Louder, part 2

I've been spending this week's practice concentrating on playing louder. At my lesson last night I told my teacher that while I was playing louder, I didn't feel very relaxed. So we spent the lesson working on loud, fast, and relaxed. I'm just playing the F# minor scale these days because of the Popper, so he had my play the scale progressively faster, but using a lot of bow. One point of this was to get me using lots of bow, be loud, but not worry about intonation. The other task was to use more bow at a higher volume and faster than my current comfort level. Also, he wanted me to disassociate my bowing from my right hand. It was actually harder at some of the middle speeds because I was still trying to hit the intonation. Oh, and I was supposed to be relaxed too. Oh, yes, use lots of bow on a consistent basis. Once it got too fast for me to hit the notes and I concentrated on my bowing, my tone actually seemed to get better. We also noticed that on the up bows I don't bite into the string enough when I switch directions so the bow has a tendency to slide across the string - something to work on fixing. Maybe one of these years I'll actually get notes, speed, and tone all at once!

The next exercise was even more useful. We pulled out the Popper and he had me play a passage. Then he said, ok, now we're going to have a conversation. Talk to me while you're playing; don't worry too much about rhythm and notes. What was amazing was that my right arm immediately relaxed, and my tone sounded much better. The parts that I know very well sounded fine, and if there was a part I didn't know very well, our conversation suffered (now it wasn't a deep philosophical discussion, just talking about my day) while my mind tried to think about what I was playing. After that I played through the whole Popper piece with that same relaxed feeling, and while I muffed up some sections, from a tonal standpoint it sounded the best that I've ever played it!

Now if I can only be that relaxed all of the time! I played this morning with our violinist, just the 2 of us, and we played through 3 B. Romberg violin/cello duets. It was really fun. Then she switched to the piano and we played through the Schubert Arpeggione sonata. I am planning to work on it next...it's one of my favorite pieces. My loud exercises are at least working...I can now easily play at a volume level over the piano (a year ago I couldn't play over the piano) but I know I wasn't relaxed enough since my right hand was sore after playing today. Loud AND relaxed....Loud AND relaxed....Loud AND relaxed!