Violin lessons. THE LEFT - HAND: PRACTICE

THE practical side of the simple left-hand technique can be summed up in the two words "muscular control."
The aim of the present article must therefore be to lay out a scheme of muscular training. And the student, besides following it out, must keep its importance clearly before his eyes. Its object is, not only to give him the power of contracting any desired muscle alone, but also the sense of muscular relaxation; and to give him both so completely developed that he will be able to contract certain muscles while relaxing others, and to sense the relaxations just as keenly as the contractions.
The words "muscular contraction and relaxation" thus amplify and explain the words "muscular control." Only it must be noted that, in the delicate art of playing the violin, the great difficulty is to acquire a vivid consciousness of the difference between contraction and relaxation. Yet the unerring faculty of discriminating between the two processes must be acquired. Otherwise, there is no hope of banishing unwilled muscular activity. To put the matter familiarly: if one does not know when a muscle is contracted and when it is relaxed, that muscle will be apt to do as it pleases.
If there is any doubt of the fact that muscular movement is often quite unconscious, it can be satisfied by a simple experiment. Ask a friend to allow you to raise his arm. Then, after raising it, suddenly let it go. In all probability your friend's arm will remain in mid-air, kept there by his own unconscious muscular action. For, the very suggestion that you are going to raise his arm is enough to set his motor-apparatus in action, without any conscious intention on his part.
Our scheme of muscular training, then, must have as its object the acquisition of this sense, so vital to the violinist. Of the ten exercises which we shall prescribe for the student, the first seven are directed solely to this end. The last three are practically a basic study of the left-hand technique; only that the right-hand is substituted for the actual violin. This change is made, partly because the exercises can be 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.
Not 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, А, В, C, D, E, F, G.
The 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.
The 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.
For 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.
But 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.

The 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 quite natural and proper. It is, in fact, a sign of grace—a sign that he is proceeding along the right road to violin-success. Nor should it be hard for him to understand why this lateral bending must take place. If he will look at Figs. 9,10,11, and observe what happens to the block when its weight is evenly balanced (Fig. 9), or is shifted to the right (Fig. 10), or to the left (Fig. 11), he will have no difficulty in explaining to himself the movement of his wrist.