1. Committing to the instrument!

​1.    Committing to the instrument! 
I made the first of my solid commitments to learning to play the violin in the early months of my learning journey (before the beginning of the pandemic) when I returned my inexpensive rental instrument to Long & McQuade, and went to The Sound Post to buy my very own violin. Terrified to showcase my elementary playing skills, I asked the salesclerk to play the array of violins he had picked out that were within my price range. This he gladly did—perhaps not for the first time, I thought. After all, a sale is a sale.
 
Buying a stringed instrument and/or a bow carries a trial period. My teacher, Lucia, had made it very clear that I would need to play a new instrument for a while to know if it felt right. My criteria for feeling right were rather slim at this stage, so I chose the most resonant violin complete with case and bow, and just looked at it for a while when I got it home. It was a lovely student violin and it got me through the first few years of learning.
 
My problems at this stage of learning—level 1—were myriad: I had insufficient strength in my fingers (to hold down the strings) and back (to hold up the bow without tension) and lacked the requisite flexibility in my shoulders, arms, hands and wrists to reach all the notes on a violin. My joints slowly opened up as I strove to reach hard to hit notes and press hard enough on the string to make a good sound—or maybe any sound. But this did not happen overnight, and trying too hard just caused more stress injuries. Listening to myself was still unutterably dismal and horribly demotivating but I just kept pushing through on blind faith.
 
When I received the final mark on my embossed RCM assessment for the preparatory level, I wondered for a moment, if they might have sent the result to the wrong person. 91? First class honours with distinction? I was amazed!
 
With this positive reinforcement, I launched headfirst into Level 1. On the technical side, I graduated to A minor harmonic (check!) and A minor melodic, which was a scale I had never heard of before. The dreaded C major scale made an appearance. I also had G major—on two octaves. There would no longer be any excuse for avoiding the G string. Not only did I have to learn the G scale starting on the open string, the lowest note on a violin, but the C scale began on the G string with the third finger. No tonal reference point. Tricky!
 
There were also double stops: playing two strings at the same time. These were open strings: perfect fifths. They sounded beautiful but it was devilishly difficult to balance on both and keep the hee-haw sounds down. Turning the page to the études, I saw a definite escalation. My studies included pieces with accidentals, double stops, harmonics, slurs over four notes (oh come on!) and sixteenth notes, though fortunately not altogether in the same place. They presented a kind of choose your poison smörgåsbord.
 
I sat, listened and read along to every piece in the repertoire book, all played by professional violinists who sounded hopelessly perfect and beautiful. I tried to judge the most doable pieces for myself. These were not necessarily the easiest, but I did not want pieces deliberately pushing the boundaries of the next level. Showboating is for young people with good joints and easy flexibility, who also play on proportionately smaller violins. No such luck for seniors.
 
I listened for something else, too: I wanted to play what I liked. There was a wide variety of pieces offered, so this was not hard. I met composers, such as Dmitri Kabalevsky, whose compositions I loved, and found traditional songs, such as, Un Canadien errant, a beautiful, haunting piece that I have known since childhood. I found a lovely ballad written as a duet, and asked Lucia to record the second violin. When she sent it and I played along, magic happened. Playing against a beautifully performed second violin made my first violin part sound so much richer. I played and played that piece. I still play it years later to practice more advanced techniques, such as vibrato. Cycling back to earlier pieces to practice new skills, coincidentally a feature of the Suzuki method, was reassuring and affirming of my progress.
 
Thus far, I had organized my daily practice in terms of a linear run through the technical exercises, studies (now two of them) and selected repertoire pieces. Though still generally useful as an organizing principle, linear study was becoming physically unrealistic. I needed to learn to do deliberate practice. 

Part 1

Part 2

part 3

part 5