Avoiding aches lesson 7

and pains
The basis of all playing must be balance and physical freedom. All too often we spend our practice time
working on problems of the left hand or right, when actually what we need to do first is to find a basic
balance and freedom throughout our entire system. Then everything works much more easily in the first
place.
General tension throughout the body often begins with the neck and shoulders, and tension there has
to spread to the arms and then to the hands and fingers. Then it can become less and less productive to
practise problematic passages over and over again, trying to get them sounding well and in tune, if the
basis of the playing is not one of freedom.
While it may seem very difficult to find such a basis of freedom if you do not already have it – and if it
seems that you already have enough to think about just trying to get around the notes – in fact there are
certain key issues which make an enormous difference, and more freedom can be gained very quickly
indeed.

Understanding the causes

Listening to your body

Imagine that you are busy practising, and the fire alarm goes off. You do not ignore the alarm, saying,
‘I have important work to do, I can’t stop now.’
Pain is your personal fire alarm going off. Yet many string players, hurting with every note they play,
ignore warning signals and carry on playing in the same way. A common approach to practice is this:

First I have to learn how to play this piece; then I will learn how to play it without getting tense.
I know that all these things my teacher tells me about being balanced in my posture, not squeezing my fingers together,
relaxing my shoulders, not pulling my chest down, not squeezing my left thumb back, and so on, are all the right things; and
one day I will be able to use all this helpful information, and then I will be glad that I learnt it now.
But meanwhile I can’t think about it because if I play in all those relaxed, balanced, non-squeezing ways, I simply cannot
play; or if I can, my playing seems boring and uninvolved and unmusical; but if I forget about them, and just play as I have
got into the habit of playing, I can play at least quite well.
I can ignore the pain in my left upper arm, and I can still get through the piece even if I am tense. One day, when I can play
it and all my worries with it are over, then I will learn how to play it in the way that my teacher is suggesting.

This approach often fails for the simple reason that until you find a way of playing without tension and
conflict, you never do reach the stage where you can play it easily anyway.

Forming good associations

From the very beginning of learning a new piece, build good posture, balance and freedom into the
musical playing of the notes.
Just as you have a muscle-memory of the feeling of beginning a piece on a down-bow or an up-bow, so
that it becomes impossible to begin accidentally on the wrong bow when playing from memory, so do
undesirable physical actions (such as tightening) become associated with playing a particular note or
phrase. Then that tightening becomes part of how you play that phrase, even if you have got yourself into
a generally relaxed state beforehand.
If you form an association of bad posture or tension with the phrase, it becomes more and more difficult
to change to a new way of playing without the musical playing suffering. Then you may become reluctant
to make the change.

Lesson 7: Avoiding aches and pains 163

Freeing the shoulders

Freeing the shoulders

Raising or not raising

The most common advice is that you should not raise your left shoulder in holding the violin. However, it
may feel unnatural and inhibiting if you do the opposite and purposely ‘keep the shoulder down’. Dounis
recommended a buoyant, mobile feeling in the shoulder:
Lift the [left] shoulder slightly. The shoulder will then support the weight of the arm. Otherwise the weight will be in the
1
Valborg Leland: The elbow where it is a burden.1
Dounis Principles of
Violin Playing Imagine that someone about your height is standing in front of you. You reach forwards with both arms
(New York, 1982), 39.
to embrace them. Notice what you do with your shoulders as you reach forwards.

It does not feel natural to force your shoulders to stay down, without any movement whatsoever, so
that only your upper arms move (Fig. 108a).

Nor do you ‘raise’ the shoulders, i.e. the same movement as shrugging (Fig. 108b). What happens
naturally is that your shoulders ‘come up’ without being raised (Fig. 108c).

2
This is a perfect model for what to do with the shoulders when playing the violin. (Fig. 108d,
See Using a shoulder Fig. 108e, Fig. 108f). Of course, the correct height and position of any shoulder rest is crucial.2
rest, page 27

The Alexander teacher Walter Carrington, after listening to a discussion about the left shoulder at a violin
teachers’ forum, said: “Instead of thinking about raising the shoulders, or not raising the shoulders, why
don’t you just keep the shoulders free?”

