violin teacher came to visit!

Apologies for my lack of posts. It's not that I haven't been practicing violin. Rather after a rather long period of uncertainty in my future plans, all of a sudden everything happened at once... which meant traveling all over the country, frantic phone calls, pro-con lists, last minute assignments, ...and of course, no time for blogging. Fortunately, things are falling into place and I'm finding a new routine. Big changes are ahead in my future, including going back to school in a new state!!! I'm hoping to continue playing violin, but we'll have to see how everything pans out.

In the middle of all these changes, I've been spending a lot of time with friends... including five days with my violin teacher!!! My teacher came up to visit me, and we spent a lot of time touring around my city doing fun stuff. We also managed to squeeze in two violin lessons, and she actually got to play harmony with me.

So exciting for two reasons:
1) We actually met when I was playing piano accompaniments for her group classes. This means that we used to play together (almost) every month, and I had gotten used to seeing her play with students. Now it's my turn!
2) Skype is a great resource for us. But it has its flaws. We discovered that you cannot try to play together because of the lag in sound. Echos work just fine, but in playing a string instrument, it's really, really cool to hear more than one instrument playing at the same time. You can actually hear whether or not the notes are in harmony. Of course, you can hear this on any instrument, but as a pianist, you never really pays attention to it because if it's wrong, there's nothing you can do to change it.

I'm hoping to get in a whole summer's worth of practicing and improvement. I'm already all the way up to Long, Long Ago in Book 1 of Suzuki, so I'm making ample progress. I can't wait to see how far I'll get before I move!

Violin vs. Piano #1

As I mentioned before, I consider myself a pianist who is now learning the violin. As I become more familiar with this second instrument, I'm discovering definite differences between them. Here's my new favorite: ringing notes on the violin!

The sound a violin (and other string instruments) produce comes from vibrating strings. Each string vibrates at a particular pitch (hopefully, an actual note!). When a string of a violin is vibrating at a certain frequency, it also vibrates at multiples of those frequencies. (Our ear is simply in tune to a limited range of frequencies.) If one of those frequencies happens to be a multiple of the frequency of another violin string, that second string will also vibrate. This is referred to as "string resonance" & "sympathetic vibration".* While pianos are tuned in order to take advantage of this phenomenon, it's much easier to hear on the violin.

Recently, I've been practicing Song of the Wind, which has a lot of phrases that end on open "E" strings. It's really cool to hear the ringing "E" before going on to the next phrase. I think I'm falling in love with the violin.

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* I knew that the math lecture I went to fall semester freshman year would some day turn out to be useful. However, I accept all the blame for errors in this and all future explanations.