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Andrew, you are saying you'd like a lower chinrest if such a thing were possible? It also seems that you have the same problem as me with the instrument sliding down your chest. Perhaps the heavier instrument and heavier-because-bigger shoulder-rest is part of the problem? One thing my teacher has asked me to do is keep my chin more in line with the violin's axis, rather than to the side. That helps a bit with stability, as long as I am constantly aware of it, but also perhaps you would benefit from a sponge which will have more friction (hopefully), but also very lttle weight and will be lower than a shoulder rest too?
Andrew
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I don't need a lower chinrest than what I have now. My current chin-rest is custom-made and is about as close to ideal as physically possible. It's the right height, but it's lower than the tailpiece so I can't move it any closer to center. It's already been cut to place the center of the cup as close as possible to the tailpiece without having my chin on the tailpiece itself. Ideally I'd have the same height, but at or near the center, which is impossible.
As far as the shoulder rest side goes, I've tried a sponge and prefer a hard rest. The weight of the viola is not a big problem, the length of my fingers is a bigger problem. (I've even been told I should consider playing a 7/8 size violin because of my small hands.) The main purpose of my shoulder rest is to fill space and provide the necessary tilt so that I can play on the C string without an extreme elbow swing, and I also hold the viola lower on my shoulder for the same reason. The shoulder rest is far enough from my neck to not really affect how the instrument fits under my jaw; right now it's not even at its minimum height. How I hold my viola and set up my shoulder rest has changed quite a bit since I started taking regular lessons.
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My orchestra's spring schedule is always a bit hectic because we have concerts in three consecutive months. Our concert program with Sibelius's 5th was last weekend; on Monday we were already rehearsing for the next concert, which is at the end of this month. The next program is Respighi's Vetrate di Chiesa and Bruckner's Te Deum.
I've been extra busy because the Respighi turned out to be an orchestra librarian's nightmare. We've played it before, back in 2017, but at the time we rented it because it was still under copyright. It's been public domain since 2022. The set of parts on IMSLP is not a professionally published edition, but was copied from the score by a volunteer/hobbyist, and for some reason it omitted the organ and piano parts. I contacted our former librarian from when we played it before, and he still had the organ part, but I had to copy the piano part from the score myself (I did that more than a month ago). Then, two weeks before the first rehearsal, when I was about to email the parts out to the orchestra, our principal trombonist alerted me to the low brass parts being unusable because of entire passages being copied from the wrong parts in the score. He volunteered to make new low brass parts, but that sent me back to checking all the other IMSLP parts. The other IMSLP parts were better, but almost all still had a lot of errors. I ended up completely recopying the first 39 measures of the second movement for English horn and second and third trumpets, making inserts for missing or incorrect passages in several other parts, and typing up an 11-page errata list, and it took me something like 25 hours over six days. Another orchestra librarian I know through Untitled Virtual Ensemble suggested that the volume of errors means I should probably flag the parts on IMSLP for deletion so that other orchestra librarians don’t have to wade through the same mess.
Anyway, the first rehearsal happened, and the corrections seemed to work... except for the contrabassoonist not reading the entire email and not noticing the errata list before rehearsal, but that got cleared up quickly. For my own part, the Respighi wasn't nearly as hard as I remember it being from 2017, even though I was sight-reading in the first rehearsal. That's in part because I'm more comfortable in the upper register now, but also because I know the score well enough to be aware of where I actually need to play the notes accurately (this includes one nasty passage in E-flat minor) and where it's just for effect and close is good enough.
Other than that, I’m still working on the viola part of the Turina piano quartet, continuing to solidify the Hoffmeister concerto, and learning the first and fourth movements of the Norman sonata. Quartet rehearsals are still productive – we rehearsed today, and we were able to play through the fast second movement and stay together at what I’d consider an acceptable performance tempo for the first time.
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It's concert week already! We're not in our usual concert venue for this one, but playing at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in downtown Sacramento instead. Our first rehearsal at the cathedral was this Monday; it was also our second rehearsal with the choir and first with all the vocal soloists.
The acoustics of a big cathedral are an extra challenge, and took a lot of getting used to. It's much more echoey than the spaces we usually rehearse and perform in. This meant some technical adjustments: dropping the tempo a little and playing loud notes shorter so that the extra reverb doesn't make it muddy, among other things. It's also harder to stay together because the architecture directs everyone's sound out toward the audience but doesn't let us all hear each other clearly. For example, sitting in the viola section, the only orchestral parts I could hear clearly were the viola and second violin sections, woodwinds, trumpets, and trombones. The first violins, celli, and horns were on the other side of the sanctuary and barely audible to me, and the choir sounded muted too because their voices were projecting well above the heads of all the strings. At times we had to rework what we were listening for, and use visual cues more than auditory. So this rehearsal was all about getting used to the cathedral, with a lot of time spent reworking balance and fixing the timing/tempo issues created by the acoustics. We'll have two more rehearsals at the cathedral, Friday night and Saturday morning, and then the concert is Saturday.
I put a few clips taken from my music stand in an Instagram post, one from the Bruckner and two from the Respighi:
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