Play from where you're not
Updated: Sep 3
The solution to a problem is usually where you haven’t looked yet.
Imagine you’re practicing a difficult passage. You’ve tried it slowly, with various rhythms, different bowings, different fingerings, even with a metronome. You did what your teacher told you. Still, it’s not there yet. It keeps slipping out of control. Little (or not-so-little) inaccuracies keep creeping in here and there.
You could, in practice, keep hitting your head against the wall. Like Salvador Dalí:
“The important thing in life is to be stubborn. When what I'm looking for doesn't come out in my paintings I knock my head furiously against the wall till it's bloody.”
But I don’t recommend it.
Instead, ask yourself a series of questions:
What am I aware of?
What am I listening to? (Listening, not hearing.)
What areas of my body am I aware of while playing this passage?
Most importantly: what areas of my body am I not aware of?
The solution to a technical or instrumental problem often lies in No. 4.
For ultimate mastery of the instrument, the whole body needs to be engaged. Not equally, of course. There’s no way your feet will be moving as much as your arms (unless you’re Lindsey Stirling).
Rather, think of the body as a tree. The trunk supplies the power. Larger branches support medium-sized branches. Medium branches sway in the air. And the leaves—the fingers—are the most refined, delicate perceptors.
The problem is that we don’t feel sensations throughout the body equally.
Our hands, feet, and faces, for example, have enormously detailed cortical representation compared with areas such as the back or upper legs.
Take a look. These are the sensory and motor homunculi—sculptures based on the cortical homunculi mapped through the work of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield:
The exaggerated proportions represent how much of the cortex is devoted to sensory or motor processing for different parts of the body. Hence the enormous hands, lips, and tongue.
It is possible, however, to considerably refine our awareness of sensations throughout the body—as anyone who has taken a ten-day Vipassana meditation course knows.
This is where body awareness for violinists becomes particularly interesting. Because our sensory awareness is distributed so unevenly, we naturally gravitate toward the areas we feel most clearly: fingers, hands, perhaps arms.
Meanwhile, other areas can almost disappear.
And when an area disappears from awareness, movement there can become limited, fixed, or simply unavailable to us.
This matters because masterful technique depends on flow and efficiency.
A powerful, efficient bow-arm movement, for example, can involve a spiral-like movement beginning far below the arm itself—through the feet, legs and torso, eventually radiating all the way to the fingertips.
We see something similar very clearly in golf, hockey, and boxing:
And in animals—a running jaguar, for example:
Nothing moves in isolation.
The key to technical mastery on the violin, viola, or any other musical instrument is efficiency. And no one—or nothing—is better at efficiency than nature itself.
But to access that efficiency, we need to become aware of the parts of ourselves that don't easily enter our awareness.
The elbows. The backs of the knees. The back of the neck. The sides of the belly. The lower back.
And we need to sharpen our senses enough that we don't merely feel these areas “broadly,” but begin gathering increasingly precise information from them.
More sensory information leads to new movements.
New movements lead to more sensory information.
So the next time you're technically stuck and don't know how to improve something, choose an area of your body you're not thinking about.
And play from there.
Let that area lead the movement. Let the part of the body you usually forget initiate it. See what changes.
Experiment.
Because movement is the source of sound.
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