Next Level Violinist promo

| practicing | 

Wearing 

many hats 

Alex Kerr 

up and 

comer 

Eunice Kim 

keys to 

success 

Rachel Barton Pine 

summer 2014

Contents 

Summer 2014 

Feature Story 

5 Wearing Many Hats 

Alex Kerr 

11 Up and Comer 

eunice kim 

16 Keys to Success 

rachel barton pine 

Contributors 

Ranaan Meyer 

PUBLISHER / FOUNDER 

Brent Edmondson 

editor 

Edward Paulsen 

SALES 

Karen Han 

Layout designer 

2 NOV/DEC SUMMER 2013 2014 NEXT LEVEL BASSIST VIOLINIST

Publisher’s Note 

It’s utterly thrilling to be writing you from the pages of Next Level Violinist! 

This journal represents the culmination of months of planning to create a 

resource that I hope every violinist will read and take to heart. Inside this issue, 

incredible teachers and players will lay out the tools that you need to be, 

as Rachel Barton Pine puts it, “a professional practicer.” That’s really what music 

comes down to: how can you develop your technique and your understanding 

of the instrument so it becomes the most natural way to express yourself? 

I recall my early days of learning to play. I would practice the bare minimum that my 

parents told me to, and fought them nearly every step of the way. One day, a friend of 

mine came over and showed me how to play a boogie-woogie bass line on the piano. 

Once I had learned to play it, I was suddenly hooked. There wasn’t enough time in 

the day for me to practice as much as I wanted to. Finding jazz, discovering a side 

of music that inspired and pushed me to play better every day, these were the catalysts 

for my growth. Over the years, I learned how to refine my practicing and learn more 

material in shorter periods of time, adding tips and tricks to my ever-growing arsenal. 

As we make the transition from students to professionals, we inevitably find less and 

less time to isolate ourselves and truly focus on practicing. Turning off our phones, 

switching off the TV, and really centering our minds on the music at hand is one of 

the skills that separates musicians from the general population. For me, practice is 

almost meditative. I find that I have my best ideas during or right after practicing. 

It is one of the most clear channels for thinking that I have developed in my brain, 

and it can and should be the same for you as well. 

As you read through the brilliant advice laid out by Rachel Barton Pine, one point 

of focus is her innovative way of strategizing so she keeps all facets of her playing 

fresh and honed at the same time. I am smitten with her idea of practicing scales in 

a “Debussy” style, or polishing your Mozart tone with scales while you are focusing 

on preparing Brahms for performance. Her organizational principles underscore the 

strong need to be an efficient practicer and use the limited time you have to maximize 

your results. 

Alex Kerr, who is a wonderful and well-rounded violinist, provides so many fantastic 

links and reference points for developing your skills as a player. Take each one to 

heart and you may just find yourself with the same extensive resume of high-ranking 

positions that Alex has accrued. Additionally, I think his points on reading to broaden 

your horizons are right on the money. One of the best ways to improve yourself as a 

musician is to improve yourself as a person. Once you have developed your technique, 

you will find that the extracurriculars of life (such as knowledge, friendships, and 

love) will give you more to say in your playing. 

I’m glad you’ve joined us on our initial issue of Next Level Violinist. Keep searching 

for ways to improve your playing, your understanding, and your love of music, and 

nothing will stand in your way. I’ll check in with the next issue, and look forward 

to seeing you on the Next Level. 

Ranaan Meyer 

Publisher Next Level Journals 

SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL VIOLINIST 

3

4 SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL VIOLINIST

wearing 

many hats 

Alex Kerr 


5

At this point in my life I have so many roles to play - professor, concertmaster, soloist, chamber musician, father, husband -- all of 

these things take an incredible amount of time. The fact is, any one of these by themselves would be enough to fill one’s emotional 

and physical cup! Therefore, everything I do has to be done in a meticulous and extremely conscious manner. When I’m performing 

as a chamber musician, it has my complete attention, as do all of my different personas. When I’m practicing, I have to be intensely 

focused because I have a finite amount of time per day and per week. I’m having to learn a substantial amount of music on an hour to two hours 

a day of practicing, if I’m lucky! My practicing has to be so meticulous and organized that I’m not wasting a single second. I’m very regimented 

in what I’m working on, what I’m looking for, and how I’m going to accomplish it. If I’m not, I won’t achieve what I want to accomplish and that’s 

wasting time I don’t have. My practicing relies on organizational skills and a clear focus on the certain things that need to be addressed. 

Although I wouldn’t call myself an “etude person,” I use specific etudes for certain overarching concepts that I think are important. A typical 

warmup for me would be practicing Sevcik op. 1 no. 1 left hand etudes, which are useful for the frame of my hand, agility, the speed of the drops 

of my fingers, and the angle of the drops. 

Sevcik Op. 1 No. 1 

I also use scales for these purposes, adding the complexity of vibrato and shifting. I’ll go from there to practicing the Yost etudes - basic shifting 

etudes that are out of print but available on IMSLP. Throughout all of this, I’m focusing on producing a beautiful sound, the contact point 

between fingerboard and bridge, and getting focused for what I’m about to practice. There are certain elements that are key no matter what you 

are working on. The only thing that changes is the context. If I can focus on those basic principles in a simplified form, then I can take them 

and bring them into the solo repertoire. 

Yost Exercise No. 1 


Schriadieck exercises are a great resource when it comes to building 

the frame of the left hand, intonation, and agility. Kreutzer is another 

one - Josef Gingold was absolutely right when he said you never finish 

Kreutzer! I think of the Paganini Caprices as competition pieces, or 

perhaps the “final etudes.” The Ernst pieces or the Wieniawski pieces 

go into this category as well: pieces you play when you have the basics 

and you’re trying to hone them to the point where you can do anything 

on the instrument. There are things on the way from Kreutzer to a 

Paganini - Rode and Gavinies are very nice, but the most important 

thing is you have to know what you’re trying to achieve. The etude 

is there to address a specific issue, so if you’re going through the book 

reading the notes without trying to discover the issue that you’re 

trying to address, you’re missing the point and wasting your time. 

working hard. The outside material is much more difficult to achieve, 

and honestly impossible to achieve if you’re not focused on what 

you’re doing. Here are some ways to get the most of your time seeking 

the “bread” of this sandwich. 

When working on intonation, always practice with a drone - specifically 

the lower open string of two. I find that people who use a tonic drone 

end up with a different tuning because we are tuned in fifths and not 

in octaves. I always try to temper my intonation. Practicing intonation 

without a drone is exceedingly difficult and pointless. 

I always make sure that my body is as relaxed as possible, because 

tension is the worst enemy of the musician. It’s tension that we’re 

trying to address, because anytime we get on stage, nerves are the 

effect of it. Addressing tension cannot only happen on stage. It’s not 

Rode excerpts from Etudes 1 and 4 

Every student has to have the mentality that they’re listening to themselves 

with the ears of someone who doesn’t like them. People get too 

comfortable in the practice room. I practice always with the thought 

process that I’m going to have to play this stuff in public. Practice must 

always be solution oriented, or else, again, it’s a waste of time. I tell my 

students to constantly listen to themselves. Technique is the means 

to the musical end; it is not merely a math equation to decipher 

(even though we work from physics and athletics). Sound and music 

dictate everything, therefore not knowing what you want to sound 

like and not knowing what you want to do musically creates too many 

variables. These have to be thought out first, and then everything else 

is teachable. 

