Reaching Beyond the Comfort Zone

Sky’s turned a steely grey outside, temp’s down in the 30’s, a few snow flakes blowin’ past my window.

I guess we’re putting spring on hold here in Western North Carolina.

So what better time to talk about reaching beyond the comfort zone.

This morning I set about pushing outside of mine in Caprice # 17 of Paganini. The middle section has a devilish collection of octaves combined with some tricky bowing requirements.

I wanted to play it faster than I have to date.

But to do that clearly meant taking a couple steps backward before I could move forward. I’d gone as far as I could go with the approach I was using.

A couple days ago I’d overhauled my approach to the bowing and felt pretty confident that it wasn’t the problem.

It was the left hand that was muddying up the waters.

On the surface it would seem that there were only a couple of ways of fingering the octaves. After all, when you’re playing fingered octaves you’re essentially limited to two fingers choices for each note; one and two on the lower notes, and three and four on the uppers.

As I began fooling around, however, I came up with a number of ‘slight of hands’ that either involved combinations of fingered and non-fingered octaves, or quick hops to neighboring strings.

I was truly surprised by the new possibilities.

Wasn’t long before the clear winners emerged, however. And after a little data entry into my grey cells – highly accelerated by counting and breathing – off I went, lickety-split.

The important thing is to keep your focus out in front of where you are, and to stay mentally active where it comes to finding solutions. If you find the trail getting stale or cold, give yourself a break, move to something else, and only return when your mind offers up a fresh image for your hands to chase.

Of course you always want to operate from a position of strength. For that you need strong fundamental skills and learning techniques. These are exactly when you’ll find in the volumes of Kreutzer for Violin Mastery.

All the best,

Clayton Haslop

P.S. In Paganini for Violin Virtuosity, Vol. 1 you’ll benefit from much insight that came as a result of my 23 years of coaching with Nathan Milstein. We’re talking info that’s difficult to impossible to find anywhere else today.