Cornelia L. Heard, Professor of Violin

WILLIAM: Hi, and welcome to the Musichir Young Artist Program Series Viewpoint. Today I have the honor and pleasure to talk with Professor Cornelia Heard. Connie holds the Valerie Blair Potter Chair at Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, where she is Professor of Violin and Chair of the String Department, and as well, a member of the Blair String Quartet. She has served on the artist faculty and as co-director of the chamber music program at the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2005. A Juilliard grad, she studied with Dorothy DeLay, and chamber music with Robert Mann, Earl Carless, and Sam Rhodes of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as Felix Gallimere, Ruth Laredo, and Jan Degutani. Welcome, Connie.

CORNELIA: Thank you very much.

WILLIAM: So we thought we would talk about, well we sort of texted to talk about basic questions like, you know, what are basics? In your opinion, in your viewpoint, what are basics with regard to practicing?

CORNELIA: Well, I think basics in terms of playing in regards to playing are good intonation, good sound, good rhythm. And so in pretty much everything we do, we want to think about those things, I think. Well, it's okay. Keep going. There are ways to practice, lots and lots and lots of ways to practice each of those. But I think as a kind of a framework, that's what we want. We always want those. I think in thinking about this, I found you had mentioned at some point. You know, what do you think of Sevcik? And I thought, well, I don't do that much with Sevcik, but as it turns out, I really do. In terms of articulation and moving, just moving the fingers in simple patterns, Sevcik, Opus 1, Book 1. Is terrific and it's a building block and it allows you to work on relaxed, clear finger movement, finger dropping, relaxing, finger lifting, relaxing, intonation, keeping the fingers relaxed while others are in use. So it starts off very simply and I find that a wonderful way to warm up and a wonderful way to kind of build some fundamentals. And since I'm talking about Shevshik, I'll sort of jump straight to the other two I realized I use quite a bit. Opus 8, Shifting, Sevcik, I think is very, very useful. And it's interesting that the oldest of the Blair Quartet for many, many years, every concert backstage, his warming up was with Sevcik Opus 8. And you can practice overlapping slurs. That's one of my favorite ways to practice most everything. So that you're covering shifts with slurs and covering string changes with slurs. And you can practice the Shevshik Opus 8 that way or you can practice one beat per bow or two. Speed it up, slow it down, but just shifting is so fundamental to good, clean playing. And then the other, and again, this is kind of jumping around, but one of my favorite books, and one that I actually only discovered in the last 15 years or so, is Sevcik's Opus 3 Bowing Variations. I think that's a fantastic book. For any of us, all of us, really taking each, it's short variations on a chord pattern. And each one has different bowing techniques. But again, it's simple, it's building blocks. And if one is really, really mindful of what is happening with the hand, that you've got the kind of hand position you want,. That you're not allowing fingers to be stiff or straight, that you're not allowing your hand to collapse. The kind of fluidity and springiness and resilience that you want, that we all ideally want in our. Bow hands. That's a wonderful book to practice that in. Not only that, but also just lots of strokes, like at the end of the book, all these ricochet patterns. I don't know of a better, anybody who's playing solos in Scheherazade or some Paganini caprices. I send them immediately to Sevcik's.

WILLIAM: When you start to talk about positions, like hand positions, do you have. Some kind of a point of view, some kind of a model in your head and do you work from that or do you look at the student? How does that work with you?

CORNELIA: Definitely look at the student. And I learn from the students because some people, you know, sometimes people are able to do things that, you know, I just think are phenomenal. And so I look and I try to examine. And I think Ms. DeLay did that a lot because she had a lot to look at. But I mean, yes, certainly there are people whose hands look very beautifully relaxed. And seem to work optimally. And that's a starting point. Different people are double-jointed, different people have long fingers versus short. What we really want is relaxed and efficient. And one technical issue that I personally have spent a lot of time on is left-hand fourth finger. To try to have it work just as well as the other fingers. And so I've sort of developed or discovered, I guess it's more like it's hard to develop really, things that haven't been done before, lots and lots of exercises, small exercises to help develop fourth finger position on the left hand.

