A Hand Like Greased Lightning

Well, I trust you survived the Halloween weekend intact and no worse for the wear. In Sedona you’ll find literally thousands flooding into ‘uptown’ where the business owners hand out the treats and street performers provide the tricks.

Our daughter stayed in character as a fairy only until we encountered a African drumming ensemble, where upon she transformed into a whirling, twirling, Zulu princess. It was something to behold.

So, on to greased lightning.

You know, there are 2 ways one can use lightning as a metaphor for the goings-on of a left hand.

On the less-than-flattering side, Aaron Rosand once quipped, after the performance of a student, ‘you have fingers like lightning, they never strike in the same place twice.’

And then there’s an entirely opposite use, a way that describes perfectly the workings of Milstein’s left hand. It’s called ‘greased lightning.’

I love that one. And I’ve invested quite a bit of time, over the years, understanding how to condition my left hand to convey the same impression.

And one secret to this kind of fluidity, one that you won’t hear about in most teaching studios, is the concept of the left hand as ‘perpetual motion machine’.

So often we think of the fingers as little digital devices, either on or off. We don’t think to groom the in-between movements of the fingers.

Yet for scales, arpeggios, and many kinds of figurations – Kreutzer #9 being a perfect example – getting control over the entire range of movement of the fingers can ramp the ease of playing, and upper end of one’s velocity, to a whole new level.

Instead of seeing the fingers as either on or off, imagine them to be as four parachutists descending to the fingerboard in series. And, upon raising them, like balloonists rising from the string one after another.

Now if this image makes sense to you, you’ve got some fun and challenging practice ahead, practice that will amaze you when the results are counted – yes, don’t forget to do that.

And if you’re not entirely sure how this is to play out from what I’ve written, you may want to invest in volume 1 of Kreutzer for Violin Mastery and take a look at my chapter on Kreutzer #9. It’s all there, a whole new way to approach this legendary etude.