Anatomy of a warmup: an alternative approach to violin and viola

I start my warmup by doing everything I was taught not to do.

The purpose is not flexibility — it's not a sport.

Nor is it to get to the point where you sound as good as yesterday — we're not machines.

I think a warmup, at least as I use it on the violin, is the act of crossing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable while listening to gravity, the body, breath, nature.

Here is how I do it.

With loose arms, I put the full weight of my right arm into the string through the bow, carelessly, sometimes to the point of the stick touching the horsehair. I use the whole bow, or only parts of it. I make rough, sluggish tremolos. My left hand rests however it wants on the fingerboard, all four fingers draped over strings, sliding in glissandi across the entire instrument.

The sound is scratchy, messy, sometimes ugly.

But free.

I experience the violin's real estate in its fullness. From tip to frog. From one edge of the fingerboard to the other. Not a single millimeter remains untouched. Not a single grain of horsehair goes unexplored.

Think of everything excellent violin playing brings to mind.

A beautiful tone. Good intonation. Perfect posture. Elegance. Grace. Expressiveness.

None of those things are part of my warmup routine.

Instead, I focus on exploring the violin-bow situation while surrendering to gravity. And because surrendering completely to gravity would eventually lead to stillness, to continue moving I rebound through elliptical motions.

I move my body like a four-year-old child imitating a marionette rock star.

However my arms want to move that day, I let them.

Whatever sound emerges, I welcome it.

I let the natural weight of my body pull, swing, bounce, and fall through strings and bow hair.

I place my left fingers wherever they want to be placed. Not in position to produce specific notes:

No

But in the most comfortable position possible, resembling a naturally closed and relaxed hand:

Yes

I never think about the notes this hand shape would produce.

I listen to my body first. And to sound second.

I explore every possibility of violinistic movement, especially the one I have never tried before, but always in the most ergonomic and natural way available to me.

Years ago I asked my teacher, Mark Steinberg, what I should do during my warmup.

"Just play something that feels good," he replied.

Before moving to NYC, at a barbecue in Montreal, sitting next to Vladimir Landsman, after he casually played the first movement of the Sibelius concerto while sitting in a folding lawn chair, he told me:

"The secret to a good bow arm is physical pleasure. You need to feel physical pleasure when you bow the strings."

I remember thinking that this must have been something he carried with him from his own teacher, the legendary Yuri Yankelevich.

In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski chose to end his book with this:

“You can go astray only if you do […] do not have confidence in nature; if you try to think out ‘new principles,’ ‘new bases,’ ‘new art.’ Nature’s laws are binding on all, without exception, and woe to those who break them.”

He was not advocating a stifling absence of innovation.

He was simply stating that nature cannot be bypassed.

And nature, for the musician, means body, breath, gravity, space, time. You attune to it through physical enjoyment. Pain and discomfort are nature's ways of telling you you're headed the wrong way. "...and woe to those who break them." Woe to the ones who proclaim "no pain, no gain" (at least in the violin/viola world).

The warmup becomes an act of listening to nature rather than listening to culturally established standards of sound.

It becomes an exercise in ignoring preconceived norms while favoring however your body wants to move that particular day.

It becomes an attempt to be present without preconception.

And from there, from that mindless feel-good space, like a sculptor facing a block of stone with only a hammer and chisel — a messy operation — we can begin to work our way towards a sound that is refined, detailed, precisely carved, and yet, still exists beyond judgment, beyond thought.

It's a sound we enjoy listening to.

A sound we want to prolong.

A sound we want to surf.