WILLIAM: What kind of exercises do you do for that? Octaves?

CORNELIA: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think we often think of octaves as the frame of the left hand and so that's useful and I like to think of both octaves and tenths as starting with the fourth finger and then you reach back to whatever degree possible for the first so that you're favoring three and four, the hand is balanced towards three and four because it's easy to reach back with one and two. It's much harder to reach up with four. So that's kind of a fundamental starting point. But I like practicing scales in seconds with a 4-1. So starting on the G and the D string, playing a D major scale in seconds. And again, overlapping slurs. Pretty much all of these, I would say, overlapping slurs. So it's, and you're actually playing the notes of the scale. So not every second is going to be a major or a minor. It's going to be, you're going to have F-sharps and C-sharps in the key.

WILLIAM: So you're balancing off the first finger and you're moving up or you're balancing it off the fourth finger.

CORNELIA: You're balancing off the fourth finger. And actually I should say, I think that fourth finger scales are very useful too. To do a two octave or even a three octave scale just with a fourth finger in a good position. And there's no pressure, you're not on stage, so there's no reason to be tense. And you can do overlap slurs or you can pick out any kind of bowing you want, but keeping a good position.

WILLIAM: Mr. Lay would talk about Yost. Is this a memory of Yoast?

CORNELIA: I guess it is a memory of Yoast, yes. Four finger scales and then three, four, three, four, three, four. Those scales and Yost. Yes, exactly. I'm glad you mentioned that. And Yost has you going way up and down single strings and then also up. But I think four finger scales up and down the string and a two octave or three octave. Just relaxed hand balance. And the fourth finger and then three, four, three, four, three, four, three, four. Same thing.

WILLIAM: Yeah, another one of those books that I was aware of that Mr. Le told me about and worked with me on was Dounis, in which one of the first ones is just four, two octaves up, three, two octaves up, you know, that kind of thing.

CORNELIA: Yes, yes. And all the while, I mean two basic premises without which you do not do the exercise. One is being relaxed and the other is having a nice hand frame.

WILLIAM: How does pitch fall into all of that?

CORNELIA: I think pitch is important. I think pitch is important. I think you might, if you're first starting one of these, maybe you don't pay so much attention to pitch because you want to get the feelings, like yoga or something. You want to get the feeling. You don't want to be correct. You want to find what is efficient and relaxed and gives you something that you're going to really be able to work with. And then you refine the pitch. I don't think it's worth practicing a lot of shifting exercises out of tune. I think you really want to be practicing them in tune. But when you're first just finding a mechanism, a new exercise.

WILLIAM: If you were to talk about that kind of modeling in the right hand, what would you suggest are ways that people could look at that?

CORNELIA: Okay, let me say one more silly fourth finger exercise before we go to the right hand. Not only practicing the scales in seconds, I like practicing them in perfect fourths.

WILLIAM: Why perfect fourths?

CORNELIA: Four and three. Fourth finger on the D on the G string, and then third finger on the G. And so for exactly the same reason as we were talking about the seconds or the octaves, it keeps you honest. And actually the third finger helps support the fourth finger well. So I find that that's actually an easier exercise in a way than the seconds.

WILLIAM: Do you do that on the D, G, A and D, E and A?

CORNELIA: I do a three octave scale with it.

WILLIAM: Very cool.

CORNELIA: And so going first position, second position,. Third position, fourth position, then back down to first, second, third, fourth, I think. And it's really surprisingly comfortable. And I'll say one last thing, because fourth finger is a sort of a, I go down that rabbit hole. Roland Vamos has a wonderful book that I got a copy of the whole book last summer. I had years ago gotten some Xerox pages, but I got the whole book. And it's a bit torturous, but it's exercises in double stops, and it's all kinds of patterns. It's patterns, and he has you do them in first through seventh position, and then the next string, first through seventh, and the next string, and then he changes the pattern. And it really, again, it gets you to balance your hand in ways that is called for all the time in our repertoire. But at first glance, for me, practicing at first, it really took quite a bit of mental effort, and now it's much, much more comfortable. So Roland Vamos exercise.

