1:13am May 9, 2012

Violin, and accuracy, and wearing myself out, and amazingness, and stuff.

So there seem to be two things (at minimum) influencing the mistakes I make on the violin.

One of them is what you’d expect: Experience. The more I practice the less mistakes I make overall.

But the other one is song-specific. I start out blundering and creaking and squeaking and sounding awful. Then I play the song a certain number of times. Varies by song. And I make much fewer mistakes.

But it doesn’t carry over to other songs. Actually it does, a little, but in ways that don’t make sense to me. Like a vigorous jig might carry over to Sunrise, Sunset, but not to other things more similar to it. It’s complicated. But for the most part, this single song effect means I can be great at one song and have to start over nearly from scratch with the next one.

I’m still not totally consistent either. So doing really well at a song means that at least a certain percentage of time I get it just how I want it and play it in a truly expressive way. The rest of the time varies.

I also really have to be careful. Having a violin in the house (and knowing I can play it) is like… if the people at the art program were at my house, 24/7, always putting painting materials in front of me. Today I practiced until I felt really lousy physically. Which isn’t good. It’s just so hard to pass up the possibility of learning (or improvising) just one more song.

Especially now that I’m at a level now where I can really put feeling even into songs I didn’t write. And can really feel that sense of cooperation and (on some levels) merging or symbiosis with the violin, like what I play is a combination of my personality and the violin’s personality. Which is very intimate and amazing. And is why I have so much motivation that I’ve never had with any other instrument.

I know I keep writing about that but it’s because I keep experiencing it. And it doesn’t stop being wonderful just because I’m talking about it so repetitively.

But I really have to not trash my body the way I did today. Or I’ll put myself in a state where I can’t practice anymore. And that would be bad. Plus as a friend pointed out the violin doesn’t want me doing that either. It’s just hard to stop
once I start (which come to think of it could be a motor issue, not just an issue of interest), until I literally can’t continue. But I have to learn, and soon. This is very strenuous compared to my normal activity level and can only end badly if I try to push through it.

On the up side, though. I’m learning fast. Probably because a lot of this is stuff I already knew and was just rusty about. But I’m also discovering skills I never had before, at least not to my knowledge. Mostly in terms of expressiveness, improvisation, and more subtlety than I used to have. And I can tell that my more general level of skill, while inconsistent, has a much higher high end of that range than I had as a kid. The main trouble is accessing that consistently.

I’ve also found out that I’m flat out incapable of arm or wrist vibrato. What I thought was wrist vibrato was just an especially vigorous finger vibrato. The other kinds of vibrato require the ability to play without a certain part of your hand touching the neck, and my hands are too small to manage it. But since I’m not going to be professional at this I figure it’s fine to stick within the boundaries of my body type and not stress out about what’s impossible anyway.

All in all I’m loving this, I just have to be more careful if I want to keep this up. I love that I’m getting more and more able to cooperate with the instrument. And more and more like I’m interacting with something alive.

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