Most Common Misconceptions About Violin Practice & Making Mistakes

Practicing always involves making mistakes. But one of the greatest sources of confusion for string players is how to deal with mistakes effectively. From the standpoint of utilizing our natural abilities, it may come down to something surprisingly simple: how we notice things.

Frustration in practice often comes from focusing on the mistake itself — rather than what led up to it.

A skilled teacher helps provide the student with the parameters needed to observe perceived limitations in technique — in turn influencing the student’s sense of what is possible. But the deeper question is: what are we actually noticing when we practice, and when are we noticing it?

The Problem with Noticing Mistakes After the Fact

Key Insight: We often notice mistakes after they have already happened. But everything leading up to the mistake is the real fodder for learning — the observations, the sensations, the subtle details of breath, tension, and movement that precede the error. Whether we breathe, hold our breath, exhale or inhale — all these tiny details are part of the observations that lead to refining ease in playing.

Feldenkrais and the Art of Learning

Awareness studies like those developed by Moshe Feldenkrais — which lead to optimal functionality — are really a means of learning how to learn. Feldenkrais didn’t address change by forcibly getting the body to act a certain way. Rather, he would sometimes accentuate what the student was already doing, making more obvious to the kinesthetic self what was actually happening. He understood that awareness must precede any real, organic change in body function — and that an effective teacher is one who helps the student notice what they are already doing as the starting point for transformation.

According to Mark Reese, writing about his studies with Feldenkrais:

“These lessons are not ‘physical exercises’ such as calisthenics; they are somatopsychic explorations which foster improvement by accessing inherent neurological competencies, increasing self-awareness, and facilitating new learning.”

“The teacher partially discloses or hints at a functional motor pattern, and the student’s nervous system responds with altered muscular responses. Gradually, with repetitions and variations, the student assembles or synthesizes — mostly at an unconscious level — a new neuromuscular image of movement which can later be translated into active performance.”

“Immense activity goes on in us, far greater than we appreciate or are aware of. This activity is related to what we have learned during our whole life from inception to this moment.” — Feldenkrais

“Don’t you decide how to do the movement; let your nervous system decide. It has had millions of years of experience and therefore it knows more than you do.” — Feldenkrais

How This Translates to Violin and Viola Practice

Most players are focused on the mistake being made — but by that point, it is already too late. The real learning comes from observing what happens before the mistake, and trusting that the information provided on a neuromuscular level will lead to new and better possibilities in technique.

If shifting to a particular note, for example: what does it feel like to overshoot the note? What does it feel like to freeze before a shift, out of fear that a mistake will be made? Where does that freeze occur? What part of the body unnecessarily seizes up? These are the questions that lead to genuine technical refinement — not the judgment of the mistake itself, but the curious, non-judgmental observation of everything surrounding it.

Feldenkrais believed that discovering everything about the learning experience — including the difficulties — was a good thing, because those difficulties are the point from which the student can discover infinite possibilities beyond them. Our experiences in practice have the ability to defy mere labels of success or failure, if we trust our bodies’ ability to learn from what they feel.

* Mark Reese, “Moshe Feldenkrais’ Work with Movement: A Parallel Approach to Milton Erickson’s Hypnotherapy.”

by Rozanna Weinberger