If you think of music as a sandwich, the bread is the difficulties. One 

slice is knowing what you want in the first place, and the other slice is 

knowing when it’s right. This is aesthetics and hearing. All the meat, 

cheese, mayonnaise in the middle is teachable, and it all comes from 

a spontaneous act - one has to actively practice releasing tension in 

order to make it occur on stage. I’m always working on releasing my 

joints, getting the proper weight into the strings from both hands, 

and always doing so in a manner that is efficient and avoids locking 

any of the joints in the arm or neck. 

When it comes to sound quality, I believe the contact point is one 

of the most fundamental elements of being a good and consistent 

violinist. A control over a variety of contact points for different 

contexts is literally one of the things that separates a great violinist 

from a mediocre one. I was never told this in a scientific manner. 

I think that a lot of the great violinists of the bygone era were trained 

very well at a very young age and didn’t have much inward analysis 

of what they were doing. I always thought of myself as a late bloomer, 

someone who needed to fully understand things to make them work. 

I read books on physics, acoustics, the human body, Alexander 

technique, physical therapy, and others to further this understanding. 


7

Guy Voyer, a French osteopath, is a genius in 

showing stretches that keep one from getting 

too tight and allows one to maximize use of 

the body. 

I’m constantly dividing my practice focus 

between intonation, sound, and relaxation. I 

also consistently practice with my metronome. 

I think of the metronome not just as something 

I need to stay with, but as my pianist, as 

my orchestra. It’s something that keeps me in 

check with the music, with the overall pulse. 

I don’t think of it as a crack addict needing 

his pipe, I let it reflect my tendencies so I can 

see more about myself. It’s a much different 

mentality - you’ll always find people who 

practice with a metronome and upon leaving 

it behave like Linus having lost his blue 

blanket, or Moses being lost in the desert. 

They’ve removed the one map they had, rather 

than using the map to create an internal map. 

That’s the point of using the metronome. 

Take the external beat and use it to understand 

your internal beat. It’s not natural to us, so 

we need to use this technology to try and 

create something from within that’s as close 

to it as possible. One of the things I’m naturally 

good at is phrasing. I’ve always had a natural 

way of feeling music. Let’s say there’s a person 

who isn’t natural at it. For this person, I like 

to take all distractions away, removing vibrato 

and all other external elements. Just phrase 

with the bow. Analyze how the phrase works. 

Listen to recordings to figure it out. If someone 

doesn’t have access to theory classes, harmony 

training, music history classes, etc. they 

can look at the score while listening to the 

recordings. I encourage students not to listen 

to a single recording, but to listen to 15! Get 

hundreds of ideas going through your head. 

I remember studying the Debussy sonata, and 

I was listening to a recording of Frank Peter 

Zimmermann. I was getting so many ideas 

from it! I listened to a dozen other recordings, 

but I still found Zimmermann’s interpretation 

resonated most strongly with me. There was 

something organic about it. I learned it and 

performed it, and then I listened to the tape 

of the recital. I was relieved and inspired to 

find that it was completely different from 

Zimmermann - I wasn’t imitating him in 

the slightest. He started me on the path to 

thinking about certain things, and yet I totally 

diverged from him. That’s what the benefit 

of listening is - I completely disagree with 

people who encourage students not to listen 

to recordings. I think you should listen to 

hundreds of them. Find out what you like, 

find out what you don’t like! I’m always 

amazed as a professor that a resource like 

Youtube exists where you can go listen to all 

8 SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL VIOLINIST 

the great violinists of the recording era, and 

yet all people do is look at cat videos, and 

don’t use it as the resource that it could be - 

not even to cheat with fingerings! I offer my 

fingerings and bowings to students, but I don’t 

want them to become addicted to them, so I’ll 

make them create their own. They’ll come in 

and say they are so confused, and I’ll wonder 

why they didn’t just go look at a video of 

Leonidas Kavakos to see what he was doing! 

People don’t really see that these basic 

resources are so tangible that you could touch 

them. I would have used everything at my 

disposal at that age. We used to go to concerts, 

buy the nosebleed seat tickets, and run down 

to the stage when the soloist would come 

on so we could analyze every fingering and 

bowing. We don’t even need to do that anymore 

- use the technology at your fingertips! 

I used to listen to a lot of violinists, which I 

think made me improve rather quickly. The 

negative aspect of this was that I didn’t have 

as much knowledge as I did will power! 

Michael Rabin, my teacher Aaron Rosand, 

Itzhak Perlman, David Oistrakh, Jascha Heifetz 

- I wanted so much to be as good as all of 

these people, which made me improve by 

sheer will! There were certain things that 

were natural for me, but other concepts were 

completely foreign to me; I felt lost. Technically, 

things like contact 

point weren’t 

presented to me 

because teachers 

assumed I already 

knew. I became so 

envious of all the 

violinists around me 

that were so much 

more consistent 

than I was; this was 

a feeling I still had 

into my 20s, even 

after I had already 

won positions in 

prestigious 

orchestras! I hadn’t 

yet achieved a total 

understanding of 

violin playing; it 

came later as I 

began teaching 

and developing a 

consistent method 

that I believed in. 

I researched everything, 

read every 

single book you 

can imagine. This 

extended beyond the 

music.indiana.edu 

literature on how to teach and play violin 

and into physics, natural science, and beyond. 

I developed a method for doing what I was 

doing in a consistent manner. I realized my 

whole life had been a process leading to these 

realizations. In the end, knowing what I wanted 

to be when I was young made it easy to get 

some recognition quickly, but it made my 

overall journey more complex because I gave 

people the impression that I knew what I was 

doing when I really didn’t. 

Not everybody loves what they do. Some 

people think they do but being a musician 

means loving to do even the things that 

aren’t as artistically rewarding as the most 

invigorating concerts. One has to be fascinated 

by the violin, to enjoy the most mundane 

tasks and even one’s worst days. I love being 

a concertmaster, playing in an orchestra, 

playing chamber music, every day. 

When kids are young and they’re trying to 

learn, they’re always searching for something 

to hold onto. They need to realize that there 

are resources out there, and that in the end, 

achieving a quality and consistent technique 

is really doable. I actually find now that the 

most difficult thing one can do on the violin 

is learning how to do what you did in the 

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night. The other parts are teachable, and there are resources and basic 

things that can help. When you are aware of these, you can manage 

your own progress. 

Vibrato 

Let’s talk about vibrato. The components of vibrato are very simple: 

it’s one part arm, one part wrist, one part the first joint of each finger. 

The arm is basically a spark plug - it gets things moving. If you want 

to talk about what controls the width and speed, it’s much more the 

first joint of the fingers. Go on Youtube, watch Ivry Gitlis. There are 

two videos of him playing the Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saens. 

One recording is when he was about 35 years old and the other is 

from when he was 88. Observe how his wrist is not straight but slightly 

out when he vibrates. The reason for this is he keeps the weight of his 

hand forward and he’s able to vibrate quite big with the joint without 

taking his finger weight off the string. Ivry always got violinists to 

think outside the box, and some people might take issue with his 

interpretations; however, one thing you can’t argue with is that he has 

the same vibrato across his entire career, 50 years later. How many 

people do you know that can do that? Probably no one! You simply 

can’t argue with the mechanics. 

Left hand articulation 

Watch Hilary Hahn’s performance of the final movement of the C 

Major Bach Sonata and observe how she drops her fingers from the 

base knuckles. Look at how every finger is independent within that 

frame, how she gets a lot of finger weight from the acceleration of the 

fingers into the string. There’s a reason she’s doing that, and it’s because 

it is efficient. She’s getting all the weight that’s necessary to make the 

string stop, but she gets most of it at those speeds from the acceleration 

of the drop. You can see the same mechanic in Julia Fischer’s left hand. 

