounted G and D strings… your violin will thank you later. Also, as a general rule, we steer clear of the Dominant E strings, so enter the Corelli E strings (Crystal was good for a while, but I highly recommend using the Alliance model now, for its sweet richness).
Aaaand that’s it for now! Hope you find this list of shops helpful for the next time you need a learning / accessory upgrade, and leave a comment here to help others hear about your own experiences, too!
In the meantime, stay safe everyone, and HAPPY PRACTISING!!!!
X.O.
As we’re increasingly feeling the weight of halting our engagement in activities outside of the home in an effort to curb the rampant spread of the Coronavirus, here’s a crazy list of programmes to follow from home, thanks to the magic of streaming, live or on-demand. And, as art isn’t just entertainment (or, certainly not the art we’re involved in), take a look, pick a few to try out, and who knows, you might even discover something you didn’t know about this vast internal world we call ‘the arts’!
Here’s just to name a few -
From Russia
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre:
Revel in the genius of Russian artistic excellence, with
6 of its most popular productions made available to us, dubbed ‘the Golden Collection’ will be available on its Youtube channel - Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker. Honestly, I haven’t found them, but to be fair, I only gave it about 2 minutes while I got distracted by clicking on other videos… (for example… La fille du pharaon looks AMAZING! I’d love to watch its entirety some day.)
The Theatre also be showing us some the Bolshoi’s most popular productions: The Tsar’s Bride (oops, they did it two days ago now), Marco Spada (a première: April 4), Boris Godunov (April 7) and The Nutcracker (April 10). These upcoming performances will go live at 7pm Moscow time and will be available online for 24 hours.
From Europe:
The Vienna State Opera announces on its website that:
‘‘starting Sunday, 15 March 2020, Wiener Staatsoper will broadcast recordings of previous opera and ballet performances daily via its streaming platform www.staatsoperlive.com – worldwide and [several] free of charge’’. After a quick registration on its sleek livestream page, a detailed calendar is immediately available, elaborating the available programmes until the end of June. The programmed streaming for the month of April comprise of past productions of some of the great classics - L’Elisir d’amour, Le Nozze di Figaro, Cinderella , La Bohème, Elektra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ariodante, Parsifal, etc.
Paid viewing is also possible for certain productions, with prices start from 14 Euro per event, or 16.90 Euro per monthly subscription, if I’ve understood correctly… considering that entrance to an actual opera production in Geneva would easily cost double for audience members without a student discount, I’d say it’s a steal. Plus, you can cuddle up in your PJ’s with a glass of wine in hand and enjoy the production from home… what more could you want?
NB: televised programmes remain available only for 24 hours, so take a look to see if something catches your eye, before it’s taken down!
Bavarian State Opera in Munich states:
‘After the cancellation of all performances at the Bayerische Staatsoper from March 11 to April 19, we provide individual performances as live streams on www.staatsoper.tv and as video-on-demand.
Programme includes: Parsifal, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Trovatore, etc as well as its weekly ‘Monday Concert’ series… and can be streamed directly from their website without account registration
Opera Europa, the professional association of opera companies and festivals in Europe, is happy to participate!
The first thing I clicked on at the production viewing platform, OperaVision, turned out to be Alceste from the legendary Teatro La Fenice in Venice!!! I might have passed by this historical opera house on my one trip there, but never entered. It airs this evening, and I might tune in just to see how the theatre looks like from the inside. And then, perhaps, allow myself to be transported by composer Gluck’s mastery of melody. Next up, Guillaume Tell on the 7th of April.
The Paris Opera, according to Vogue Magazine,
‘will be putting its most beautiful shows from its archives online free of charge. From Don Giovanni to Swan Lake and The Tales of Hoffmann, there are many great classics to see or rediscover from home’
Next up on their programme: The Barber of Seville, for the entire week April 6-12.
More information on their website here
The Finnish National Opera and Ballet:
invites us to their online platform, Stage24, to browse their rich programme offering. Did you know, for example, that the Little Mermaid has been staged as a ballet production? (Worth noting, though, that it’s also narrated in Finnish, no subtitles, but it doesn’t really matter, given it’s a ballet!)
From the UK
The Royal Opera House announces that
raising its virtual curtains to the ‘culturally curious’ with weekly opera and ballet productions every Friday
These include: Acis and Galatea (April 3), Cosi’ fan’ tutte (April 10), etc.
Opera North
has made the entire Wagner Ring Cycle (cue Norse mythology + Lord of the Rings) available to us mortal beings!!! Many things to criticise about aesthetic choices, but, can we just stop and admire the fact that someone actually offered it up for free viewing? Respect.
… And here’s a little palate-cleanser for anyone wanting a little change from this immense list:
National Theater Live
is offering live-captured plays including Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre. Beginning on April 2, audiences can watch a number of NT Live’s live-captured productions for free via the National Theatre’s YouTube channel. Every Thursday at 7pm UK time, a production filmed in front of an audience in the theatre will be streamed and made available for a week.
There’s so much to discover that there’s no time to complain of boredom being stuck at home!
Happy viewing, STAY SAFE, and don’t forget that we WILL get out of this eventually, so keep working your violin, and we’ll catch up in person, hopefully soon!
XO. Cheryl.
do what you love.. and preferably with people (or animals) you love!!!
Travelling all the time without too much time to stop and regroup?
We’ve all been there, what with easy travel options and the need to get away from city life… but the violin experience doesn’t have to stop when you leave your town of residence!
Violin progress seems to come to such a standstill for every one of us every time we take a break from lessons. And since lesson time is so precious, we do almost nothing else than to focus almost exclusively on how to make our fingers and arms function better on the fingerboard and bow… that there’s barely any time at all to talk about everything else outside of the violin lesson - and that’s where the real experience starts!
