Dear Joshua Bell

by Paula E. Bird

One of my favorite students, Benjamin, is ten years old. He has played the violin for 3.5 years and studied with me for three of those years.

Benjamin saw you in concert for his 8th birthday. Since that day, he has talked about you quite a bit. He likes to mimic what he recalls of your physical movements when you play, adding appropriate gestures that fit the musical expression of the phrasing. Having heard and watched you play many times myself as part of the symphony orchestra that accompanies you, I enjoy watching Benjamin work so hard to emulate you.

I have a problem helping Benjamin understand the importance of driving at a speed limit that is appropriate for the road conditions. For Benjamin, every day is a sunny day and every road a straight, curve less ribbon: 100 mph, full speed ahead, enjoy the wind in your hair sort of affair.

What helpful words might you suggest to help little Benjamin understand when it is appropriate to slow down and let the ears really hear what the fingers and bow are playing? How can Benjamin learn how to pick the right speed?

I know you are a busy performer. Benjamin is one of many of my students who has been touched by the music making gifts you have shared with the world. It would greatly help me if you were to offer Benjamin some helpful advice about this tricky subject. I would really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Paula Bird

PS: Benjamin has not enjoyed learning the Bb scale. Until recently he has been quite depressed by the sound of the key. He has persevered, however, and I have as well concerning the appropriate speed to learn the new scale. Now Benjamin finds that he can make this scale sound pretty good. I am sure you would be proud to hear him play it.

PSS: Does anyone know how I can send this letter to Joshua Bell? Email me if you do.

Quick Practice Tip: Holes and Towers

I have a delightful eleven-year old boy in the studio who is on the cusp of book 6. We have spent much of this year in lively discussions about practicing and what constitutes good practice habits. I would like to share one of our recent conversations about this topic.

Eleven-year old boys are enamored with speed and movement. They generally have lots of energy and enjoy playing things as fast as they can. I understand the seductive lure of playing fast, but I also understand the pitfall of allowing the fun of physical sensation to encourage the ears to take a siesta from doing their job. When a student plays a passage too fast, the ears cannot hear it accurately. The trick is getting the student to learn how to play the passage quickly enough to garner speed but also slow enough to check for intonation and accuracy. I covered the topic of practicing methods to build up speed in previous posts:

• Building up speed with thoughtful chunks

• Building up speed with Magic Patterns

I had discussed these various methods with my student, but in this instance, my student was caught up in the fun and excitement of playing a very cool piece (Bach's Violin Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, violin 1 in book 5) and had little enthusiasm for accuracy for the moment.

I isolated a passage whose perfection eluded my student: tricky finger pattern, difficult bow articulation and slurring, and advanced aural interval for intonation. I asked my student to play the passage a little slower and really listen to what he played. Our conversation went like this:

What did you hear?

My student looked at me with a puzzled expression.

Were you playing the correct notes?

I could tell that he was not sure about the answer to that question.

Try playing it again much slower and really listening to whether the notes are correct and in tune.

It took a few more tries before my student could play the passage slow enough for his ears to start working accurately and identify problem areas.

Let's suppose that I asked you to build up a big pile of dirt for me. And, you eagerly did that, except that you dug a hole instead.

"O . . . K . . .," my student said, clearly puzzled about where I was headed.

When I checked up on the work you did, I found that you dug a huge hole instead of building up a pile of dirt. I would tell you: "Jamey! I asked you to build a pile of dirt! I wanted to build a tower and needed a pile of dirt. You dug a hole instead!" What would you have to do now to fulfill my request?

"I would have to fill up the hole and then build a pile of dirt on top of where I had the hole at first."

Exactly! So how much work did you do in order to finally build up the pile of dirt I initially asked you to make?

"I would have to do two sets of work. I would have to fill up the hole I dug and then have to pile more dirt on top of that to build a pile -- No! Wait! -- I would have done 3 sets of work! Because, I would have dug the hole in the first place, then I would have had to fill it up, and then I would have had to build it up. I did three times more work than I should have done."

So, how much work would you have done if you had just built up the dirt pile in the first place?

"I would have done the work once."

When we practice, we also have to decide whether we want to practice to dig a hole or build a tower, right?

"Right!"

So what do you want to do in this piece when you practice? Dig a hole or build a tower?

"I want to build a Castle, not a Moat!"

Lesson learned! Thanks, Jamey! Happy Valentine's Day back at you!

Quick Practice Tip: Magic Patterns

This practice tip is about building up speed in difficult passages but in a manner more advanced and complex than the earlier practice tip I posted about building up speed through the use of thoughtful chunks. I call this technique "magic patterns" and use it mostly with my advanced students. Currently here in Texas there are several auditions for students coming up that require the performance of several fast etudes, and my advanced students are struggling to build up speed.

Here are the 11 magic patterns in a nutshell:

Magic Patterns (11)

Each pattern in a measure is a separate pattern to be applied to the passage being worked on. The above patterns apply to passages that involve a multiple of four notes (16th notes, 8th notes). There are three requirements:

• Keep the same fingering.