Ruggiero Ricci used to say that a violinist is only as good as their 

intonation. I disagree with that because I’ve heard people play in tune 

and still be quite awful! I will admit that a violinist is only as good 

as their left hand, though. If your left hand is not at a very high level 

when it comes to using weight, using agility, using those gigantic 

drops, intonation, frame of hand - it doesn’t matter if your bow arm is 

fantastic, it’s not going to work. It’s very important to observe the great 

violinists of today - they all share many similarities in their left hands. 

Use videos as a resource to find what you need. 

Bow grips 

There are a lot of successful bow grips. You’ll see Franco-Belgian, 

Galamian grips, Russian grips, and hybrids of these. Each one presents 

certain advantages, especially if you look at the repertoire of the people 

who exemplify these various bow holds. If you’re talking Russian, 

basically Heifetz is the epitome. He was amazing for Romantic repertoire, 

but he wasn’t as successful in Classical and Baroque repertoire. Why? 

The Russian bow grip doesn’t lend itself to having a lot of “touch” - 

your joints are quite fixed and there’s not a lot of movement in the 

joints of the right hand. It makes it very difficult to produce a brush 

stroke, and that’s why Heifetz didn’t excel at that repertoire. Find out 

based on observation which grip you think is most effective. The 

thing that all grips have in common is the control over contact point. 

I challenge you to look at any violinist that’s good (any one of them!) 

- Frank Peter Zimmerman, Leonidas Kavakos, Julia Fischer, Joshua 

Bell, Gil Shaham - all of them have impeccable contact point control. 

They have all discovered, either consciously or subconsciously, that 

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the more consistency they have over the contact point, the more consistency they’ll have 

over their sound in general. It’s important to observe what all great violinists do in the 

same manner. 

Finger Drops 

People get frustrated trying to learn how to play the violin, and want to do what they 

think makes sense, but sometimes the technique for getting good is counter-intuitive. 

Why would you think that using larger finger drops would help you play faster? It seems 

illogical, but in order to keep the hand relaxed and move quickly without making a fist, 

you need those larger drops so that the acceleration of your finger will give you the force 

you need to stay relaxed and press the string down. Force + mass = acceleration, it’s 

basic Newtonian physics. Technique can and must make sense. When you can approach 

the instrument with the knowledge of what you want to do, you can then employ your 

listening skills and logic to find which way to go. I’m sure there are teachers out there 

who tell students to keep their fingers extremely close to the string, and they are wrong 

because the physics are wrong. The thing that drives all of this information is music - this 

is why we do all this research to improve ourselves - physics provide a road map to make 

the journey easier. If you can combine that with a well-rounded knowledge of technique, 

you’ll get there faster and easier. 

Nerves and Anxiety 

One of the most crucial things about performing is being able to overcome the fight or 

flight response. You spend a lot of time training your body to relax, but the mind is going 

at a quick pace and it is subconsciously perceiving danger when you walk on stage. Your 

body wants to fight somebody or run, but there is nobody to fight and nowhere to run! 

All of your natural instincts at that moment are wrong. The first thing you can do is just 

drop your shoulders and let your arms hang at your sides. I strongly recommend reading 

the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In this book, he identifies the ideal space 

where your body can relax. In my mind I think of this place as somewhere between 

boredom and frustration. The boredom component allows your body to relax and 

have weight in it. Frustration brings focus to your mind. Once your body is settled and 

relaxed, your focus can slow down and zero in on the music - that’s the easiest setting to 

perform in. This process may be easier some days and harder on others. Michael Jordan 

said that on his easier days, he felt like he was shooting an orange into a giant trashcan. 

Sometimes it feels like that, and sometimes you need to get out of there without falling 

on your ass. I deal with every situation the exact same way, whether I’m playing in 

Carnegie Hall or a nursing home. Sometimes I’m actually less nervous in Carnegie Hall 

than I am in my own living room. Another book that I find helpful is called Talent is 

Overrated. There are books by Daniel Pink that talk about the mind and how it works, 

and performance anxiety books by Don Greene. 

When it comes to tension and dealing with your body, it is so vital to treat your body as 

though you are an athlete. I would develop a stretching and exercise regimen that is low 

impact but high gain. I think all these things together can help one find one’s path. ■ 


Up and Comer 

eunice kim 

 

I truly have to thank my teachers, my colleagues, and my family 

for supporting me and believing in me. My teacher in San Francisco, 

Wei He, is definitely someone who understood me, nurtured me, 

and encouraged me to keep going, even through my difficult times 

of tendonitis and scoliosis. Getting into Curtis really changed my life, 

and I’m so grateful to my friends and teachers who made my 5 years 

there so meaningful. I’ve had so many people who brought me to 

where I am now, especially Ida Kavafian, who has been like a second 

mother to me. She is more than just a teacher- she is my role model 

and an inspiration to me. I’m lucky that I had the privilege of studying 

with her. 

I started playing when I was 6 years old. I had a babysitter from 

infancy whose son was the concertmaster of the San Jose Symphony 

in California. As a very young child, he was always practicing around 

me, and after years of listening to him I told my mother I wanted to 

play the violin. My mom was disappointed, because she had wanted 

me to play the cello. When the day came to get a cello, the people at 

the string shop told us I was too petite to start the cello, and they gave 

us the violin. 

Nowadays, you’re a member of the Astral Artists 

roster, a recent Curtis graduate, and you just finished 

playing solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

What else is in the works for you? 

It was quite a year for me since it was my last year at Curtis, which was 

extremely bittersweet. I was the concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony 

Orchestra, and I had a lot of orchestral responsibilities. I performed 

constantly and collaborated with many great individual musicians, 

ensembles, and orchestras, which I hope to continue doing in the future. 

I was the violinist of Ensemble39, a contemporary ensemble that 

formed at Curtis. Now that I’m out of school, I have a lot of freedom to 

experiment with everything right now. I just came back from Ravinia’s 

Steans Institute, which was an amazing experience. I’m doing whatever 

is coming my way, and I think now is the time to do that. I don’t like 

the concept of “settling down,” rather I’m trying a variety of things out 

until I see what I want to do. 

Can you talk about your warmup routine? 

My “routine” differs every day, but I try to stick with a scale or two 

each day. Before college, I was very faithful to arpeggios, double stops, 

etudes, and those dreaded Paganini Caprices, but on very busy days 

where I don’t have an hour or two to work on warmups, I may start by 

picking up the violin and working on a difficult passage very slowly. 

One of my favorite ways to start the day, which I learned from working 

with my colleague and friend Tim Dilenschneider (see Next Level 

Bassist Left Hand Issue), is to play some passages from Edgar Meyer’s 

Concert Duo. I thought it was so much fun playing his music that I’ll 

just go back to that at the beginning of the day. It’s probably pretty 

funny to listen to me warming up! 

Do you get nervous while performing? How do you 

deal with that? 

I absolutely do, but it’s always a “good” kind of nervous. I think 

performing gets more nerveracking as you grow older because your 

expectations grow as time goes on. The difference for me now is that 

I have embraced the fact that I will get nervous, and prepare myself 

for it. The day before or the day of the performance, I accept that I 

will get nervous, and I mentally prepare by telling myself that it is 

a good thing to be nervous since it means I’m just excited to perform. 

I physically practice by doing jumping jacks before I play a slow piece 

or movement, because that is always the hardest part - when your heart 

is beating fast and you have to have complete control over your body. 