WILLIAM: Sorry, one last question about that before we go on. Does age make a difference in what you assign to your students to do?

CORNELIA: You know, it's funny because my very first teacher was Wilda Tinsley. And she was a wonderful teacher. She was associate concertmaster of the Nashville Symphony, and she later married William Moennig of Moennig's Violin in Philadelphia. But she was a fine violinist and a really fine teacher. My first two years with her, which were my two years with her, she wrote in a spiral notebook every week. She wrote, you know, she didn't have the parent do it or something. She wrote. And I have those books.

WILLIAM: Wow.

CORNELIA: I have those books and they are amazing. And I show them to my college students, especially if they're thinking, you know, in terms of pedagogy and stuff. It is amazing. She's talking about: get your bow straight at the tip. Have your bow straight at the frog. You know, have your pinky curved at the frog. Have your pinky curved. It is the same fundamentals that we work on, that I work on, that my college students work on, that my pre-college students work on. Yes, there may be some allowance for age, but not necessarily. These basics, these fundamentals, they apply to violin playing. They don't apply to seven-year-old versus 50-year-old, I think. So I guess. The way that I think of it is, what do I think the student is going to be interested in and what will catch fire? And I maybe dangled the bait, and if they seem not interested, I'll try to find something else that can address the same issue. But very often, people really want things that will address their technical problems.

WILLIAM: I can see Ms. DeLay really had an impact on you. So, okay, let's shift over to the right hand. Suppose, for example, a student came and they were playing, but when they went to the tip, the boasts get it off the runway towards the fingerboard. How would you address that?

CORNELIA: Okay, I can tell you some of the ways I've gone through it. And what I find to be most effective now. One college student who had gone to Indiana University and had worked with Mimi Zweig there, and Mimi sort of combines elements of all kinds of teaching systems, and she's got wonderful sort of games to play. And so what we did was put the violin on the floor, put the bow at the tip, or maybe two-thirds of the way up the bow, on the floor, tie a string from the button on the frog to the peg box. It really works. And when I used to do it a lot, I would do it with college students too, and they found it hilarious. But what it means is that you go along, and when you start to go crooked, it jerks you back. It's very effective. It's the it factor. You're going along. So that's effective. A lot of people like to practice in front of the mirror. And when they're in front of a mirror, they can draw a straight bow. But I find that that doesn't always mean they can draw a straight bow when they're not in front of the mirror. So that's not good enough. It's good practice, but it's not good enough. Um, one thing that I find very helpful and I actually do a lot is I have two bows. One is about a, an eighth size and one is about a quarter or maybe one is a 10th and one is an eighth. I mean a bow that this like a little, like a little beginner would use and I will have grown men and women college students, um, have to play their piece or a section of their piece with that little bow. And it's great for two things I find. Two or three things. You have to use natural arm weight because there is no weight in this bow. The bow has energy that wants to fly off. So you have to use it. You have to use slow bow and you have to use the frog because you have nothing else. So I find that extremely useful and pretty much, I think, for the most part, the students find it really, really helpful for a lot of things. And I'll have people practice a half a movement of Bach. So, you know, say a gigue or a presto or something. Using that bow and saying, you have to get a good sound. This isn't a time to scratch. You have to get a good sound. And they can do it. And then when they go back to their own bow and they can use a little bit more bow, where they are in the bow is more appropriate. The sound is better and the control is much better.

WILLIAM: That's interesting because Kurt showed me his small bow, but his was more for dividing the bow up into, you know, into half and quarters, etc., etc., and thought about it that way. That's really great.

