When Air is truly Air.

Published: Jul. 1, 2007 at 4:27 AM
Last modified: Jul. 1, 2007 at 4:32 AM

Tonight, I furthered something it feels I've been working on forever, though not really I guess. Taking "Air On a G String" and lightly playing the notes continuously tip to tip, dividing the note per logical maximum number of notes instead of bow returns for expressiveness I continue my quest for: Mr. Legatomeister!

Currently I'm working on a level of actually levelness I think, that still has some logical bow changes based on phrasing, but only at the end of a phrase. Limiting vibrato severely and listening only for pure tone in my mind, gives the piece a fluidity that is a level of it's own. Personally, I find it awesome and maybe even satisfying done with this lightness

Beginning the second theme, I normally use a little weight and dig in for some juice. But tonight, I started learning how to get juice with minimum amount of weight instead.

The inspiration for this little exercise actually came from watching someone on television playing in such a way as to seemingly be doing the same thing I'm doing with the song quite some time back. So irregardless if this is a good exercise or not, I feel like it's getting me close to knowing my bow somehow I'm not qualified to describe really. It's like Sans bowing realtime or something?

So I added a couple insights tonight. One is related to the actual process here, and one not. The one not related is that my back seems to be getting tired, so I relinquished myself to playing sitting some.

The insight that is related continues with my recent themes of lightness and involves phrase shaping in at least some instances by being competent on the entire bow as much as possible. But, it's how that competence is related to the pinky that I ingrained somehow tonight--another adaptation since ditching my shoulder rest and having to refind my sounding points(SP).

While f3/f4 have alot to do with tracking the SP, I discovered that a completely lazy pinky somehow effects confident SP:f3/f4 control; and, also seems more important to me than in the past in both feeding weight from the forearm as well as helping with seemless bow changes.

It seemed that I became able to subtly feed weight and reduce weight both in bow changes and phrasing if not deluded. For months now I've been working towards this lightness in everything and as my bow hand continues to learn this, these subtle at least to me things, seem to be evolving.

An aside to all this is how I also started working tonight on a 'phrased approach' to learning lightness of southpaw grip, as well as overall. Because I play 'SO' much at times, it is completely out of the question to remedial heavily. I 'shall' play this thing one day.

Anyway, beyond the soapbox, I started taking major phrases and re-doing them as I get ready to start using etudes for the same purposes in achieving various levels of fluidity. The detache runs in Lully, the first measures of Boccherini, God have mercy Witch's Dance--though I didn't get to work that much on it in this respect, and so forth. Also started sketching Suzuki 3/5-7. Anyway, it was a good and light beautiful mountain airy night.

Mr. Legatomeister