I’ll also try putting my hands in the fridge for a second and then try 

to play the violin, because I sometimes get cold hands before I play. 

Pam Frank told me that it’s good to find ways to practice being nervous 

and deal with it, which has helped me a lot. 

What’s a typical day in your life? 

Every day lately has been very different! If I’m not traveling, I like 

to do my practicing in the morning to get it out of the way, and I’m 

typically off to rehearsal soon after. I deal with scoliosis, and tendonitis 

SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL VIOLINIST 11

“it was a lot of work and a lot of anxiety imagining a career 

in music, but being apart from my violin and not being able 

to make music made me determined to really go through with 

this passion I had, and it clarified what I needed to do.”

comes very easily to me so I try to be as active 

as I can. I’ll either do some yoga or go swimming, 

whatever keeps me moving instead of 

sitting in front of my computer! If I have a 

concert that day, I like to keep my schedule 

light, but if I don’t, I will typically round out 

the day with some more practice time. When 

I’m traveling, I like to have travel days off. 

You need to let your body catch up on rest 

when traveling! I don’t like to be the person 

practicing a million hours a day - I know that 

I have to watch out for myself both physically 

and mentally. It’s no fun watching the walls 

of a practice room all day - but don’t tell my 

teacher that! 

What are some of your 

career highlights? 

Last week was very exciting for me, making 

my solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

I had never played with a group like that 

before. Getting prepared for that was a little 

bit scary, because I had spent an intense 

5 weeks of chamber music at Ravinia. We 

were rehearsing 5-7 hours a day, which meant 

that I barely had the time to practice while I 

was there. I played at the Mann Center in 

Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, with a great 

crowd between 3,000 and 4,000. 

It was a very supportive crowd, even sitting 

on the lawn while it rained! When I came 

to the rehearsal, it was so amazing to see so 

many familiar faces - it was great to play with 

my favorite orchestra that I frequently listen 

to. I knew the conductor, having met him 

at Curtis. They were very supportive, and it 

made a stressful rehearsal flow nicely into 

a great concert. Upcoming for me is Music 

at Angel Fire in New Mexico for the next 

few weeks, performing as a guest artist with 

Roberto Diaz on a Europe/Asia Curtis on Tour, 

collaborating with BalletX in Philadelphia, 

playing my Astral Artists debut recital, and 

performing with the Louisville Symphony. 

Talk about taking a short amount 

of practice time to get something 

to a high level. 

I learned a lot from my teachers on how to 

learn pieces in a smart way, and not wearing 

yourself out by over practicing. This year was 

a great test of these skills, because there was a 

lot of repertoire to learn in a very short time. 

I would give myself 45 minutes to an hour to 

really hit spots, things I needed to work on. 

I would get the difficult things done first and 

then allow the less challenging spots to play 

themselves. Pinpointing the spots that were 

most difficult for me, I would give myself a 

few tries to get them right instead of trying 

them over and over again. If I didn’t get it 

right in those few tries, I would revisit the 

passage at a later time. This is another lesson I 

learned from Pam Frank, who was also dealing 

with injuries when she was a performer. 

That forces you to work efficiently instead of 

repeating mistakes again and again for five or 

six hours. When you find yourself repeating 

mistakes, you have to stop and give yourself 

time to rethink the problem. It also helps to 

think of difficult spots musically. The technique 

often comes easier if you are thinking of 

shaping the passage or phrase that is a 

troublesome spot. 

What do you hope will be 

the next steps in your career? 

I’m really loving what’s going on right now! 

I had the honor of graduating Curtis with the 

Milka Violin Prize, which is a grant given to 

a graduating student who is committed to 

participating in international competitions 

for the next year. Therefore, I will enter 

international competitions when I have the 

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time to, take auditions, and continue to perform and work with all 

of the amazing people around me. Anything is really possible at this 

time, so I’m keeping an open mind to see what’s out there. 

Do you think you’d like to be a professor 

in the long term? 

I would love to do that, but I think it takes an extraordinary person to 

be both a performer and a professor. Again, I look up to Ida Kavafian 

and her husband, Steve Tenenbom. They have far busier lives than we 

do, but they are incredibly dedicated to their students. I absolutely 

admire how they’re still brilliant artists and traveling performers, yet 

find the time to teach at multiple schools and give so much attention 

to their students... Not to mention that they have prizewinning dogs 

who compete! I have a couple students now, and I can see how 

challenging consistency is with my traveling and performing schedule. 

It really sheds light on how amazing my teachers are. While I was at 

Ravinia, Ida was giving me a lesson on a piece she’s very fond of… 

through text messages! She was taking pictures of her left hand 

position on the violin, and then she would write out the fingerings 

on a piece of paper. These little moments are very special to me since 

I know how busy she is, and I hope to be like her someday. 

Can you talk about some 

breakthrough moments for you? 

I think the most important time for me was when I wasn’t playing. 

I graduated high school 2 years early, and I was about to audition 

for colleges at 16 years old. I got too carried away, tried to be involved 

in too many things, and overplayed. I went to three different chiropractors 

a day, and most of them told me I wouldn’t be able to play 

for at least a year or two, and one of them even said I should stop 

playing altogether! They weren’t sure if I would be able to go back to 

playing after such a long time off. It was very discouraging, but I was 

so lucky because I had a supportive teacher, Wei He, who gave me 

lessons without the violin during the entire year that I wasn’t playing. 

I realized during that year that I really wanted to pursue music. Before 

that, it was a lot of work and a lot of anxiety imagining a career in 

music, but being apart from my violin and not being able to make 

music made me determined to really go through with this passion I 

had, and it clarified what I needed to do. Once I had the ok to start 

playing the violin again, I could only play about 5 minutes a day for 

a month or two. I felt like I had lost everything I had learned over the 

past several years, and it was hard to relearn how to play the violin, 

but it was a very big breakthrough for me. I knew that making music 

was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life after that point. I’m 

almost thankful that this all happened, just because it finally was 

perfectly clear to me that I was in love with music. 

What advice would you give for aspiring musicians? 

First of all, go and attend a lot of concerts. Rather than being cooped 

up in a practice room, you can find a lot of inspiration and discoveries 

by listening to music. That was what kept me going during the year I 

wasn’t playing. I went to as many concerts as I could to stay motivated 

- that was where I found the reason to be a violinist. It’s very moving 

and uplifting to listen to amazing masterpieces in person. It’s more 

personal and intimate than listening to recordings through 

your earphones. 

Brahms Example 1 

Brahms Example 2 


Stay humble, and respect your colleagues, teachers, and audiences. 

Don’t settle for “it’s good enough!” I find it very troubling when people 

are preparing for a concert and walk away saying that it’s good enough 

for “that” audience. You should go to your full potential and push your 

limits on everything you play. You will feel more fulfilled and satisfied, 

you will have grown more after each performance, and the audience 

will feel that way as well. This makes performing a lot more worthwhile. 

What is some of your favorite repertoire to perform? 

Lately, I’ve really been loving South American/Spanish music. On 

my Astral Artists recital in December, I’ll be performing works by 

Piazzolla, Ginastera, De Falla and Sarasate. The first time I discovered 

Piazzolla, I immediately fell in love with his voice. Something about 

this type of music is so liberating, so spoken, and in a way, very 

comforting. My father plays guitar, and my recital falls on his birthday, 

so I decided to do this mostly-South American program in honor of that. 

Aside from all of that, I love listening to and playing to Schubertwell, 

mostly listening to it because Schubert is so challenging to play! 