CORNELIA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing that. I had a wonderful student years ago who had, she was very tall and had very long arms and she had beautifully straight bow. And when I just watched her, how, you know, what it looked like, it looked to me like she went long, straight, straight, straight, straight, straight. And then it was kind of like a hockey stick at the bottom. She sort of went off to the left and then it came back. And if this makes any sense. So instead of trying to do a straight line, she's doing a straight line and then she's compensating rather than doing what you said, rather than going crooked towards the fingerboard, sliding towards the fingerboard. She took care of that and went the other way. And it was fluid,. And so I for years talked about the hockey stick really think of the hockey stick, you're going straight down and then you do like the L go down. But what I think Is probably the very most helpful nowadays Alex Kerr gave a class at Blair one time. And I had a student who for years I had encouraged him to play with a straighter bow. I tried many different things. And Alex in this class, he said to somebody, he said, you just watch it. He said, watch it. It's not straight. I was like, huh? Not talking about a mirror. We're talking about watch the darn thing. And so a lot of people are very uncomfortable really being able to tell if it's straight from where they are. But if you're there ready to play, you have your bridge, the four strings, and the bow. If you look at the bow hair and the bridge, and then two strings and make a rectangle out of it and you watch that and you make sure that from frog to tip or you can practice lower half middle upper and you really, you have to look away every now and then. So you don't go cross side. But it's extremely effective, and it's probably the most effective thing that I've learned. Just so simple. Just watch it.

WILLIAM: That's direct. So, okay, let's say this is good, we've got our fourth fingers all together, and this is good, you know, we've got our piece of whatever pulling our bow and it's straight. How do we get, what do you do to get those two things to happen at the same time?

CORNELIA: Well, that's where scales can come in. And, you know, there's so many more. Both things, that Sevcik Opus III is just phenomenal, and really getting things working beautifully. I'm a huge believer in scale practice, and for all ages and abilities. Um. And I actually really enjoy doing them myself. And I think key with scale practice is to always be creative in what you are trying to accomplish. Never just do it rote. And you can do similar bowings many, many times. We all, I think, grow up doing one per bow, two per bow, three, four, six, eight. I even like doing five and seven to 12 and 24 per bow. And with the metronome or without the metronome but with good rhythm. So that's something that most people have grown up doing. And of course we would want to do those separate bows. And we would want to have a goal. Are we vibrating or are we just going for really pure tone and really pure intonation without vibrato and trying to experience and develop the G string tone, the D string tone, the A string tone, the E string tone. That might be one thing. I remember you at Juilliard practicing your scales for the maximum volume and still being relaxed. I remember you really, really focusing on scales, even slow scales, seeing how close you could be at the bridge, how you could finesse the stroke to build the tone. You know, whether we're practicing crescendoing going up, whether we're really practicing scales for vibrato, for beauty of vibrato. I enjoy doing lots of different vibrato things, including thinking rhythmically sometimes, if the vibrato is too slow, which I feel like mine is sometimes, I like thinking in terms of triplets on each note. Anything that some people might want to slow their vibrato down. So you can have vibrato goals, you can have dynamic goals, you can have clarity goals, you can have connecting the finger from one string to the next. Sometimes we lift too much. And, you know, how much do we want to hold the fingers down? Articulation, which we can start thinking about with those early Sevcik Opus 1 Book 1. How do we drop the fingers? How do we release after we drop the finger? How do we lift the finger? How do we release? A lot of us sort of keep tension when we release the fingers. How do we use our scales? Again, we're not on stage. There's no pressure. How do we use those to help build our technique? And then, of course, I also, of course, love doing arpeggios, which I think are pretty standard for everybody to do. And I'm a believer in doing the broken thirds. The broken thirds take us really, really high on the instrument. We have to be able to deal with these extremely high positions because you can't just kind of reach up 4-4. You have to... And chromatics.

WILLIAM: Do you do a thing like concerto scales? Pulling a scale from a concerto and working?

CORNELIA: Absolutely, absolutely. And Beethoven is a really good one for that.

WILLIAM: Oh, really? Seriously?

