Books › Modern violin-playing, 1920 › scan 40
Scan 40
Modern violin-playing, 1920
14 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1be seen, and therefore criticized, better without the violin, and partly because sensation is more acute through the right-hand than through a wooden fiddle-neck. This is, in fact, a matter where it is advisable to let your right-hand know what your left-hand is doing.
3Not until these exercises have been thoroughly practised is the violin to be taken in hand. Then, when it is, the practical business of the finger-technique can be begun. When that point has been reached, in order to concentrate the student's mind on the objects that he should keep in view, we shall tabulate them; and, to differentiate them from the ten exercises, we shall letter them, A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
5The above few paragraphs will give the student a rough general idea of what we propose to do in this chapter. But before we present him with the ten exercises to which we have alluded, there are some facts in connection with the human hand to which his attention should be drawn.
7The hand is not a solid structure. Violinistically it consists of four bony shafts, extending from the knuckles to the bones of the wrist. These shafts are bound about with muscles; and, together with the tendons attached to the visible part of the fingers, they are covered with skin.
9For pugilistic purposes the hand may be regarded as a solid mass. For our musical purposes we must regard it quite differently. We must not think of the fingers as being worked from the top of a solid fleshy wall. We must think of each finger as extending from nail to wrist. In a word, we must recognize the fact that, by setting the joints, we can "lock" into one piece the whole structure from finger-tip to elbow.
11But note here an important point. When this "setting" or "locking" has been accomplished for one finger, it by no means involves the "setting" or "locking" of the other three. Their muscles, as well as the thumb-muscles, can be and should be relaxed as far as possible. And this should be done so much as a matter of routine, that the violinist acquires a habitual mental picture of his own hand as having at any given moment only one finger—the playing-finger, which, for him, extends from the finger-tip to the wrist. Half the troubles of violinists arise from their contracting the muscles which hold the four hidden shafts together; and so handicapping themselves with a rigid hand.
13The force of this last paragraph will very soon become evident to the student when he begins to experiment with an actual violin. For he will find that, as the activity shifts from one side of the hand to the other, there is a corresponding lateral bending of the wrist. This is
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