The symphony season is over. Astoria Festival (for the big orchestra) is done. Now, it’s time for the summer regimen to begin. No matter how great the orchestra, playing in an orchestra over time does some pretty insidious things to one’s playing. Since you cannot really hear yourself, it can create a harsh approach to playing in the louder dynamics, and softer dynamics can begin to lack a certain depth, becoming flat and boring, devoid of life. Intonation also begins to decline. And one tends to be rather passive as a musician – the “there’s that guy with the crazy hair waving his arms at us, do I’ll just do what he says” attitude that can creep into the rest of one’s musical life. So, it becomes necessary to get down to brass tacks insofar as one’s playing is concerned. As I recently described to a friend, the summer months are spent “scraping the pigeon shit off the statue”. So, what is the poor, downtrodden orchestral string player to do?
That’s where my “holy trinity” of practicing comes in. It’s pretty simple – but not at all easy!
- Scales & Arpeggios – the basic building blocks of music. They get one around the whole range of the instrument, and expose weaknesses in shifting and intonation like virtually nothing else. Doing them slowly also is an excellent laboratory for tone production work.
- Etudes – sometimes diabolical, but always worthwhile. These can range from the micro-minimalist style isolation etudes of Sevcik or Schradiek to Kreutzer and Fuchs. The key is, find an etude that gives you fits, and give yourself a week of daily practice to try to break it to your will
- Bach – if you do your work on nos. 1 and 2 well, then this is your reward, or at the very least, your Rubicon – it exposes every weakness of technique (whether you’re working on the violin Sonatas & Partitas or the cello Suites) – and also forces you to exercise that often underworked (in orchestral musicians, anyway) interpretation muscle.