[Amended]

So far I have had six lessons in twelve weeks with my new teacher.

It has been a mixture of tedious back to basics and gratifying confirmation of the level I had set for myself. I have heard of teachers who can't adjust to another teacher's style and automatically take every student back to beginner's level and re-do everything their own way. At the age of 64 I couldn't tolerate that, and luckily my teacher seems to be able to accommodate my progress so far. As a teenager I had a piano scholarship, so I'm not musically stupid and know roughly what my level is.

Basics involved correct positioning and constant repositioning of the violin on the left shoulder - I always have the tendency to hold it too low down on my chest, in order to play the G string easily, but that results in lack of gravity diminishing bow weight and thus tone on the other strings. Also holding the bow correctly in the right hand, the two changes mostly eliminating slippage in the right hand immediately. Also it's easier to shift down when the violin is horizontal.

Schradieck exercise #1.1, very slowly at first - a whole bow per note (with immediate attention to tone production at the frog) then 2 notes per bow, then 4 then 8 then 16 then 32. Then exercise #1.2 the same way, then whichever I wanted (the pinky exercises are most important). Hand not moving, fingers dropping into place. Intonating by moving fingers, not hand. Same for the G major scale, for 6 weeks (!), followed by A major and the arpeggios, and Corelli 8 Adagio. There was perhaps misunderstanding here -  it's basically a recipe for playing the thing fortissimo - later she modified it to "A whole bow per note in principle" (English isn't her first language), which then got amended to "a musical performance". In a week's time we'll abandon it [thank God - we've been doing the damn thing for 12 weeks, and I'm not convinced I've ever understood what she wanted from it] for Elgar's Salut d'Amour for the purposes of whole-bow legato technique and frog work. I suspect the Massenet Méditation will serve the same purpose later in the year.

The first difficult piece (my choice) was Vivaldi's Spring, which was clearly too difficult for me with my technique as it was. We then switched to Beethoven's Spring Sonata, which was gratifying, as it's basically the same theoretical level, but she wanted my bowing technique to improve before doing any more double-stopping in something like Kreisler's Liebesfreud. Also, the Beethoven is particularly apt, together with the scales and the Schradieck, for bow distribution (i.e. distributing notes and phrases over measured portions of the bow). When we have been doing Beethoven for 10 weeks, we will switch to the Bach D minor Allemanda, which is still the same level of difficulty. She also seems very keen on doing at least one Mozart sonata.

Luckily Beethoven's autograph of the Spring Sonata is on IMSLP, so it's easy to confirm that, except perhaps for one bar, Rostal's phrasing is what Ludwig wanted. The bowing is a different issue, though.

So far, so good, then. If she had spent too long on basics and banned me from playing harder pieces, I'd have had to consider getting a different teacher. But I'm happy to slow down and consolidate.

Now is the right time to start skimming Fischer, with whom she is not familiar, to see if I can supplement her and progress more rapidly.

Yeah, yeah,  I still need to record myself again.

Mouse said
...

So, the higher chinrest helped? ...

  

No, I went back to the Hill Guarneri. I can't remember why. Possibly because I couldn't get on with a microgel shoulder rest. With the new position on my left shoulder, that may change, but I'm going to keep what I've got for a year or two before experimenting again.

stringy said
Great to hear things are working out wel,with the new teacher, I actually can get a teacher now if I want her, but don't know if I can there'd as its about 30 quid for forty minutes, and I don't have the same orchestral ambitions as your good self. 

I don't think anyone cam ver get away from basics, good stuff practicing scales, in my opinion anyway, keep it up and keep the blog Informed;)

  

Yes, I dithered about the cost of a teacher. My last teacher (£30 mates rates for an hour and lunch too, lol!) had a friend she recommended at £50 per hour, which everyone I knew agreed was too expensive.

The current one charges £40 per hour every fortnight, but I also have to pay a £15 per month agency fee, so all in all it doesn't work out much cheaper than £50.

And with the economy the way it is, they will all be putting their fees up this year, although I haven't discussed it with her yet.

stringy said
Just noticed all the spellings in my post, I am going to have turn off this spell checking annoyance. 

Teacher costs are a nice little earner, then again everything to do with fiddle is eye watering. 

  

Yes, when I first set up my tablet online a couple of weeks ago, apart from the difficulty of typing on such a beast, I merrily selected "autotype" or similar, and was amazed at the twaddle it was generating. Luckily I always proofread myself.

This weekend I read Basics by Simon Fischer*, yes, read.

Once you've done some remedial work with a teacher, even one who does not know of Fischer, everything in it makes a lot of sense.

I have always been skeptical about recommending his tomes to beginners, and that skepticism remains - they are too big, so as to drown you in detail, and, without a teacher, your self-diagnostic skills won't be good enough. But when you know what you are looking for, you will find it in there.

* No, autotype, not Simon Fischer-Dieskau!

AnnyJ said
I'd have to agree with you on this. I had bought his "The Violin Lesson Book" thinking it had all the information in it I'd ever need (which it probably does, since he's extremely detailed), but when going through it, I felt like in order to know what he's talking about you'd first have to know what he's talking about. I hope that makes sense.

  

Absolutely. I was recommended this book by an economist, and not only is every chapter written backwards, the whole book is written backwards, so that it's only when you known its contents inside-out that you can know how good it is. I read it twice, but that wasn't enough for me to memorise it, so I gave up, unless I still have it somewhere.

Introducing Keynes

I've also got a copy of The Violin Lesson, but it doesn't look so accessible as Basics.