How to practice violin effectively: why repetition isn’t enough
You browse a bit of the internet, a bit of social media, a little Facebook, and what kind of violin advice do you get?
Do this, do that. The Franco-Belgian bow hold, the Galamian way. This exercise, that exercise.
They’re all telling you what to do.
Seemingly no one is talking about the how.
And yet, that’s where the key lies. If you want to know how to practice violin effectively, the answer is in the how, not the what.
The how at the most subtle level.
Practice five pages of Ševčík, four pages of Schradieck, go through the whole book of Flesch, Galamian scales, Dont Etudes, Rode, etc. — if the how is dull, limited, unaware, or repetitive, you will be worse off than someone who plays five notes of their choice slowly, in a curious and mindful way.
In the 19th century, there was, in the Western world, the idea that a musical piece — say, the Brahms violin concerto — was made up of technical passages, thirds, octaves, arpeggios, and that if you practiced those specific techniques separately and mastered them, you would then be able to master the Brahms violin concerto. That’s where the work of people like Schradieck and Ševčík came in.
It’s hard not to see an analogy with what was happening during the Industrial Revolution. Automation, repetition, mechanical efficiency.
Like a steam engine, ruthless and unstoppable, violin technique became a quest to conquer the unconquerable, to aspire to invincibility, flawlessness, proficiency.
Frankly, I don’t know how violinists of that time were working with these notorious exercise books. All I know is how they affect me, and how they affect my students:
The senses get dulled, the fingers strong but insensitive, and with a lumbering mind, doing these exercises becomes an exercise in perseverance — like climbing a mountain at any cost, with tunnel vision, no time, attention, or energy whatsoever to notice the wildflowers on the side of the road.
Do that for a few days — heck, even just a few minutes — and you notice one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you as a musician creeping in, silently, perniciously. The thing that no one wants to talk about, and yet is extremely commonplace:
Automatism.
To repeat not only the same notes, but also the same thinking, the same approach, the same neural circuits, mindlessly, with a dull mind, devoid of breath and imagination — that is a recipe for misery.
The dangerous lure in this case is reliability, consistency, safety.
To let expectation determine experience, leaving no room for surprise — that is a road you don’t want to take, a road leading to a dead end.
The key is to repeat without repeating.
The repetition is in the what, not in the how. The how is a living, breathing state. It’s life itself.
Yes, everyone knows you need repetition to learn something. But repetition cannot be done repetitively. It needs to be alive, lively. Open to newness.
Every repetition is a little different. Notice what you’re doing, but also notice the place you’re doing it from.
Observe the observer. (Or, as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, "the observer is the observed.")
Don’t take it for granted that you know what “violin playing” means. What “music making” means. It might not be it after all. We might have been wrong all this time.
Let the sound, the music, the instrument, your body, the gesture, the movement unfold. One note becomes a unique moment, never to be replicated exactly.
The key is in micro-sensations.
If you play five notes slowly and let each note be a little infinite universe in itself, full of possibility and the unknown, full of auditory and sensory information, you will benefit more than if you laboriously plow through five pages of Ševčík.
We are not machines.
Whatever exercise we practice needs to have the effect of sharpening the mind and the senses.
It also needs to spark our musical imagination.
I just started Schradieck, so this was really helpful to read! It’s not easy for me to focus on getting through the exercises, but I’m realizing how useful they are when I slow down and actually pay attention to what my hands are doing.