Perpetual Motion is one of the most notorious pieces in Suzuki Book 1. Just say the name to any violin teacher or Suzuki parent and you'll get a heavy sigh. "Oh, THAT one." When I tell people that I have 8 students all at some stage of Perpetual Motion, I get condolences.

It's true, Perpetual Motion haunts my sleep. Out of sheer survival instinct, I've developed a variety of ways to both prepare students for Perpetual Motion so that when they actually learn it on the violin, we get through the piece in a matter of weeks.

1. Singing

• The first thing students do is listen to Perpetual Motion and learn to sing it. 
  
• I always have my students write their own words to their Suzuki Book 1 songs. The rules are simple: one syllable per note, to keep the rhythm steady, and the words can be anything they want. This helps the student be expressive, connect to the rhythm and pitch pattern, and remember the order. If you assign different words to repetitive phrases, they'll be easy to remember. 
  
• Singing in solfege. I teach my students to sing solfege syllables on scales and other patterns from the first lesson. By the time they're at Perpetual Motion, singing their songs in solfege is a normal thing for them. Singing in solfege also helps them connect to the relationship between the pitches.
• IF your student is reading all the notes in the A Major Scale by this point, you can also have them sing note names.

2. Scales and Finger Patterns

• I make sure that my students can play an A Major one octave scale, the arpeggios, and the scale in broken thirds.
• I also do a ton of finger patterns featuring broken thirds and fourth fingers.
• We do the A Major Scale in two different bowings: martele in the upper half for the Perpetual Motion singles, and then detache doubles in the middle of the bow for the doubles. This prepares the bow strokes.

3. Basic Technique

• If a student is struggling with basic elements of technique such as left hand position, holding the violin up, or bow hold, I correct these through review songs or supplemental repertoire before tackling Perpetual Motion.

4. Awareness of Musical Form

• The large scale form of Perpetual Motion is A B C A (using 4-bar phrases). That can be broken down into a a' b b' c c a a' (using 2-bar phrases). I write this on the music for the student and sing through the piece with them so they can see where exactly each section is.
• I always point out that the difference between a and a' is that a ends on the note E and a' ends on the note A. The same goes for b and b'.
• Any awareness of patterns will help build the connection between the student and the piece.

Once you've prepared the student to sing the song in a variety of ways, trained their fingers to do all the patterns required in the piece, and trained the bow to do the different bow strokes, teaching them the actual piece goes much, much smoother.

I hope this helps students, parents, and teachers who are working on Perpetual Motion, and I'd love to hear any tips or tricks you have for teaching it!

One of the things I love the most about my job is getting to introduce people to different pieces of music. I've gotten a little jaded about certain pieces. The ones that are so ubiquitous in our culture that they are remixed, beatboxed, and have terrible cuts used in tv commercials. Sometimes I forget to sit down and really listen to the piece and appreciate it. Listening to music with my students and seeing the joy and excitement in their faces as they hear the music, excited to know what comes next, helps me remember just how special  music is. If you do anything enough, I suppose it can become ordinary, and I want to try and guard against that.

I've decided that my second blog of the month this school year is going to share a piece of music that I love and talk a little about why I love it and why I love this particular recording.

This time, it's the Debussy Violin Sonata. I personally haven't played a great deal of French music, but I love listening to it and it's something I want to explore more in my playing. Claude Debussy was a composer who lived in the early 20th century and is to classical music what Claude Monet was to visual art. His compositions are lush, colorful, and imaginative. 

I love how quietly and simply this movement starts, almost calmly, before it takes on a greater sense of urgency and sweeps us into a beautiful world of color and rapidly changing sound textures.  The sheer variety of sounds and characters produced by the performers is incredible, as is the speed with which they transition from one to another.

Around the 2-minute mark, I imagine that there's a conversation between two characters as the violin switches from the low register to the high register. Soon after, the opening theme comes back in a nod to traditional ternary form.

I think my favorite moment in the piece, however, is at 3:57 in this recording. It's exultant, exotic, and just perfectly gorgeous as the climax of the movement. 

I love this recording of Joseph Szigeti and Bela Bartok. Bartok is better known these days as a composer than a pianist, but I find his interpretations powerful and always interesting. I love Szigeti's violin playing. He can change moods faster than the blink of an eye, and his energy is always on the edge of bursting out into wildness. I never get tired of listening to these two play together.

I hope you enjoy this short movement from Debussy!

This Saturday, I'm launching a special project in my studio. It's called "28 Days of Practice," and the purpose of the project is for me and my students to explore our practice habits and to become more self-aware in our practice. Hopefully, we'll all learn one or two things about how we practice that we can incorporate into our regular routine.

The project is structured in four weeks, with a different focus each week. There will be reflection questions as well as specific tasks. I will be doing this along with my students and will post my answers to the questions on the blog! Talk about accountability - anyone who reads this will know if I'm practicing or not! 

So, just to whet your appetite I present you with the titles of the four weeks:

Week One: Starting Where You Are
Week Two: Putting In The Time
Week Three: Identifying Your Practice Habits
Week Four: Setting Goals

I'll post the guidelines for each week on the blog so you can follow along! Feel free to do it along with us and to post your progress and reflections in the comments!

The process of learning - not just in violin, but in most things - looks something like this, as described to me by researchers and psychologists:

Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence
Ignorance is bliss - the student is unaware of their mistakes. 

Stage 2: Conscious incompetence
The student receives feedback that makes them aware of the things that need improvement. They may attend a concert that makes them realize they don't play as well as the performers, or a teacher might point out things that need work in the lesson. This is often a very frustrating stage. It's crucial for parents and teachers to be supportive of their student and to be aware of the frustration while urging them to stay the course, because soon they'll get to...

