Muscles: working from the zero point - Simon Fischer

(1) Suppose you play up from the A string to the E string: you’ve got to go up to go up. If you pull
down as you go up, the tone may weaken; the bow may slide away from the bridge; your body
contracts and your breathing is constricted, and so on.
Instead, lengthen the back as you crescendo up the arpeggio, with a feeling of raising the chest and
becoming taller.
Keep the scroll still, or allow it to rise slightly, with a feeling of buoyancy in the instrument so that
it floats on a cushion of air without any hint of dropping with gravity.
(2) Suppose you play down from the A string to the G string: you’ve got to go up to go down.
Lengthen the back, raise the chest, keep the scroll still or allow it to rise slightly as the strings meet
the bow-hair, the same as when playing ascending.
One way to avoid pulling down is to have a feeling of the string or violin coming up to meet the bow. 1
Another way to avoid pulling down is to link lengthening the back, or raising the chest, with flattening
the violin. Instead of two unrelated subjects, see them as two parts of the same thing:
• Use a certain amount of lengthening your back in order to flatten the violin
• Flatten the violin in order to lengthen the back. 2
Examples
Widening at the base joints of the left hand
Sometimes the fingers touch each other during the course of playing, sometimes they do not,
depending on the shape of the hand and the note pattern. It makes no difference, but what does matter
is that there is never any sideways squeezing-together (Fig. 78, page 159).
I often remember a student who had an awkward-looking left hand action. I made various suggestions
which she seemed unable to pick up. Finally it came out that she had always thought that no finger
should ever touch another finger, so she was trying to keep them unnaturally spread apart all the time.
Another common misconception is that all the fingers should point in the same direction. Maxim
Vengerov and Joshua Bell are two examples of leading players with hands where the fingers do remain
more or less parallel most of the time; but for many hands the fingers should as often form a fan-like
shape.
Widening at the base joints encourages this shape, and gives the left hand increased range, flexibility
and mobility.
Lengthening and widening
1 See also Image
of the cat,
page 29
2 See also The
tilt of the violin,
page 60
[v5.1 12/06/2010 2:10 PM] Lesson 7: Avoiding aches and pains 195