The Four Elements

For my first blog entry, I want to discuss one of the most important lessons I try to teach my students.

There is a reason professional athletes don't simply walk into the gym and start lifting whatever weight is closest to the door, run track, or just kick a ball all day. True training is carefully planned not only on a session basis but also to get the athlete to the performance moment. Practice has stages, each with its own purpose, and skipping one doesn't make you faster; it wastes the most precious commodity you have: time. It could also make you injured.

Practicing the violin is no different. After decades of playing and teaching, I can tell you that most practice problems are not connected to talent, lack of time, or laziness (of course, it is ALSO laziness…). They are usually planning problems. A student plays a piece for three weeks or three months, and it still sounds shaky, not because the fingers can't do it, but because everything was practiced at once, in no particular order, hoping it would somehow assemble itself by the concert date.

It won't. So here is how I break down the work of taking any piece, any piece whatsoever, and making it worthy of the stage. I call these The Four Elements. I made a video walking through the system, if you'd rather watch than read.

Each element has a different set of practice methods; some are apparent, others might not be. After I discuss the four of them, I will tell you how to use them in the best possible way in the next entry.

1. The Technique Stage

This is where you learn what is actually on the page. Not what you imagine is on the page, not what you remember from a recording, but what is written.

The notes themselves. How fast they are, how high they are. Where the composer asks you to slow down, where to push forward. This is the stage where you find your fingerings and settle your rhythm, and I mean settle, decided, written into the part, and practiced the same way every time. Many students think this is the Slow stage, and they are not wrong, but also not completely right. Playing slowly to find out the notes is incredibly important, especially if you are playing a piece for the first time, when you are like a white sponge. A mistake in this stage would linger the longest. However, finding the right fingerings and bow technique depends on the speed you want to perform (where to bounce, whether to make a long shift or climb up the positions), so it is not only a musical question but a technical one as well — you need to discover and reach the correct tempo for the piece even if you still can not perform the piece back-to-back. The Technique stage needs to bring you to the correct tempo.

This stage is unglamorous. It is also non-negotiable. Everything you build later stands on it.

2. The Sound Stage

Now the piece is in your fingers, and it's time to make it worth listening to. This is where you work on your vibrato and your bow control, and I would argue this is the most important stage of the four. Sound is the magic fairy dust that made you choose the violin in the first place, made you choose to continue practicing and laboring daily, and what makes the audience fall in love with your playing. Believe me, I rarely get approached by an enthusiastic audience after a concert who want to tell me how in tune I played… (come to think of it, maybe I should work on my intonation.)

So, what makes beautiful sound? This is almost a separate entry, but let's simplify here: Vibrato is around 30 percent; the rest is bow control. Your aim is to control the quality of your sound with these two tools: make it clean, rich, and moving in a meaningful way across the notes, or even across one note.

Here you clean up your sound from scratches and audible shifts (a personal obsession) and make it attractive in the true sense of the word. Every note should be examined with a magnifying glass attached to your ear: is it speaking? Is it ringing? Is the bow in the right place, at the right speed, with the right weight? Is the vibrato alive, or is it a nervous habit running on autopilot?

An audience will forgive an occasional missed shift. They will not forgive twenty minutes, or even one minute, of ugly sound. Sound is what people actually hear; the notes are just the delivery vehicle.

3. The Musical Stage

Here is an uncomfortable truth: the first two stages are musicality killers. Long sessions of slow practice, repetition, and technical scrutiny will flatten your phrasing into something correct, clean, and dead.

So in the third stage you re-apply your musicality, and just as importantly, you re-question it. What is this phrase actually saying? Where is it going? What did you believe about this piece before you started practicing it, and do you still believe it now that you know it from the inside? Some of your original instincts will survive this interrogation. Others should be gratefully retired. Everything is on the table: dynamics, speed, every innuendo in between. Also accents, correct entries, understanding your partner's part (piano or orchestra), and even listening to three different performances of the piece and making a thoughtful comparison.

This is where the piece stops being a set of exercises and becomes music again.

4. The Performance Stage

This is the stage almost nobody practices, and it is crucial. Playing a piece well in your room and performing it well on stage are two different skills, and only one of them happens automatically.

Here you learn the piece by heart, properly, not "I think I mostly remember it," but tested, from any starting point, under pressure. You practice how you will actually perform: standing up or sitting down, in the shoes and clothes you'll wear (playing in a suit or high heels feels different than walking around the practicing room barefoot and in shorts).

You do full run-throughs without stopping, because on stage there is no stopping; you must learn to recover from a slip and keep going, which is a skill entirely separate from not slipping.

And you practice with people in the room. Play for your family, your friends, your colleagues, your phone camera. The first performance of a piece should never be the performance.

Most importantly, you want to stop thinking of yourself and what you do, and think about the experience your audience is having. This is the moment you question whether your musical nuances resonate off the stage and to the ear of someone in the 20th row.

These four elements are not a rigid recipe. Real practice moves back and forth between them. But knowing which stage you're in, on any given day, with any given piece, even at every part of the same piece, is the difference between practicing and merely playing around. Athletes figured this out long ago. It's time we practiced like professionals too.

Next time: how to divide a single practice session between the four elements and why most violinists spend far too long stuck in stage one.