CORNELIA: And sometimes when I have younger students who don't see the point in scales, I don't like that. I'll pull out the Beethoven concerto and I'll say, look at this, look at these arpeggios, look at these scales. And I pull out thirds and fingered octaves and tenths out of concertos, out of Wieniawski concerto, out of Sibelius concerto, especially out of Paganini concerto. And I think, you know, a lot of us might enjoy that a little bit more sometimes than the Flesh and the Sevcik. And so I think it's great supplemental. And I also string quartet parts, tricky orchestral or string quartet parts to practice scales or double stops from those.

WILLIAM: Had a student the other day and I was trying to we were working working on his basics and He kept just looking perplexed and finally he said oh I get it. You're not talking about basics you mean fundamentals and. I don't know. Do you ever think about this idea of fundamentals versus basics? Has it ever come across in a lesson? Because I found it really fascinating.

CORNELIA: Maybe fundamentals is a richer word. Has more meaning that what we're doing is fundamental to what we want to be doing in music. Maybe it sounds a little bit flat. I don't know that I find a huge difference except maybe you could have fewer categories of fundamentals and say, okay, maybe there are three categories of fundamentals and we'll work within those with basics. Outshoots.

WILLIAM: Fascinating. So, what you've been talking about is a lot of this from Miss DeLay. I'm sure it's been developed since, but at its core, is this something that she worked with you about?

CORNELIA: Yes.

WILLIAM: As Will de Tinsley did.

CORNELIA: As Will de Tinsley did. I think the short answer is yes. I don't think that for years, I think a lot of these things I have discovered or rediscovered through years and years of teaching and playing, because some of them are things that I sort of focus on because I think they'll help my own playing. And there's always a student who needs it too. So when I come back around to thinking about all of these, Ms. DeLay, especially when you talk to students who studied with her, a lot of the students we knew at Juilliard who had studied with her since they were quite young, rather than came to her at college or in high school, she really did a lot of fundamentals. With her students. I think she really built their techniques through these fundamentals. So I think the answer is yes. I think it just took me a while to come back around to a lot of things. And things like working with the little bow, which I find so. So successful, so effective. You know, I don't believe we did that kind of thing with her, but I think it makes sense with everything that we did do with her. They're shifting exercises, all kinds of shifting exercises. One, you know, one finger shifting in scales up and down one string, you know, all first fingers. Yes, very much "Yosed." And we certainly did lots of Yost.

WILLIAM: That's true. Do you have any story or stories that you would like to share about your studies with Miss DeLay?

CORNELIA: Yes, yes. I would welcome the opportunity. I'll say two or three small miscellaneous things and then one that sort of had a big impact on me. A couple of miscellaneous things. When I came to Vanderbilt and started teaching, I would go back up to New York. And for various reasons. And I would often sit in on an afternoon of lessons with Ms. DeLay. And with my own students, I would be keeping this laundry list through their piece of all the things that I thought they should do. And then when I sat in on Ms. DeLay's lessons, I would see what I remembered, which was that she would choose one thing to work on for the lesson. It might be vibrato. And she would work on vibrato throughout the lesson in all kinds of different guises. And it never felt rushed, even if the lesson was short. We know that sometimes the lessons were a little short. Never felt rushed. It always felt like a wide open world. Or it might be articulation. And she might take you through the first arpeggio of Lalo, Symphony Espanol, and talk about the different kinds of articulation, the finger dropping, the string crossing, the shift, the finger liftoff, that kind of thing. And she just seemed so pleasant. So unhurried and that was a real lesson to me as a teacher to go huh this is a really different way and yes that is the way it was but so so that's one thing another thing that was always really hilarious was Mr. DeLay played piano and she said you know it never made her uptight because she she just didn't care but she loved playing bad orchestra. Oh sweet, come on, let's do bad orchestra. And I was doing Paganini Concerto and she sat down at the orchestra part and she would rush and she would play wrong notes and she would play really loud and she would slow down and she would laugh her head off. And I wish I played piano well enough to play bad orchestra with my students.

WILLIAM: Whenever I play piano, it is bad orchestra.

