And here is a list with all the links to the practice diaries of this PROJECT.
Notice the consistency with which I was able to practice in the middle of a pandemic, in quarantine, learning a new way to perform my profession from home. All of this while feeling a sky-rocketing anxiety. Tough...
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| "Direita" means right and "esquerda" means left |
I made a list of all the technique exercises I’ve been doing to see if somehow I come up with a system to them with a balanced frequency. I wrote down how long it takes me to do each of these exercises. But since I didn't know how long the 1 octave scales and arpeggios in one string takes, I decided to practice just that today, so I could time it.
- 1 octave scales and arpeggios in one string in G minor (I timed it and I takes me about 25 minutes to practice them)
Tchaikovsky 1st mov., end of recap
Random practice
- Bars 288 to 291 (just intonation)
- Bars 300 to 302 (intonation and hand shape)
- Bars 296 to 299 (intonation of the shifts)
Tchaikovsky
Random practice
- Coda of the 1st mov., bars 304 to 312 (I practiced bow, with metronome at 60 = quarter note, then slower to check the sensation on my neck during the passage, at 80 = eighth)
- Coda of the 1st mov., bars 314 to top of 317 (I practiced playing the triplets as fast as I could, as if they were ornaments, with very light hand)
- 3rd mov., bars 333 to 349 ( I practiced at 80 = eighth with the new fingering, slowly, memorizing and paying attention to the neck that, just as in the previous passage, gets very tense on big shifts and crescendos)
It’s been a handful of days that my practice is sparse, inconsistent. In the meantime there were 2 days I didn't write in the diary, but that I practiced only for the Theatre projects. It’s difficult to have the heart and motivation in the situation we’re in. It's been 3 months at home and the only person I touch is my boyfriend. Being Brazilian, not to touch people, hug my family and friends, is really hard. My mother is hermetically sealed at home with my sister, I only see them from a distance - at the door and wearing a mask - when I go to deliver some groceries. I see people talking about being depressed, crazy, sad, in a situation of losing work, money and going back to their towns, to their parents’ house. I also see a good part of the people, if not the majority, alienated from the danger that this virus represents. There are cases where the symptoms of Covid-19 are so strong that there are sequelae. There are also people having Covid for the second time, mutations of the virus in a second wave of the pandemic, here in Brazil there are people who invade hospitals to photograph the situation. It’s painfully distressing. And then I have to practice the violin? And write the text for the qualification exam? Yes, I know, I talk about reversing the relationship and using these tasks to relieve my mind, to look at them as a balm. But it’s not easy. I think that if everyone in the world were like my mother and sister, locked up at home being extra careful, this pandemic would have ended by now. While there is a lack of public policies at the federal level to fight the Coronavirus in Brazil, there are people who think everything is fine because they re-opened the mall.
June 20th, 2020 - Saturday
I haven't practiced in the last 3 days. I was able to understand that my anxiety about things that are important to me is SO BIG that I don't even feel it, I just paralyze and it’s very difficult to start practicing. I procrastinate before practicing (or before writing the qualification exam text for this master’s dissertation) with an anxiety level so high that I don't feel the agitation anymore. During those days I meditated a lot, wondering why is it so difficult for me to start practicing and why do I have the impression that I avoid practicing? I detected this huge anxiety and it seems that it has decreased a little, dropping to a level that now I can feel it, and it’s a lot of agitation! I walk around the house with a thousand thoughts and matters in mind at once.
I’ve learned over the years that, in order to deal with performance anxiety (in my case the performance of the practice) it cannot be the main focus of my attention. The go-to way is to practice anyway feeling anxious, really afraid, really insecure, and focusing on the object matter of the practice: the repertoire.
Today I managed to start practicing. It wasn't necessarily super easy, but neither was moving an Everest as it had been. I was also able to organize the technique part schedule, all the exercises I usually do distributed in a chart so that I practice them more homogeneously in a week. About an hour of technique a day.
