On Getting Ducks in a Row

To be truthful, I really don’t have any experience whatsoever with trying to order ducks in a row. I can imagine, however, it would be quite a challenging task unless, by chance, you happen to be a mother duck.

In any case, this funny image came to me as I thought of the challenges we confront as violinists.

There are a myriad details to resolve in pursuit of mastery, and once one has them in isolated form they must be ordered quite specifically and recalled in a flash to fully realize complex music.

This past weekend I had quite an interesting, and at times challenging, time initiating my daughter into the art of penmanship.

Though most of us have probably forgotten the process, there is quite a bit of duck-lining that goes into it – how to hold the pencil, where the pencil begins on the paper for each letter, how far and in what shape it travels, and so forth.

And though not so complex, it is an appropriate metaphor, I think, for the task of mastering the violin.

Now, like so many players, the main challenge my daughter faces, even at the tender age of 7, is in overcoming some unfortunate habits she acquired early on in her writing experience.

She is constantly jumping ahead of herself assuming she knows what she really Doesn’t know.

On seeing or recalling a letter, her mind immediately goes on ‘auto-pilot’ with the result that, in the absence of old dad here, we get the same rough approximations for letters she learned at age 5.

So in our penmanship lessons I have had to challenge each and every assumption she now holds, virtually every time she places her pencil on the paper.

Initially in was pretty slow going, and I fielded some serious protestations from her over the process – ‘I can’t do it’, ‘I don’t understand’, ‘why do you make me do this?’ – you know the drill.

Yet when the ice began to crack, and the powers observation got to flowing, the results had quite a positive effect on her.

You can surely imagine how I felt witnessing this awakening.

So, does this have to do with your violin practice? Only in so far as you are prepared to challenge your assumptions each and every time you take the instrument from its case, or put one of my instructional DVDs in your player.

In the way of Zen it is known as ‘Beginners Mind.’

Now if you’re not too far along in your violin study and are looking for a good place to apply your ‘beginners mind’, I’ve got just the ticket.

All the best, Clayton Haslop

P.S. Players of longer experience may want to jump in to more challenging material.