My first meeting with Professor Stephen Shipps did not go well. In my defense, I was only sixteen at the time. But Professor Shipps is not a man to be trifled with, and I most certainly trifled. Seconds before he announced my name and program to the jury at the 1994 American String Teachers Association national […]
Practice like a bodybuilder: slow, steady and super strong!
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we were bodybuilders?” my wife asked me last month, after a tough practice day. “After all the pain, we could walk down the street and people would actually see how hard we worked!” I had to agree. How gratifying would that be? Imagine if we could wear our practicing like clothing. Think […]
How to make an audition video without spending a fortune
‘Tis the season for audition videos! It wasn’t always this way. Let me do my best Church Lady impression: Back in my day, we didn’t make videos for college auditions! We drove the interstate to every school and played fifteen concertos at each one, and we loved it! But times have changed, and serious music students are applying to more and more schools […]
Terrible tremors: embracing your violin bow shakes
Ask any violinist about the first time they got “the shakes” in a performance, and they’ll respond with the name of the piece: the Schubert Fantasie. Shostakovich 8th quartet. Mendelssohn concerto. And since this week’s repertoire at the LA Philharmonic is Mahler’s ninth symphony, the grand-daddy of all shaky pieces, those terrible tremors have been lurking about! […]
The paradox of the endless violin bow (VIDEO)
The violin bow has a problem: it ends. And with it, so does the phrase. But what if the bow didn’t have to end? Step into a parallel reality with me, one where no matter how long you draw a bow, you never reach its limit! Zeno the Greek In the fifth century BCE, Zeno (despite […]
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