NIKITA YERMAK

When you’re standing with your instrument, when you’re sitting with it, notice how you use your body. Are you doing anything special? No. You just stand the way you stand. You sit the way you sit. It’s not a performance. Now here’s a powerful key to virtuosity on the violin or viola: When you go from simply standing or sitting with your instrument to actually playing, change as little as possible. In fact, barely change anything. This is more profound than it sounds. And to r

Standing perfectly still in Masquerade has become one of my favorite moments to perform—a strange exercise in stillness, perception, and the feeling of slowly leaving the body behind.

The loudest fears are impossible to miss. The quieter ones are more dangerous—the subtle doubts that slip unnoticed into your violin practice until they begin to feel like part of you.

Working as a Masquerade violinist is a high-octane job. It requires physical stamina and relentless focus. After all, at any given moment, there is only one violinist for all six pulses. But we also need the tools. Few people know that behind a door, next to the first performance area, there is a violin cabinet. On the right is my own violin, the one I play at the beginning of the show. It’s an anonymous French violin from the mid-20th century that I’ve been playing for the p

A good bow arm begins with a fall. On gravity, resistance, and learning to let the arm drop through the string rather than forcing the sound.

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 o

When a technical problem refuses to go away, the solution may lie in the parts of the body we’ve forgotten. An exploration of sensation, movement, efficiency, and what happens when we learn to play from where we’re not.

Playing a musical instrument is, at its core, an act of perception. It involves two senses: hearing and touch. That’s it. Seeing is important for reading music (and walking around), but when it comes to playing, it often gets in the way. Sight can be a trap. For example, what looks like good posture can actually be a terrible posture. Violinists who are standing straight, neck upright, seemingly balanced and symmetrical, yet struggling with tendinitis, chronic pain, and all s

There is a gold mine out there for artists of all kinds. John Cage's 10 Rules for Students and Teachers. The composer who revolutionized music in the twentieth century, at a time when innovation seemed to have reached a dead end, was also a remarkable pedagogue. You'll find the full list of rules at the bottom of this page, but take a look at Rule No. 8: Playing while thinking "I'm not sounding that good". Being disappointed with this note or that passage. "This isn't how I w

You can’t fix yourself to mastery. If you take every flaw of yours and correct it, you will not become a master of your instrument. If you address all your weaknesses, one by one, even meticulously, even with discipline, you will not start playing masterfully. If you correct everything, there will be no magic. At best, it will be an excellent performance. Not a magical one. Not one where boundaries of body and instrument disappear to let the soul of the music soar, unbound. I

“Playing in tune.” This ominous, restricting phrase. The moment I think of it, I think of that game with sand bags, where you need to toss them and it's either hit or miss (cornhole?). Or a game of darts, where there is a definite center and you need to get as close to it as possible. A Lego set where you can't veer off track, where you absolutely need to build the model on the box. This is not creating, building, or designing. This is all along the lines of following a scrip

Thirty-three years of playing the violin — experimenting, studying, observing, and performing — brought me to a simple conclusion: There are only three types of left hand technique. Vertical movements (lifting/pressing fingers on the string without shifting — e.g. trills) Horizontal movements (shifting) Hand frames (chords) That's it. And the fastest way to improve your left hand technique is to practice each movement meticulously, without combining it with another. Even at o

It’s July 2, 2026. As a Masquerade violinist, I have now performed 200 shows. With six pulses (groups of sixty audience members) at each show, six preludes each show, that’s 1200 performances of the exact same Prelude, 1200 bows, 1200 cadenzas. Five E strings broken mid-performance. Tens of horse hairs ripped. Someone asked me once: "Do you get sick of it, playing the same thing over and over again?" I don’t. I truly don’t. If anything, I enjoy it more and more. And being par

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

Un, deux, trois, quatre, un, deux, trois, quatre. The eight clicks before I begin to play I count in French, the language I grew up speaking. Soon the room will fill. The first guests are directed to within a few feet of me. I don't look up. The click track is already there in my right ear. I listen past it. The first measures are for the violin as much as for the audience. Wood, string, horsehair. The sound is still finding its shape. For a moment it feels unfamiliar, then s

I was about 15 years old when I noticed. On the body of my violin, between the tailpiece and the purfling, a small puddle of dried sea water, the size of a quarter. I don’t remember crying while practicing. But there, holding on to 250-year-old varnish, was the evidence, quiet and indisputable. An emotional testament commemorating the beginning of years of suffering. From the age of about 12 to 22, violin slowly became an instrument of torture. At age 19, simply placing the