His works are all heart wrenchingly beautiful in both a simple and 

complex way. I can’t get enough of Schubert at the moment! 

Is there anything you don’t enjoy playing? 

I don’t really dislike any music, but there are some traumatic experiences 

that you don’t want to revisit any time soon. One example that comes to 

mind is the Brahms Violin Concerto. I was playing it in a competition, 

in the finals. I got nervous right before the performance, and I started 

with the cadenza instead of the opening section, and I am totally 

scarred now. I don’t want to deal with that piece for a while! 

Do you have any advice or thoughts for aspiring 

musicians? 

Keep your head up and don’t let disadvantages get to you. I was at a 

friend’s recital recently, a girl who started playing the cello at age 12, 

which is somewhat late for professionals. Shortly after she started 

playing, she decided to audition at Curtis as a practice for other 

auditions - she actually succeeded and got in. Even if you feel like 

you are at a disadvantage, keep trying because sometimes you can 

evolve quickly and do things you never expected. 

Keep your mind open too. I didn’t really explore many different genres 

for most of my career, but I met my friend Tim Dilenschneider and 

other bass players, and they introduced me to bluegrass and Edgar 

Meyer. That brought me to Piazzolla and my love for jazz, which sums 

up a lot of who I am today. You can be a classical musician and still 

experiment with all different types of music. Also, don’t just look for 

inspiration in music. Other expressions of art such as films, visual art, 

and dance are all part of our world too. This is sort of a secret, 

but I am obsessed with Broadway! ■ 

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VIOLINIST 15

KEYS TO 

SUCCESS 

Rachel Barton Pine

Early Memories 

Early in my studies, I developed a method 

for researching my music. Whatever piece I 

was studying, I would go and find a biography 

of that composer. I would go to the media 

section of the library and see what else that 

composer had written. By the time I was a 

teenager, that extended to styles of music. I 

was shopping for sheet music one day and I 

found this edition of Corelli’s opus 5 sonatas 

that had not only the violin line, bass line and 

right hand realization for the keyboard, but 

also an extra pull-out with an ornamented 

version of the slow movements purporting 

to be Corelli’s own ornaments. Whether 

they were or not is debatable. Up until this 

point, at age fourteen, I hadn’t even heard of 

ornaments. I thought you just played the notes 

on the page. I sought out some specialists, 

a viola da gamba player and harpsichordist 

in town who knew all about this stuff. They 

introduced me to concepts of historically 

informed performance. I started using a 

baroque bow and learning how to write my 

own ornaments, working them out carefully 

ahead of time. After a number of years I 

started getting used to the style and did 

them extemporaneously. 

When I was working on Bruch’s Scottish 

Fantasy I was really curious about the folk 

tunes that were incorporated into his 19 th 

century romantic concerto. I went to the 

library and found all these books from the 

18 th century that had these tunes in them. I 

sought out a Scottish fiddler to show me how 

these tunes would have been played by fiddlers 

and incorporated those inflections back into 

the violin concerto. Bruch himself might have 

been a German romantic composer, but his 

dedicatee for the piece was Pablo de Sarasate, 

the great Spanish violinist. Despite being of 

Spanish descent, he spent a lot of time touring 

in Britain, including Scotland, and was very 

familiar with Scottish fiddling first hand. In 

fact, he wrote his own medley of Scottish 

fiddle tunes with orchestral accompaniment. 

Once those fiddle tunes are in your ear you 

can’t play those tunes any other way. The 

violinist for whom Bruch wrote the piece 

would have played in a more fiddle-y way 

so that’s the way I’ve played it ever since. 

Learning about many composers, and 

especially their dedicatees was a very big part 

of my musical journey. Unless the composer 

was a violinist and was writing music for 

personal use, he or she was writing for a 

violinist. Learning about that violinist’s 

musical personality, taste and way of playing 

is very important in being able to understand 

what the composer’s intentions might have 

been, and using that in crafting your own 

interpretation. 

I was able to be a member of the Civic 

Orchestra of Chicago. It’s a training orchestra 

of the Chicago Symphony for undergraduate, 

graduate, and postgraduate students who are 

aiming for an orchestral career. My aspiration 

was to be a soloist but I wanted the training 

and security of knowing how to play in a 

good orchestra in case my solo career didn’t 

work out. Being in the Civic Orchestra was 

the best thing for my solo and chamber music 

playing. I can’t say this strongly enough 

because so many young people, particularly 

violinists, don’t take orchestra seriously. I 

think it’s really sad because orchestra is so 

much fun. So many of them go into orchestra 

and don’t get as much pleasure out of it as 

they could. In Civic, we had the amazing 

opportunity to have so many of the great 

conductors who were coming to the Chicago 

Symphony. They would come in and not 

do just one rehearsal with us, they would 

do a couple weeks’ worth of rehearsals and 

perform with us. They would work with us 

on every measure of the piece, break it down 

and put it back together. This kind of training 

in the orchestral repertoire directly impacted 

my understanding of all classical music. If I 

had spent that many hours in my room only 

practicing the Brahms concerto, I would have 

missed the Brahms I learned about playing 

his 4 th Symphony. If I had been just practicing 

Paganini caprices, I wouldn’t know how to get 

up and play a concerto with an orchestra, or 

how the orchestra instruments interact with 

each other. I feel so lucky to have had that 

orchestra in my city, because the only other 

institution like it is the New World Symphony 

in Miami. Even when you are in a good youth 

orchestra, you need to take it seriously 

and not just learn your part. Look at the 

score, listen to the other instruments, use the 

opportunity to learn about that composer’s 

style and apply that to the other music he or 

she wrote. Symphonic works are the greatest 

works of the classical music literature - 

how can you be a true musician if you don’t 

appreciate and understand those works and 

relate them to whatever else you’re playing? 

Now, conductors find me easy to follow 

because I understand how to work with 

a conductor; I’ve sat in the orchestra when 

soloists have done rubatos that were impossible 

to play with. Playing inside the orchestra 

teaches you what works and what doesn’t. I 

try to only do things that are going to work. 

If you go back historically, to violinists from 

past generations, they weren’t living in a 

bubble only playing concertos. Joachim, 

Brahm’s collaborator, conducted one day and 

played string quartets the next day, played 

concertos the next day, and sat concertmaster 

from time to time. That’s not the way the 

profession is anymore, but he was one of 

the greatest soloists of his day because he 

was a well rounded musician. 

In my early twenties, I was on the faculty 

of the League of American Orchestra. They 

put together the National Youth Orchestra 

Festival which took place on the grounds 

of Interlochen. Several high school level 

orchestras sent in audition tapes and five 

were selected, including the Chicago Youth 

Symphony. After performing with their own 

conductor, they were randomly shuffled 

into five new orchestras, and each of those 

orchestras spent the week preparing a program 

with one of five famous conductors. These 

kids didn’t know which orchestra they would 

be in and they had a week to learn pieces like 

Shostakovich 6 or Mahler 1. I was there to 

coach the violins. The disconcerting thing 

was, I would walk past the wind and brass 

players in their rooms practicing their 

orchestra music, bass players, violists, cellists 

practicing their orchestra music, but you 

would hear the violinists practicing their 

concertos and Paganini caprices. I ripped into 

them, I asked them why they weren’t learning 

the music like their colleagues, when they 

didn’t know it any better than them. They 

argued that they had lessons with their teachers 

at home and needed to be prepared. I said, 

“well, I can’t help it if your teacher doesn’t 

understand the value of orchestra training but 

right now you’re here and we’re your teachers 

and we expect you to be prepared. I better not 

pass by the dorms and hear your practicing 

anything other than your symphony for the 

next couple of days.” It wasn’t totally their 

fault, if they did have those teachers saying 

“the day after you get back I expect your 

concertos to be ready for your lesson.” That 

was really revealing, that it was just the violins 

that were doing that. 