CORNELIA: But she just had a big sense of humor and she loved that. One personal story was I started out at Sarah Lawrence College where she was teaching. She taught a few students at Sarah Lawrence and then she would teach a lot of her Juilliard students there on Sundays also. And I think it was my second year there. I wasn't going home. I think I had some rehearsals for a show. I wasn't going home for Thanksgiving. First time I'd ever not been at Thanksgiving. And she said, well, sweetie, why don't you come over and have Thanksgiving dinner with Mr. Newhouse and me? And I did. And her son, Jeffrey Newhouse, was there. And Mr. DeLay, Mr. Newhouse, she did all of the cooking. She cooked this turkey. She cooked the entire dinner. She had no helpers at all. Which, you know, knowing her in the later years, that's just so remarkable.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

CORNELIA: But she was a mom first, you know.

WILLIAM: A mom first who knew how to cook. I didn't realize she had no idea. I thought cooking might be alien to her DNA. I had no idea that that was going on.

CORNELIA: I think later it was. And then the last story I'll tell, which had a big impact on me, which will be obvious why, and this was a very different time. I want to preface it by saying, you know, nowadays you have, you know,. Huge numbers of super students who are incredibly gifted and accomplished on the violin and who are incredibly intelligent and accomplished in any of a number of academic areas. And so we have all these dual degree programs at conservatories and major universities. And we have a lot of people pursuing, you know, a lot of routes and that is working well and a lot of our, you know, A lot of the. People, younger people who are playing concerts and winning competitions have gone that route. So this was a different time. I think this would not have happened in that time, or maybe it was more specific to me. But I started out at Sarah Lawrence College, which was a liberal arts college and a wonderful college. I mean, the course is incredibly interesting, stimulating. And one third of my program was music. With Miss DeLay and everything else that you do in music. And so, by my second year, mid-second year, I started feeling like no, I really want to find out if I can be a violinist. I really want to be in a conservatory. And so I talked to her one day in my sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence. And I said, you know, I think I want to focus more. And so we decided that I would audition, because this was somewhere midwinter, I think, and that I would take the June audition. In those days, there were June auditions for Juilliard. And so I auditioned, and I was accepted, and I went to Juilliard the next fall. And so when I got there, you know, my father was in academia and really values liberal arts, as did I. And he said, you know, they work out funny programs at Sarah Lawrence. They give you credit for, you know, living in Appalachia. They give you credit for different things. You know, I wonder, anyway, too long story, a little bit shorter. I went through a lot of effort to go before councils at Sarah Lawrence and see if I could go to both schools at the same time and keep studying some academics at Sarah Lawrence while I was at Juilliard. So I worked out all of this, I made appearances there, finally got approval. And so I went to Miss DeLay at Juilliard that afternoon and I said, Miss DeLay, I wanted to tell you. I have good news," she said, I said, I've worked it out so that I can take a course, a one-third program at Sarah Lawrence while I'm at Juilliard. And she said, sweetie, come here. And I remember she sat on the edge of an armchair out in front of her studio and she said, sweetie, putting off the decision to play the violin is not putting it off, it's deciding against it. And I went, whoops. She said, if you want to go to Sarah Lawrence, that's great, no problem. She said, if you want to come to Juilliard, you need to work harder than you've ever worked in your life. And I said, oh, okay. And that was that. That took about 30 seconds to nix that idea. And so I did finish my bachelor's and master's at Juilliard. And then I went back to Sarah Lawrence for a year. And I studied with her and it was a fabulous year and I was able to study, you know, English and Russian literature and French along with lots of violin. And it was a fabulous experience. But she had the confidence and the intelligence to just zero in, just like that.

WILLIAM: Wonderful stories, Connie. Wonderful insight into what you think about basics or fundamentals of playing the violin. I hope, I'm sure everybody will really appreciate it. So with that, I'm going to say goodbye. Okay. Or should I say au revoir? We'll see each other again. Thank you very, very much.

CORNELIA: Okay, thank you.

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