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| I know, it's in Portuguese... but in the next entries of diary, each one of those is detailed. But I'll translate the title of each chunk: Classic 1, Maintenance, Classic 2, Maintenance, Fast, Express and Emergency Ear (for when my ears loose track of fine tunning) |
- I started by playing Liebesleid (by Kreisler, for a Theatre online project). Rigid body, left shoulder coming forward in a tense way.
- Played the Liebesleid again. A lot better, body more awaken, warmer, more malleable, a lot easier to move.
- 1 octave A major scales, arpeggios and alternate scales in one string
- Liebesleid (put bowing and fingerings)
- Reinventio
This practice chunk deserves a paragraph, not a parenthesis. One of the triggers for my crisis and the subsequent conclusions I wrote at the beginning of today's diary was the fact that I listened to the recording I made of Reinventio. I didn’t like it, I found it short of what I can do and what the piece deserves. I identified the main aspects that displeased me and thought about my practice process for this recording. Today I chose to practice very calmly, but up to tempo. In the previous process I practiced almost all the time very slow, and that didn’t allow me to refine the use of the bow for performance speed. So today I put the metronome up to tempo and worked spot by spot, with calmness and kindness, untangling and repeating. I set the timer for 45 minutes (when practice goes well, sometimes I overdo the dose and end up doing a little harm to my body, which gets in the way of next days’ session, hence the timer) and I practiced as detailed as I could, trimming the excesses, repeating what I needed, starting slow and accelerating until I reach the tempo, taming gestures, organizing bowings. I practiced a page and a half of the best practice session I’ve done of this piece until the present day.
Tchaikovsky, 1st mov. (40’)
- Exposition Codeta
- Recap Codeta
I practiced very slowly, intonation of note by note, twice each Codeta in an interleaved fashion. It was good to practice both at once to see the differences. If I could practice these parts everyday it would be beautiful.
June 21st, 2020 - Sunday
I practiced, but not the Tchaik.
June 22nd, 2020 - Monday
“Maintenance Set” for warming up and technique practice. The order of these exercises was thought to “wake up” the body with the violin and also work on technique. It’s not meant to be practice in random mode, it’s one after the other. (Note that I keep experimenting, that I thought and rethought with this part of my practice many times. I’ll probably rethink it many more times yet!)
- Whole bow staccato
- String crossing at 60bpm
- Vibrato
- trills
- Staccato in the middle of the bow at 70 bpm (subdividing the beat in 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8 notes)
- Schradieck (today it was XVI. n. 2 till 120 = quarter note)
- Open strings with 4, 3, 2 and 1 beat per bow at 60bpm (and I took the opportunity to practice it with harmonics, besides the open strings, so I train it for Reinventio)
- Shifts (the second half of June 10th, 2nd finger on E string)
It was about one hour to do it all. A lot more productive than the random practice I was doing before.
- Reinventio (I went straight to the last page and practiced the passages that bothered me the most in the recording)
June 23rd, 2020 - Tuesday
I practiced, but not the Tchaik.
June 24th, 2020 - Wednesday
I had a creative outburst, got super agitated with anxiety, then I fell in a way I couldn’t practice, the body rejected practicing by being in pain even before I start…
June 25th, 2020 - Thursday
I started practicing, then the A string peg went off and wouldn’t stop in the right tuning.
Anxiety crisis
Dinner
10pm
Come on, push it.
Practice mute
- practiced Reinventio till almost midnight…
From June 26th to June 28th I was still caught up with this Reinventio project. I made a test recording on the 27th and finally recorded it on June 28th. Way too many days without practicing the Tchaikovsky.
TCHAIK PROJECT 20 - July of 2020, a very short month of this Project >>>
<<< TCHAIK PROJECT 18 - Beginning of June 2020
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The Tchaik Project is part of the Master’s Degree Research of Helena Piccazio, enrolled in the Master’s Program in Music at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP).
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