Organization is Key 

The majority of my gigs are standard, like 

a Tchaikovsky concerto one week, a typical 

recital with Romantic sonatas and a Classical 

period sonata and virtuoso piece one week, 

and then I might do a Mendelssohn concerto 

and then another Tchaikovsky. It’s all pretty 

standard repertoire with some unusual things 

peppered in. When I’m preparing repertoire 


18 SUMMER 2014 NEXT LEVEL VIOLINIST 

I’ve played before, like the 

big concertos, there are 

three big factors that go 

into deciding how far in 

advance to start preparing 

it. One is the 

inherent difficulty of 

the piece. Some pieces 

are simply longer 

and more physically 

challenging than 

others. The other is 

how long it has been 

since I last played 

the piece, as well as 

how many lifetime 

hours I’ve played it. 

I also determine how 

much repertoire I’m 

performing before I have 

to perform that piece. 

I calculate all of those 

factors and work backwards 

to figure out when I have to 

start. I’ll realize that I have to 

start practicing this piece for 

three weeks from now and this 

other piece for six weeks from 

now, but actually, I don’t have to 

start the piece two weeks from 

now until next week because 

it’s easy and I just played it last 

month. You have to be extremely 

organized, especially if you 

are doing concerts with other 

instruments. If I’m playing 

my viola d’amore (12 or 14 

stringed cousin of the violin), 

or baroque violin, or even 

my medieval rebec, it’s not 

always feasible to be lugging 

around multiple instruments 

on airplanes unless 

you absolutely have to. It’s 

always such a pain in the 

butt to convince the flight 

attendants to let you bring 

them all on, so you don’t 

want to do it any more 

than absolutely necessary. 

Therefore, I also have to 

calculate how many days 

I’m actually home in my 

apartment to do some 

kinds of practicing. It 

becomes this big jigsaw 

puzzle, and the extra 

instruments become one 

more factor.

I believe it is important to maintain a variety of styles within my 

playing. I don’t mean odd styles like rock playing or early music, simply 

the core styles like high Baroque, Classical playing, late Romantic 

playing with all the expressive slides, virtuoso pyrotechnics. I find that 

I’m spending a month playing big romantic concertos, and during 

that whole month I don’t have anything that’s Mozart. The very careful 

cleanliness and refinement and sparkle that you need for a good 

Classical period sound requires a slightly different physical use of 

your left and right hands. I’m spending a whole month not doing that. 

Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe I’m playing a few dates of Mozart 

concertos and maybe a Shostakovich or some Bach and I’m not really 

doing any Romantic. I don’t want to lose that control over the timing 

of expressive slides when I’m playing music that doesn’t require it. I 

always try to think about the different kinds of playing that I want 

to make sure that I maintain in myself, and I compensate by playing 

some of that music even if it’s not scheduled. I might play the Amy 

Beach Romance just for fun or maybe something like the Meditation 

from Thais, just to make sure my expressive sound and slides are still 

at the ready. If I’m not playing any Bach for a while then I’ll add some 

Bach to the diet. We think about maintaining things like our left hand 

pizzicato or our upbow staccato scales every day, and sometimes forget 

to make sure that we’re maintaining all of our flavors of playing. As 

one of my favorite Scottish fiddlers Alasdair Fraser says, we need to 

be “multilingual” as instrumentalists. So it’s like speaking in different 

dialects, making sure that all of those languages are equally in 

good shape. 

One of things I find really useful is scales. So often, when we play a 

scale, we end up playing everything medium. Medium dynamics, 

mezzo something, medium speed, everything is medium. Of course, 

there are plenty of other things to think about when it comes to scales: 

intonation, fluid string crossings, invisible bow changes, equal bow 

distribution, clean shifts, left hand articulation. There are a million 

things to think about with a simple scale, but why not add tone color 

to that equation? It will make your scale a heck of a lot less boring, and 

it will get you in the right mood to play music. If you are going to work 

on the Sibelius concerto, maybe you should do a fortissimo scale, with 

a really wide, juicy vibrato. If you’re going to be doing some Debussy, 

do a flautando scale: a veiled sound, maybe sul tasto, (which is difficult 

to control), making a beautiful, floaty, French Impressionistic sound. 

If you’re going to be playing Brahms or Schumann, you want to make 

sure you don’t have any of that fuzz in there. You want to make sure 

you have a very thick sound, that your bow is really sinking into the 

string and that you have a nice concentrated vibrato. 

Focusing on bow weight (which is another way of saying dynamics) 

can create many different colors. A condensed slow and heavy bow 

as opposed to a fast sweeping bow can both end up being the same 

number of decibels, but they’re going to be different kinds of fortes. 

You have the freedom to manipulate dynamics, contact point, bow 

weight, bow speed and vibrato with every note! Just think of the 

variety you can achieve with vibrato alone. What width of vibrato? 

What speed of vibrato? If you think of all those different variables and 

combine them in all kinds of different ways, you’ve got infinite colors 

to paint with. Which scale are you going to do today? It might be a 

scale that relates to one of the important colors in the palate of the 

piece you’re working on. You’re actually warming yourself up for the 

proper Mozart sound by doing a very narrow vibrato with a very clean 

sound. Alternatively, you might decide to work on a Debussy scale 

because you haven’t played any impressionistic music in a while, 

and you want to make sure you don’t lose that nice sound you achieved 

while working on the Franck Sonata. Choosing what you’re going to 

do with your scales is based on filling in the gaps or enhancing what 

it is that you’re working on. 

You can also use repertoire you’ve already learned as a supplemental 

sort of etude. For instance, if you want to make sure you’re keeping 

your left hand pizzicato shored up you might grab some Sevcik. If you 

want to make sure you’re keeping your expressive slides solid, you 

probably want to grab out the character piece of your choice, maybe 

some schmaltzy Kreisler piece. 

Thinking about your practice session before you actually do it is 

critical. It’s equally important to be thinking about the practicing that 

goes in before you actually pick up the instrument and start addressing 

physics. Once you got the instrument in your hand, you’re being 

distracted by what’s happening. At that point, you ought to be paying 

total attention to noticing what you’re doing and relating that to what 

you intend to do. While you’re doing it is not the time to be figuring 

out what you intend to do. If you’re focusing on what’s happening, and 

you haven’t thought through your intentions carefully, you’re unlikely 

to have success either. 

From the macro to the micro 

The large picture involves planning the repertoire you need to prepare, 

the dates you need to prepare it, and working backwards to schedule 

your practicing today, tomorrow, and every day until the performances 

coming up. It’s a jigsaw puzzle for any musician, but you can’t get 

started without it. If you don’t have public concerts full time, the same 

thing can apply to your studies. Substituting whole concerts with 

youth orchestra music, chamber music, and perhaps a concerto for 

a competition, a sonata your teacher wants you to learn - you have 

a bunch of stuff on your plate, just a slightly different mix. You can 

assign priorities and deadlines to all those things. At this point you 

will know what you are practicing on any given day. If you just jump 

into your practice thinking “I’m going to start with the first thing I’m 

inspired to practice,” you run the risk of wasting the time you have 

to practice. It’s not realistic to expect an endless supply of 8 hour days 

where you can randomly choose what to practice. Most of us have to 

carve out time from a busy schedule, and it happens in small chunks. 

