Violin musings

So my teacher wants me to do another Sitt Etude and it has been long enough since the last one that I was willing to give it a go.  This one is #5 which is a big improvement over #1.  Sitt only wanders off into two wrong keys instead of three this time, so progress on that front, and also all the bowings are the same length which I personally deeply appreciate when I’m trying to get all those pitches right.  This should probably have been Etude 1 frankly, but here we are and I’m enjoying it while I can.

The point of this Etude is apparently leaving fingers down.  Eventually the point will apparently be slurring all different ways, but right now we are not slurring at all because the point is left hand efficiency and framing which means leaving fingers down, both because you 1 don’t need that finger elsewhere and 2 don’t need any notes on that string that are lower than that finger for a while.  

This lets you find the correct pitch once and re-use it, which is efficient, and also move your hand less which is efficient, and also have that finger as sort of an anchor point while you find other notes with other fingers, which improves pitch accuracy which is job 1 on the violin so very much a win-win-win situation.

The down side is you kind of need to know what comes next for the next couple of measures to know what fingers you can leave down so it’s for pieces of music you have time to learn very well.  Or maybe for people who just read music that well that they can be reading two measures ahead while playing the correct measure and if you can do this, my hat is off to you. 

Also he wants bridge notes for some of the anchor notes, which those readers who have been following along at home will know is when you use the pad of one finger to hold down two strings and get both in tune, which I’m better at than I used to be but this is still pretty challenging.  (Note that Sitt does use plenty of pinky notes here, including ones which he DOES NOT MARK drat him you’re just supposed to know to use the pinky note when you hatch from your egg I guess.  Sitt is improving but has a ways to go yet.). If you can manage this bridge note as anchor note, however, you get 2 found notes for the price of 1, which is also efficient.

Even on the first play-through I could tell I’d improved hugely from when I started lessons, which makes me feel both very happy and accomplished and much more generous toward Sitt.  I pretty much learned the entire thing the first week, even if it took me till Sunday to notice I was playing a wrong note in the first figure, and I’m rather proud of that.  Now I’m going back over it a few measures at a time to write out (on a photo of the music) which fingers I can leave down, and there’s a rather astonishing number of places that is possible.

The other thing I am working on is hemiolas which are hopeless.  I mean I’ll keep trying but.  Surely we didn’t need to wait until the A scale to concentrate on this.  Also why is my Etude always in a different key from my scale?

But it’s more fun, and much more interesting, when you can actually do it, more or less.

Also in other news I finally got around to scrubbing the mailbox and vacuuming the fans and it was all because I was sitting around going “it’s Labor Day, it’s going to rain all day so I don’t want to go hiking or anything; I don’t want to go shopping because I don’t want to be the reason people have to work on Labor Day; what can I do” and I looked at my bullet journal and thought; those things are easy and not intimidating.

I also discovered that those shelves that are held up by pins sticking out of holes in the sides of cabinets to be all adjustable and stuff—it turns out those pins come in standard sizes and you can order more, which means my CD cabinet will be getting its last 2 shelves in as soon as I order the pins tomorrow and they arrive in a few days.  More room to store CDs will be very helpful.