Mapping Notes

When I first started teaching, I thought that showing students different ways to play the notes on the page would be enough.

But the more I taught, the more I felt something was missing.

This came into sharper focus when I began teaching beginning students in France.

Curiously though, I'd only taught two beginners back in the U .S. and that was when I was very young and just beginning to teach. So now, having to do so at the age of 37 made it feel like entirely new territory.

I wanted to start off on the right foot, so I asked a few colleagues a simple question.

To my surprise, they all gave the same answer.

Scales.

These were the same skills I had hated practicing when I was young, so their response pushed me to take a closer look.

But before I could go very far, I ran into something I hadn't anticipated.

You see, back then in France, students were required to take one or even two years of solfege before beginning instruction on an instrument.

On top of it, the solfege they were learning didn't involve singing actual pitches.

So while they could identify any note on the page horizontally or even vertically, that identification was still an abstraction.

To me, what this prepared students for was to see a note and then to translate it from solfege into the act of placing a finger on the string.

From my point of view, this required a lot of cognitive effort, and frankly, not every young student is wired to think as rapidly as it would need to be when performing.

So all of this pushed me to ask myself what I thought was important when starting the violin.

I realized that for me, learning to be a good performer meant learning how to be able to react quickly.

And that meant the process of seeing, then thinking, then acting simply took too much time.

From my point of view, I wanted students to see the notes and be able to physically react quickly to produce the sound they imagined.

As I looked deeper into what I had done, I realized that not only wasn't I just reading the notes, I was organizing them. I even marked little V shapes in my music to help me remember where the half steps were.

Thinking about whole and half steps brought me back to something else, my very first theory lessons.

You see, I was taught to build scales and to recognize key signatures by using tetrachords.

Learning how they worked changed everything.

I didn't have to just memorize the circle of fifths.

Alright then, but what's a tetrachord? Well, a tetrachord is a group of four connected notes that spans the interval of a perfect fourth.

Within that span, the notes are spaced by whole steps and half steps, which form patterns.

There is a connection between tetrachords and the fingers on your left hand.

Do you see it? Well, we have four fingers in the left hand, and no, the thumb is not a finger, it's a thumb. And with our four fingers, we can literally create those patterns.

But you know what? It's true.

This does kind of remind me of Spock.

Well, we use these patterns built on tetrachords to construct scales.

And those are the same scales we find in the music we play.

That's why understanding these patterns can be extremely helpful in organizing how we practice the pieces we play.

And that's where my fingering board entered the picture.

My fingering board helped me visualize those patterns that come from tetrachords.

The distance between each circle is a half step, so I can design the patterns using numbers to represent my fingers.

Because I can now see a whole step, whole step, half step pattern, and all the others, I can visualize the structure of any scale more easily.

But what good is all this information if it doesn't connect to the music we're trying to bring to life? For me, my fingering board is the piece of the puzzle that helps bridge the gap between seeing the notes on the page and what we physically need to do to bring those notes to life.

That's my way of explaining to students the why behind our need to learn scales. Because if they don't understand that, one day while they're practicing, they might start thinking to themselves, scales are so boring.

Why am I even doing this? I mean, what's the point? All right, I've had enough. Let's just move on.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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