Map out the pieces you have ahead of you, the time you’ll need to 

spend on them based on difficulty or familiarity, and the time you 

have left before the concert and you’ll avoid panicking and trying 

to cram in time right before the performance. Once you’ve done this, 

you’ll have a rough practicing plan. 

It’s useful to put your practicing in order for the day as well. If you 

are looking to do 20 minutes of practicing fingered octaves, you will 

want to plan intelligently for that. You probably shouldn’t do those 

twenty minutes in a row because you don’t want to risk tendonitis. In 

that case, you need to know that you’re going to do 10 minutes now 

and the rest an hour later, with other practicing in between. You need 

to plan that out so you don’t get to the last twenty minutes of your 

practicing and realize you have to fit that in at the end! You can plan 

out whether you are going to do some technical work first and then 

artistic work, or start out with interpretation and then do rote work 

out of Schriadieck later. There are no right answers, it’s up to your 

own individual personality and how your focus tends to flow. A lot of 

it is experimentation, getting to know yourself - not just your artistic 

personality but your learning personality, who you are as a practicer. 


You can become ever more expert at planning your practice sessions, 

to make the most effective possible use of your time. 

Take your plan down to the next level, after determining that you 

will spend 30 minutes on the first page of your concerto. Are you just 

going to play it over and over for half an hour? Are you going to jump 

in starting at the first note and then stopping if you hear something 

you want to fix? That is probably not the most useful way to go about 

it. You have to decide on the goals for your time. Maybe spend the first 

ten minutes drilling intonation: no vibrato, slowly, listen to every note, 

make sure it’s clean and in tune, that the rhythm is good. Then add 

the vibrato back, and you can think about phrasing and tone. Don’t let 

loose and play it with complete passion because you will distract yourself 

from making sure that everything is exactly the way you wanted. 

You need some emotion because the choice of vibrato stems from the 

choice of the phrasing, but you shouldn’t just completely lose yourself 

in the music. It’s vital to maintain the level of detail that you want in 

the performance, down to the specific quality of vibrato on each note, 

and the way those notes connect to one another. Your vibrato doesn’t 

necessarily obey your feelings until you train it to do so. You have to 

be absolutely, consciously aware of your all the different things that 

create the ebb and flow of phrases, and when you think about how 

many things that includes, you start to see the task at hand. 

A vital component of the process is to practice performing, which is 

almost the opposite of the slow and careful practicing. Whereas in 

slow and careful practicing you’re supposed to stop every time you 

hear something less than ideal, performing practice is about playing 

to the end of the piece. Listening for how you can improve, stopping 

to fix and work on things - that’s how you want to be practicing most 

of the time. Performance and practice have different purposes, and 

you need to have a different attitude to achieve them. Performance 

is about being positive and engaging the audience, almost the 

opposite mentality to the highly critical practice approach. You have 

to embrace the way your playing sounds now, even if you think in 

the back of your mind that you want to get better. Enjoy what you’re 

doing in the moment so you can convey it to the audience. Being an 

excellent practicer can make for bad performances, especially if you 

are transmitting your self-criticism through your playing. You need to 

do both, the perfectionistic, every-detail practicing, and the energetic 

and free performing. 

On a basic level, when you practice performing, don’t let yourself stop 

for anything. If you completely miss a shift, keep going. If you have 

a memory slip, barrel on through! Get used to that feeling of playing 

from beginning to end no matter what. Ignore the notes that have 

gone by because they are in the past. You should only think about 

what you’re doing at the moment and what’s coming up - the present 

and future. 

It’s simple enough to record yourself and listen back to catalogue all 

the things you want to work on. The performance playthrough has to 

be done with utmost expression and flair, making sure you’re putting 

on a good show and expressing the music as much as you can. When 

you listen back, it’s equally important to catalogue what you did well 

and what wasn’t so satisfactory. If something did go well, you want 

to recognize that you liked it so you can figure out how to repeat it. 

It’s not to compliment yourself, it’s to improve the bad and embrace 

the good. 

Plan out your practice sessions with careful slow practice and specific 

goals in mind. Focusing on one thing at a time may result in a mistake 

creeping in, but it allows you to try and completely fix one issue instead 

of being overwhelmed by all of them. Later in the development of a 

piece, you can start to put all the separate parts together, and zigzag 

your focus between different components of your technique and the 

music. Trying to put all this in action in the time you have to practice 

just won’t cut it. 

When I ask myself what I do for a living, my answer is that I am a 

concert violinist, I get up on stage and play concerts on my violin. 

When you get up there for that concerto you’re on stage for a half 

hour. Maybe 35 minutes if you play an encore. That 35 minutes pales 

in comparison to the 35 hours of practicing that concerto before I ever 

showed up in town to rehearse it. So really, I’m a professional practicer. 

That’s what I do for a living. If you want to become a professional 

performer, you have to train to be a professional practicer too. It is 

very useful to go through the trouble of writing your practice down. 

I have yet to see a great app that would help you to organize your 

practicing, but I hope one is on the way. Write it all down and have 

your practice plan sitting in front of you. It’s not necessary to follow 

it blindly. One part of your plan might take more time, and another 

less - don’t practice something 10 minutes because you wrote down 

10 minutes. Write down in one column what you plan to do, and in 

the next column write what you actually did, trying to stick to your 

plan. As you go along, month after month, your plans will become 

ever more experienced. What you planned to do and what you actually 

do will get closer and closer together. After many many months of 

doing this you’ll be able to do it in your head. That notebook is your 

friend for at least a year as you’re getting used to this way of practicing. 

So much of practicing is physical, whether it’s making sure your fingers 

are falling in the exact right spots, or trying to make the phrasing 

happen with bow speed and bow placement. We spend much of our 

practice time being athletes. 

We have to practice being stage performers. Sometimes I would do 

a whole visualization thing. I would start in my bedroom, and that 

would be my backstage warm up room. There are elements of 

performance you want to have figured out before the performance, 

such as what to play in that 5 minutes backstage before you go out to 

perform. If you try to decide on the spot, you could waste 3 of those 

minutes figuring it out! For me that time involves some slow scales 

and then turning on the headphones to some loud AC/DC. This allows 

me to feel physically in control but to find a way to build up my energy 

right before the show. I don’t do that anymore, necessarily, especially 

with children. Figure out what backstage routine works for you, 

because you’re not going to have enough concerts to figure it out in 

the actual concert, and it’s not the time for experimentation. Visualize 

in your own apartment. Have a fake warm-up before your fake concert 

and know what you like to do. I used to walk out into my living room 

and have a couple of stuffed animals on the couch, to know the direction 

of the audience. I would shake the hand of the fake pianist or conductor, 

tune and play my piece, smile, bow, and walk back off stage. If you 

never practice these things, you will feel nervous for them. We stop 

bowing after Suzuki, in most cases. Any opportunity you have is one 

more chance to prepare for the big show. You’re creating a familiar 

physiological feeling. 

We are often preparing music that we don’t know well, spending whole 

days playing pieces we aren’t yet familiar with. Find a favorite piece, 

something you can already play well and polish this piece, maintain it. 



With limited practice, you can’t spend much 

time on it, but every day play something on 

your instrument that you play well. Even if it’s 

a page of last year’s easy concerto, just play it 

so that you can play something on your violin 

that sounds and feels good. Play a page of 

the Mendelssohn while you’re still struggling 

with the Tchaikovsky. You don’t want to do 

only the Tchaikovsky slowly plus etudes and 

scales all day. That could be demotivating and 

it’s not necessarily healthy for yourself as an 

artist, since you can’t let loose. 

