Ahh...I promised in this blog that I would talk about theater, school, and violin. School's not in session, so I guess I'll talk about violin.
So right now I'm working on the Haydn G Major Concerto. Fun piece! Still, it's easier than you expect. The last piece I played was the Bach Concerto in E Major, and it was actually harder than this one. I think the hardest thing about this piece is the bowings. How do you figure out the bowings for such a piece? I find that longer slurs, especially when moving to the higher strings, seems to cause an almost gravitational pull, which makes you run out of bow faster than you intended.
Another hard thing about the violin is spiccato. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, spiccato is a staccato like bow stroke, except you use the lower half of the bow to make a sort of short, bouncy stroke. It requires flexible fingers and careful wrist movement, but most importantly, limited motion in the arm. In fact, no motion in the lower arm.
It's very hard to be a good violinist if you don't learn to control your bow hand and do good spiccato, and it's lethal for orchestra auditions (as I recently found out....*cough, cough*). It's also important to develop the wrist movement for overall tone and sound quality. Corelli was a brilliant violinist and composer, but he had a terrible wrist and finger flexibility problem that was never fixed, as well as having trouble shifting to high positions--sometimes he couldn't play his own pieces!
Midori (my absolute, most favorite violinist out of all violinists on the planet that ever existed, or my MAMFVOAVOTPTEE, but I'll call her Midori because that's actually shorter than the acronym) came to Eugene to do a workshop/master class. She actually told one of the girls about having a looser wrist motion to improve her tone on a Mozart Concerto. I took lots of notes at that workshop...I should post them...another time!
Long post!
Srujana
Another hard thing about the violin is spiccato. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, spiccato is a staccato like bow stroke, except you use the lower half of the bow to make a sort of short, bouncy stroke. It requires flexible fingers and careful wrist movement, but most importantly, limited motion in the arm. In fact, no motion in the lower arm.
It's very hard to be a good violinist if you don't learn to control your bow hand and do good spiccato, and it's lethal for orchestra auditions (as I recently found out....*cough, cough*). It's also important to develop the wrist movement for overall tone and sound quality. Corelli was a brilliant violinist and composer, but he had a terrible wrist and finger flexibility problem that was never fixed, as well as having trouble shifting to high positions--sometimes he couldn't play his own pieces!
Midori (my absolute, most favorite violinist out of all violinists on the planet that ever existed, or my MAMFVOAVOTPTEE, but I'll call her Midori because that's actually shorter than the acronym) came to Eugene to do a workshop/master class. She actually told one of the girls about having a looser wrist motion to improve her tone on a Mozart Concerto. I took lots of notes at that workshop...I should post them...another time!
Long post!
Srujana
