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Something I'm struggling with is the vast quantity of Etudes etc out there. It's a jungle.
I'm wondering if @Fiddlerman or anyone else can summarise how many of them are essential and order them and roughly grade them? I could assume the ones available on this forum are the essential ones, but my own Googling shows that there's an availability issue with some of them. (I ordered Schott's Dancla Op.84 because I can't find part 2 free)
It seems to me that there are so many that you could practise them for 4 hours a day and not qualify as a violinist until you've been doing it for 20 years.
I know of Dancla and Sitt and Kreuzer and Sevcik and Wohlfahrt and Hrimaly, and I'm sure there are more than a dozen others (Rode, Dont, Fiorillo, Paganini, Wieniawski on this site).
The composers aren't exactly helpful either, in the sense that in Kreuzer's case #1 is hard, #2-5 are easier, #6-42 are hard again. You can play the hard ones dead slow, but that takes us back to the 20-year problem again.
Whereas on the piano all I ever saw was Czerny for velocity and Czerny for dexterity. I'm sure there are lots more, but I only ever played two Czerny pieces before I reached grade 8 (a Bach fugue will give you more dexterity!). Sure, at music college you face more, but my violin playing won't get that far.
I don't know what grading system America has - in the UK grades 1-8 are what you do before going to a conservatoire, and the audition would require a grade 8 piece.
Andrew
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The US doesn't have a grading system at all. Some teachers like to use the Canadian or UK grading systems for reference, but it's mostly a jungle.
Here's what Kurt Sassmanshaus says about the appropriate progression of etudes. Note that the "levels" are his own, not a standard grading system.
http://www.violinmasterclass.c.....and-etudes
And here's what Mimi Zweig says about what kind of repertoire corresponds to which etudes.
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Andrews link pretty much summarize what we were taught by our teachers growing up. seems like traditions die hard.
I'm sure there is a lot of great new stuff as well but I'm not familiar with it.
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I started looking at Dancla Op.84 (the Schott edition) today. I like it a lot.
Andrew
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Cool Andrew. Sounds like fun!
"The richest person is not the one who has the most,
but the one who needs the least."
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I've been reading Whistler's Introducing the Positions, and among the most interesting exercises in it are those of Ries, IMO. So today I looked around for some free pdfs of Ries, but they contain so much material that I think Whistler has done a good job distilling them all down!
Andrew
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I recently discovered that Kreutzer 10 is an ABRSM grade 8 exam piece. That's an interesting benchmark, as 2-5 are regarded as easier.
Although that doesn't contradict something that I've always said about studies - you can play them as slowly as you like to make them easier - often what they train you in is speed independent. The only downside to that is some of them will take half a day to get through if you do them real slow.
Andrew
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