Avoiding the California Stop

Those of you that drive know what I’m talking about, namely a ‘stop’ that isn’t really a stop.

I do them myself now and then, shame on me!

Of course it’s one thing to bend the rules a little bit when you know you’re in full control of a situation – I don’t do California stops when I can’t see all opposing traffic clearly.

But my driving habits aren’t what I mean to talk about. It’s your practice habits I’d like to shed light on.

You see, quite often when people make a mistake and stop to repeat something, they make a ‘California Stop’. They recognize a mistake, make a quick judgment about it, and restart, all within a blink of an eye.

The problem is, the body needs time to receive the new instruction. It needs time to ‘unwind’ from the previous experience.

While this is taking place you need to listen to your body.

Today I was practicing a famous passage from the Brahm’s Concerto. Brahms had a way of displacing beats so they fall in unexpected places. I noticed one result of these displacements was that my body needed a tad more time between repetitions to organize itself. Once I gave my body time to fully appreciate how the music was organized around the beats, bingo, everything flowed like water.

In short it’s a little dance that takes place between the creative imagination and the body.

Also makes me think of the expression, ‘take some time to smell the roses’. Something most all of us could do more of, no?

All the best,

Clayton Haslop

P.S. It all boils down to rhythm, really. All things have their natural rhythms, and it is up to us to find what they are. And the techniques you’ll learn in Kreutzer for Violin Mastery are superb for picking up the natural rhythms of music.