The shape of a musical life 

I give masterclasses virtually every week and 

I used to have a studio in the early nineties. 

I miss it, seeing the pleasure of week to week 

progress with a student and the pleasure of 

the relationships that you build with those 

people. A teacher is an immensely important 

person in a music student’s life. It’s incredible 

when students grow up to become friends 

and colleagues. I think doing teaching right 

involves being there every 7 days for lessons, 

putting in extra time before competitions, and 

really giving it your all. There’s a number of 

other things I’ve chosen to do right now. I’ve 

been doing a lot of publishing. Carl Fischer 

and I are collaborating on a series of all of 

the great etude books re-edited; the last time 

some of them were edited was about a hundred 

years ago. They are being revised with modern 

fingerings and bowings and companion 

DVD’s or CDs. In case of the first ones that 

have come out, the Wohlfahrt etudes, the 

DVD is of me performing the etudes. As the 

etudes get harder and harder, I won’t be able 

to play an entire etude through perfectly with 

no splices. No matter how good you are, I 

don’t think you can do all 40 Kreutzers, with 

no splices. Those will likely be MP3s with a 

smaller DVD component of examples to show 

what the hands are doing. I also run a charitable 

foundation which supports young artists 

through financial assistance and instrument 

loans. We’re developing a supplemental 

curriculum for beginners through advanced 

students, of music by composers of African 

descent from the 1700’s to the present day. 

I’m on the boards of the Music Institute of 

Chicago, The Sphinx Organization, and 

Early Music America. I’m on education and 

outreach committees. I do many things for 

the cause of pedagogy, in lieu of traditional 

professorship. I imagine that I’ll have 15 - 

20 good years at the end of my performing 

career to hold a teaching position, because I 

don’t ever plan to retire. Currently, I also host 

a podcast called Violin Adventures, which is 

another resource for violinists to explore this 

amazing instrument. 

On Internet Resources 

and Research 

On one hand, the availability of modern 

internet sites like YouTube is so incredible. 

You can find great living performers in 

concert, and you can see all the old dead 

guys - it’s an amazing resource. On the other 

hand, a student studying a concerto might go 

to iTunes and buy only the movement they’re 

working on. They won’t even listen to the 

other movements to hear what the rest of the 

concerto sounds like, put their movement in 

context. Buying things through iTunes also 

means not getting performance notes like you 

would with a CD booklet. They don’t have 

the essay about the concerto to read, and 

so they don’t know about the composer, the 

history and background of the piece. There 

are resources out there on the internet, from 

Wikipedia to Grove, where you can take some 

initiative and go read about your concerto, 

but it’s separated from the recording itself. 

Reading the program notes about each track 

you purchase is extremely important. 

It’s also important to know what sheet music 

you’re buying. Everyone can go to IMSLP and 

get the free PDF of out of print stuff (which 

can be great) but you might be playing an 

edition with 100 year old misprints. Invest in 

buying the urtext edition, which uses incredible 

scholarship to ensure you have the right 

notes. The risk of free music is that you end 

up with terribly incorrect or inaccurate music. 

The worst offender would be the digitized 

editions of music (with no editor listed, often) 

where the ornaments like appoggiaturas are 

written out into note values. This takes away 

your chance to be critical or make decisions, 

and could even be incorrect! I find this 

offense to be criminal. At least knowing 

who the editor was allows you an opportunity 

- it still forces you to figure out what was 

Galamian and what was Mozart, but you have 

a reasonable starting point. Playing from an 

urtext is the only sensible way to ensure you 

are able to deliver an accurate and thoughtful 

performance, and they last a lifetime. After all, 

classical music isn’t jazz, where your intention 

is to do your own thing. You’re supposed to 

be doing correct dynamics and articulations 

and note values and pitches and if you’re 

playing off of an edition where that’s wrong 

from the get-go, then what are you doing? 

Finally, when it comes to modern scholarship 

and research, remember that although most 

of the great novels and literature have been 

digitized for iBooks and the Kindle, a great 

deal of musicological resources are only 

available in libraries. Just as we still use 

physical sheet music we need to still be 

reading physical books these days. The good 

news is that most dissertations are going 

online these days. When I was learning the 

Szymanowski concerto I searched the internet. 

I found a doctoral paper on the exact 

information I wanted, found the author on 

Facebook, messaged her and within hours 

I had a PDF of the paper on my computer. 

Don’t sell yourself short or give up on your 

research if you can’t find something on Google 

- it could be waiting for you in a University 

library or major public library, and easily 

within reach. 

Developing Creativity 

When I was three years old, this was my 

mom’s bribe: instead of shiny pennies or 

candies, her bribe to motivate me to do my 

half hour of practicing was that 30 minutes 

of good practicing earned me 5 minutes of 

“yuckies.” Yuckies were when I could do 

anything I wanted on the violin. I could hold 

it wrong, I could scratch the bow, I could 

bow behind the bridge, I could play fast and 

sloppy. At first it was a chance to be sort of 

rebellious. I know that playing the violin was 

my own idea and I was motivated to do it but 

still, for a little kid to focus and do everything 

correctly is never easy. I was curious about 

this thing, this violin, and I wanted to just 

figure it out. I was doing just what my teacher 

said in the way I was supposed to be doing it, 

but being able to hold my bow backwards and 

saw away, that was incredibly freeing and interesting. 

Of course, that got old really quick 

and the “yuckies” evolved into improvisation 

time. I had learned what it sounded like when 

I bowed behind the bridge or on the bridge or 

with a too-heavy bow arm. So instead I would 

start to write my own melodies or play a piece 

with some variation on the melody. By the 

time I was six, I had enough responsibilities 

in playing and practicing that I just didn’t 

have the time for improvising any more. 

Not many people in my life placed value 

on spending my time that way. Even after 

I started homeschooling, I didn’t feel any need 

to use my new spare time for improvising. 

The urge didn’t come back until I was 14 

and started experimenting with Baroque 

ornamentation. 

I think it’s so important for young people, 

even those who intend to be strictly classical 

players, to have comfort and familiarity with 


a variety of genres. It’s simply the way the 

profession is headed! The uses of these 

skills include having fun with friends who 

play a little jazz all the way up to making 

arrangements for a chamber music gig 

- all different ways to make your career 

more fulfilling and visible. There are so 

many occasions where having knowledge 

beyond playing the notes the composer 

wrote can be useful. Your imagination 

finds the creative space within the markings 

on the page - you can still be faithful 

to the music and make decisions for how 

to execute it. 

You can be so much more creative and 

interesting as an artist if you free your 

imagination with other kinds of activities. 

If you can find 10 minutes a day, play 

along to your favorite song on the radio, 

learn a fiddle tune, write your own 

piece (even if you’re too embarrassed 

to ever play it for anyone). Find time to 

be outside the box, not thinking about 

perfect straight bow, intonation, playing 

the right notes, every day. That’s just as 

important to your daily practice session 

as all that Sevcik and trying to master the 

Tchaikovsky. I find that these days, some 

people are totally on the bandwagon 

while others are absolutely not. The world 

is shifting and there’s a much greater 

percentage of players and teachers who 

are open and even encouraging students 

to explore beyond the classical and how 

that can positively impact your straight 

classical playing. There are still some 

people to whom that’s a very novel idea. 

It’s important to spread the word. ■

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