So then, it follows quite logically that when we don’t have time with the violin, we are presented with a special opportunity to work on the other aspects of our musical literacy and culture - things like note-identification and understanding the anatomy of scales (so that we’re not drawing a mental blank when we are on the violin, and can in fact focus on where our fingers, and not why they go where they go)!
And we like these special opportunities on the bus/train/plane! Considering that a concerto usually lasts anywhere between 25 minutes to an hour (I might be wrong, so please correct me), instead of playing Candy Crush for hours on end and then hating yourself (we’ve all been there) for having literally gotten nowhere with our time, how about discovering a little Beethoven, or Bach, or Tchaikovsky? The added advantage to this is that, with our headphones on, we hear so much more than what a crappy laptop/phone speaker could ever offer. Double-win!
So, instead of rambling on about the benefits of learning on the go…. here are some truly awesome resources I personally love that can help grow our musical awareness, in an inspiring and very enjoyable way!
1) Youtube Inspiration from the Masters of the violin
Go to the section ‘Our Idols’ on the homepage of the VSG website. There’s a reason this section is named like this. Pick a musician, or a composer, or an instrument, and start exploring! You never know what you’ll find if you don’t start looking! So go ahead, and enjoy the legacy these great humans have left for us.
2) Work on your Music Theory!
A fantastic online resource can be found here: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons. They even have a mobile app that costs very little, but I’ve been told it’s only available right now on Apple phones. Boo. But the good news is, with a computer and an internet connection, you can learn just about anything from note-identification to Roman numeral musical analysis! I only wish I had this when I was a young’un. Never too late, though!!!
3) Listen to Podcasts to see what other musicians are up to
Nathan Cole and his wife Akiko Tarumoto have a funny, honest, and very self-effacing sense of humour in their podcast Stand Partners for Life. As important members of the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, they know what they’re talking about when it comes to conductors, orchestra etichette, and growing up in very different environments as young musicians. Of the several channels that are available around the internet, this is the one I most highly recommended.
https://www.natesviolin.com/the-stand-partners-for-life-podcast/
. . .
So that’s it for now!
Find the thing or the people that inspire you most, and, who knows, you just might be well on your way to building your very own personal, robust, very lively, musical culture! No more stunned silences when the conversation leaves the world of finance and politics… you’re going to have so much to contribute (and educate the others around you about), now!
ENJOY, BE INSPIRED, AND HAPPY PRACTISING!!!
Learning to play the violin as an adult is a daunting task - if you do it alone! But, just because we're no longer attending compulsory formal education doesn't mean we stop growing as a human being. And what's interesting is that, whether we already read music (because we were among the lucky few who had the chance for music education as a child) or not (perhaps because LIFE IS LIFE), we tend to understand the process of going through life in terms of emotional content.
I'm not talking about swinging between ups and downs, although that does tend to happen in extreme situations! I'm talking about the colourful imagery that springs to mind when certain labels are called up. Think: blue sky, sour lemon…. And it's not just a question of colour! We naturally swim in an ocean of shape, texture, taste….. And honestly, right now, all I'm dreaming of now is an ice-cold strawberry milkshake… (my tummy's beginning to stir… help!!!)
Imagine being a trained musician (even an amateur one, but trained!), who hears the word Russia and all you can think about is Tchaikovsky's immensely lush, generous, and so very rousing harmonies; try to imagine having the depth to appreciate the rigours of Bach's mathematical genius for structure, but also the amazement at the poetry so tightly ensconced in his apparent 'severity'… imagine being a little rascal hopping among the wildflowers among the bees, being yelled at by your mother to come inside before you get in trouble… you would have embodied the spirit of the eternally youthful Mozart from the time he wrote Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). So you see, learning to understand this other dimension in life.. Is really not far away from what we already know.
But learning to listen, and learning to play the music we love, are two very different endeavours.
The violin, for all its incredible Baroque beauty, can be a devilish instrument of torture, if not handled properly. The set-up of the left arm below and around it, the pursuit of true finger dexterity, and then learning to use this powerhouse which is our bow arm… is something that needs some significant expert guidance. Especially if you're not the kind of person who actively goes looking for physical injury.
And because LIFE IS LIFE, yours truly has had the unique opportunity of having developed, and then overcome, an almost crippling bout of tendinitis in the left side of my body. It's a work in progress to keep it completely at bay, but such a revealing schooling on how to use the body gently but effectively! Especially since, in this hyper-connected world, we tend to spend more time at the computer than not, and it's pretty obvious by now that this is the hell we have chosen in order to get ahead in life. If you're already thinking of learning to play the violin, or to continue your journey without forgetting the wellness of your physical body, why not try it out with someone who's already made the mistakes we all make, and streamline the learning process in order to enjoy life to the fullest?
Don't be fooled, the violin is not an easy instrument to learn to play, and convincingly. I could name some very famous people who didn't even get to the 'convincing' part, but let's keep that conversation behind closed doors, shall we? So if you're in it to fill in another line in your CV, and, I kid you not, I have met people like this and wonder why they didn't just boast about their symbolic 'gym membership' instead, I'd invite you to just stick to the 'gym membership'.
But if you're in it for the sounds and the fluidity in breathing and body movements, and the excitement of surmounting ever-bigger personal challenges, you're exactly where you need to be! Get in touch with me and let my eye for detail nudge you through your own learning process, and meet some amazing people on the go.
Let me and your extended circle of 'classmates' accompany your journey based on your personal schedule, specific interests… Hell, we even had a song from Maroon 5 in one of our first classes! I mean, since LIFE IS LIFE, everyone is so uniquely different. Let the violin speak for you, and you will thank yourself later for having taken this opportunity to give it a go.
Much love.