• Keep the same bowing.

• Play correctly, no mistakes. If there are mistakes, then the speed must be adjusted or the length of the "thinking pause" in the pattern execution must be lengthened.

I think of the above Magic Patterns as a floor, and each particular pattern will reveal a weakness in the floor that may need an extra nail hammered into it. A weak finger or a slippery shift may be causing a problem the student was not aware of. Maybe a bowing does not quite catch the string at a good contact point. The magic patterns will uncover all the problems one at a time. Some patterns may seem trickier than others, and this sensation may vary from passage to passage.

When a student has struggled through the entire exercise of applying the magic patterns, I ask them to play the passage as originally written. The students always acknowledge how much easier the passage feels after being massaged by the magic patterns: "It's magical," they say. And it is.

I then take two brand new rubber bands and show them to the student. We compare the color and the length of both bands; they are the same. I set one band aside and take the other. I stretch out the second rubber band eleven times, which is the number of magic patterns the student completed. After completing my stretching exercise, we compare the two rubber bands again. The stretched rubber band has a different color and is much longer than the first rubber band.

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." -- Oliver Wendall Holmes

I explain to the student that when we made the passage harder by applying varied rhythms and increasing the complexity, we stretched the student's mind. When the student returned to the passage as originally written, the student found it to be much simpler and easier to play.

I seldom have to repeat my magic pattern exercise. Once through a difficult passage and the passage then becomes "mine." Occasionally in extremely difficult repertoire, I may have to apply other patterns. If the passage is separate bows, I add slurs and mix up separate and slurred bowing. If the passage is slurred, I play without slurs or spiccato. The goal is to find ways to play the passage differently and to make it even more difficult.

To increase speed, I practice with the patterns, include larger thinking pauses, and speed up the moving notes as quickly as I can.

I use similar patterns for passages in 6/8 or other multiples of threes.

Happy practicing!

Quick Practice Tip: Building up Speed with Thoughtful Chunks

Recently a friend and I were talking about our students' struggles to increase the speed of a passage once they had learned the notes and bowing. I remembered when I first studied more advanced repertoire, I puzzled over the same issue: how to go faster and how to measure my progress. That was when I discovered the metronome and its power.

I would decide what my ultimate tempo goal was, and I set the metronome somewhere about half that speed. Every day I would play the passage with my metronome and increase the speed gradually until I had reached my ultimate tempo. Along the way I became quite familiar with the ins and outs of the passage because I spent so much time thinking about the passage while I was playing.

And that is the problem with this traditional approach of using a metronome and increasing speed a little at a time. The entire exercise takes a very long time to complete, especially in this day and age of digital metronomes that can increase speed at the excruciatingly slow speed of a click at a time. There has to be a faster way, and there is but you must practice carefully and precisely. I call this method "thoughtful chunks."

I will use the Seitz Concerto No. 5, 3rd movement (Suzuki Violin Book 4, #3) as my example of how this process works. I will use the passage in measures 101-108.

The difficulties for the student in this passage are that the bow has to play a large number of notes in a slur (6) and the student may not be the best reader yet. I teach my students how to play this passage pretty much at full speed from the beginning using the method I am about to describe.

After my student plays the first note of measure 101, I ask them to stop and consider the next series of notes to be played with the bow (in this case, the 6-note slur on an up bow plus 1 note F# on a down bow).

When the student is certain that he or she can play the little snippet without a mistake, I ask the student to go ahead and try it. If the student succeeds, we celebrate. If the student stumbles, I suggest that the student may not have thought long enough, and we try it again.

We progress in this fashion, snippet by snippet, chunk by chunk until we have gone through the entire passage or whatever length we have determined was our goal for the day.

The student must learn to spend time thinking about the passage before playing it in order to ensure that the student plays the passage correctly. Incorrect playing is incorrect practicing. Remember the old adage: practice makes perfect. In actuality, practice makes permanent, so the student had better be sure to play everything correctly the first time and every time.

Practicing the passage in this manner accomplishes several things:

• The student will teach his or her fingers how to play fast from the initial practice session.

• The student will build "fast" muscles.

• The student will learn to consider the music in chunks, which helps the student's logical thought process and ability to read music.

The pauses that the student uses between the chunks of passage notes I call "thinking pauses." The length of the thinking pauses can be as long as the student desires. In fact, long pauses are best, because they give the student's brain a chance to really consider the passage thoroughly and ensure successful playing.

Since I have adopted this method of thoughtful, fast practice, my learning time for fast passages has been considerably shortened. Students seem to enjoy it as well, since they are pretty much playing at the correct speed from the initial moment they learn the passage. This method of practicing almost seems like more of a game than hard work. And, rather than teach our minds to wander by slogging through a passage in a slow tempo, we are offering our brains a challenge in concentration and focus, which is precisely the good thing we want to encourage at every juncture.

Stay tuned later this week, as I address another way to practice fast: Magic Patterns!