Fig. 108

(a) The shoulders forced down unnaturally (b) Raising the shoulders

(c) The shoulders are active (d) The shoulders are too low

(e) The shoulders are too high (f) The shoulders are ‘up but not raised’

178 Lesson 7: Avoiding aches and pains

 Freeing the shoulders

The shoulder and the elbow

It is often helpful to a student to understand the difference between the movements of the arm at the
elbow and at the shoulder.
The elbow is called a hinge joint. The forearm can move only backwards and forwards on a horizontal
plane, when held level with the floor. If it appears that the forearm can also move up and down, this is
due to the upper arm rotating.1 1
Curiously, although

 

The shoulder is called a ball-and-socket joint. The upper arm has the possibility of both horizontal and standard term in violin
playing, upper arm rotation
vertical movements, with a combination of these producing a circular movement. is rarely ever mentioned
throughout the whole
Teacher or assistant  



One exception was the
With your right hand, take the complete weight of the arm at the elbow joint (Fig. 109a). American teacher Paul
Rolland, who used pegs
Place your left hand on the shoulder to encourage it to keep still. With your right hand move the attached to the students’
clothes to graphically
upper arm in circles to demonstrate the freedom of movement in any direction (Fig. 109b).


  

Student
‘Flop’ the weight of your arm into the supporting hand. Do not make any movements yourself.
Allow the arm to be moved in any direction, feeling it move within the shoulder socket without any
movement whatsoever in the shoulder itself.

Fig. 109

 
  

 
 (b) Move the upper arm in circles with your right hand
hand

Keeping the shoulder down and the elbow up

One of the things children often have difficulty with is keeping the right elbow supported without raising
the shoulder. Often, if their elbow is too low (Fig. 110a) and you ask them to raise it so that it is level with
the bow, they raise the shoulder too (Fig. 110b). If you then ask them to drop the shoulder, the elbow
drops too (Fig. 110a). They need to learn how to do one without the other (Fig. 110c):

Fig. 110

(a) The elbow is too low (b) Unintentionally raising the shoulder as (c) Elbow level with the bow
well as the elbow

Freeing the left hand

Understanding flexibility
You do not need to try to develop ‘flexibility’ in your hands and fingers. You already have it most of the
time. Whenever you are not playing, and engaged in ordinary, everyday activities, your hands are soft,
relaxed and pliable.
What you must do is keep that softness and flexibility when you play the violin. Instead, many players go
through the following process:

Lesson 7: Avoiding aches and pains 179

Freeing the left hand

1 Before you pick up the violin and bow, your hands and fingers are soft and flexible, i.e. no muscles in
the hands or fingers are in a constant state of contraction.
2 Every time you are just about to play, first you tighten (i.e. contract) the muscles in your hands,
fingers, wrists and arms, so that they feel hard and inflexible.
3 You spend many years doing relaxation exercises on the violin, forever trying to build freedom and
ease, relaxation and release into your technique and general playing.

Instead of this, why not miss out stages 2 and 3? Your hands are soft and pliable before you pick up the
instrument; keep them like that as you go to pick up the violin and bow; then keep them soft and pliable
as you move your fingers around the fingerboard and manipulate the bow.

But aren’t children’s 

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The ‘build-up of tension over the years’ is often an illusion. Tension may feel the same as it
did last week and be in the same place, but it is not the same tension. It is more that over
the years you build up a long history of being in the habit of contracting certain muscles, i.e.
tensing them.

We tend to think: “There is that tight feeling again that is always there,” as though it is the
same tension that we had last time and now have to deal with again. In fact contracting the
muscles, or allowing them to release and lengthen, is something that happens in the present,
in the here-and-now.

Most children do not naturally and automatically hold the bow without tension, or move their
fingers on the strings without tension. You can prove this with a simple experiment.

Ask a young child to stand, without the bow, with their right hand relaxed and ‘floppy’.
Very slowly bring a bow towards their hand: in almost every case they will stiffen their
hand and fingers (contract the muscles) in preparation as the bow approaches their hand.

You can do the same thing with their left hand. Ask them to stand with the violin under
the chin, but the left hand down and away from the neck of the violin. Make sure their
hand is completely soft. As they move their hand towards playing position, notice how in
most cases the hand tightens on the way to the neck and arrives in a state of hardness; and
that is before they have pressed the string down too hard and counter-pressed with the
thumb, which causes even more tension.

As an adult, the difference is that you have self-motivation and will-power at your command,
and can guide yourself to the desired result quickly.

Continual moments of release

Take every opportunity to release and soften the hand. One of the key relaxing moments to take advantage
of, is when you play an open string.

Make sure that your hand does not remain ‘active’ when playing an open string (Fig. 111a) – after
all, there is nothing for it to do. The hand can release completely (Fig. 111b):

Fig. 111

(a) Tight, contracted hand (b) ‘Open’, released hand while playing an open string

180 Lesson 7: Avoiding aches and pains