Stage 3: Conscious competence
The student has practiced in a focused and intentional manner, and they can now produce the results they desire with a lot of mental focus and attention. 

Stage 4: Unconscious competence
The student has worked for some time on how to play well and can now produce their desired result without thinking about it.

Let's take the piece "O Come, Little Children" in Suzuki Book 1 as a case study. This piece presents the challenges to a student of having to use their full bow, and having to start each musical sentence on an up bow for the first time.

Stage 1: The student plays "O Come, Little Children" with any bowing they want, unaware of up bows and down bows and their bow distribution.

Stage 2: The student learns the difference between up bows and down bows and realizes how frequently they go the wrong direction. They may also be aware that their bow hold doesn't allow them to go all the way to the frog, which means that they can't play with their whole bow.

Stage 3: The student now thinks to him/herself "Middle, up" as they place the bow in the middle and start each musical sentence in the piece with an upbow.

Stage 4: The student plays the piece with perfect bowings and bow distribution without having to think about it. Now it's ready to perform!

A side note: as a teacher, my goal is to start the students at stage 3, by carefully explaining and demonstrating the goals of each piece. I have specific "preview" spots that students learn before they learn the whole piece and many ways to practice their skills so that they can stay confident in the whole learning process and not have to go through the pain of conscious incompetence.

Creating a healthy foundation is one of the most important and crucial aspects of learning to play the violin. In the first years of a student's lessons with me, my goal is to build fundamental musical skills as my students learn how to listen to music critically and to discern what makes a good sound and to build fundamental technical skills, which means that I focus a lot on how to hold the instrument and bow. Even as a student reaches the intermediate and advanced levels of playing, I am constantly monitoring their fundamental skills. Often, I find that simple changes to the angle of the violin or hands and arms can make a dramatic change in the quality of the sound and the ease of the playing.

Playing the violin doesn't involve motions that are inherently natural or easy for the human body. It's not symmetrical at all, which means that we have to do different things with the right and left sides of our bodies. It takes years to feel completely natural with the violin, and that's why a student's first lesson with me, regardless of their level of playing, will almost always include some changes to their basic setup. Even as students grow and develop, I'm always keeping an eye on those basic technique things, seeking to refine their skills to an ever-higher playing level and finding easier and more efficient ways for them to play.

Without a healthy foundation for their playing, a student will inevitably run into problems. It might be immediately, if they are struggling to make a sound or reach a certain note on the violin. Sometimes it will take years for it to catch up to them, but it does. Even a mostly healthy foundation with just a few cracks can be cause for a visit back to basic technique.  The simplest problem a student will run into as they advance is that they'll hit a piece they can't play with their current setup.  A student may not be able to play in all parts of the bow because of their bowhold, or they'll struggle to play fast enough with their fingers because of an incorrect angle in their left hand. 

If a student plays and practices for years with an inefficient setup, they can develop tendonitis, repetitive strain syndrome, or carpal tunnel syndrome. Too much strain and tension on the wrong muscles can cause these injuries, which are physically and emotionally painful and and can require months of physical therapy to recover from.

The positive benefits of having a healthy playing foundation are many! They include but are not limited to: feeling physically free when playing, not having to worry about how to create a certain sound, having a natural, ringing, and free sound, and being able to solely focus on the creative process of bringing their music to life.

Anyone who has studied a language knows that being in an environment where you must speak the language, where everyone around you is speaking the language, and where all the signs are in that language is a much faster way to learn the language than sitting in a school classroom filling out verb tables.  It's the same with music.  The more a student can immerse themselves in classical music, the more quickly and easily they will learn it.  Here are some suggestions for adding classical music into your (and your students') lives!

Go to concerts.  It's important to go to as many concerts as you possibly can.  I understand that in a recession, concert tickets for your family might be out of the budget.  However, depending on where you live, free concerts might be more available than you think!  If you live in my hometown, Washington DC, there is free music everywhere.  Here are some DC related links for free music:

The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage: http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/
The Army Strings and the Marine Chamber Orchestra:http://www.usarmyband.com/event-calendar.html
http://www.marineband.usmc.mil/downloads/season_brochure_2012.pdf
The National Gallery of Art:http://www.nga.gov/programs/music/
Other tips for finding free classical music: check into the music programs at your local universities.  Student recitals are generally always free, as are student chamber music concerts.  You could also look for Classical Revolution events (go here to find your local chapter: http://classicalrevolution.org/index.php?page_id=chapters)Aside from concerts, the next best thing you can do is to listen to as much classical music as you can.  The public library can generally be counted on to have a collection of cds, and thanks to YouTube and programs like Spotify, finding free classical music on the internet has never been easier.  Tune your car radio to classical music so that your kids are constantly exposed to it when you're on the go.  Even if they're doing homework, you can put a cd on in the background.  In addition to recordings of music, you can also find great children's programs and educational recordings on the lives of the composers.  Some of my favorites are the Classical Kids collection, which can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/quot-Classical-Kids-CD/lm/1CNTUYUIW3C1T
These programs use engaging stories to tell the lives of the composers and introduce young listeners to their music.  I admit, they're still fun for me to listen to as a grad student!

Watch music-related movies.  On the Hollywood side, movies such as Music of the Heart and Mr. Holland's Opus are wonderful choices for your family movie nights.  You can also find engaging documentaries such as The Art of the Violin and From Mao to Mozart to watch.  Additionally, a number of major artists such as Gil Shaham, Itzhak Perlman, and Anne Sophie-Mutter have released dvds of performances.  This is a great way to bring concerts into your home for no more than the cost of a dvd.