I believe that in any process at learning a difficult skill there are cycles of progress followed by plateaus.  Plateaus can be some of the most discouraging and difficult times for the learner.  One of the challenges while navigating the wasteland of a plateau is to keep an eye upon small perhaps barely perceptable improvements as significant, and constantly remind oneself that noticable, even rapid improvments will happen again.   The science of plateaus and understanding their importance in the learning process can be very helpful in keeping consistant and pushing on in the face of the frustration.

After a little over a year  I made the decision to discontinue lessons if only temporarily.  It was mostly a financial consideration which motivated me to have a pause in lessons as violin lessons for me was in many was a luxury.  My eldest son was already taking piano lessons and my younger son was about to start which was going to add another cost to our financial circumstances.

Fortunately, however, discontinuing lessons was not born out of a lack of enthusiasm or commitment for playing.   Now, I must admit that my personality is one which seems to constantly seek new interests and I love learning new things.  I usually switch to a new interest every couple months and some who know me chuckle when I enthusiastically go on about some new thing.  Then after a few months, not that my interest in the old thing is lost, but my interest in something new takes precedence and away I go again.

The violin was different.  When I started playing again I was both challeneged and exhilerated.  It very rapidly felt right.  I admit it didn’t sound right, but one day perhaps that will come.  But It did feel right, as if I should have been doing it all along, and when I really committed to learning to play again I really comitted.

Of course I was initially cautious about my level of dedication, so I deferred purchasing a new violin until I had been playing for one year.  After almost a year I rewarded myself with a new violin upgrading from my old student model to something distinctly better.  Now that was fun, playing on the new instrument and the big sound it created compared to my old violin.  Every now and then I pull out the old one just to hear how it sounds, then I nod and tell myself that indeed the new one does sound much better.

There were of course many challenges and frustrations about trying to learn to play, but up until almost a year after I started, plauteauing was not really an issue.  I spent the first four months progressing very rapidly as I remembered all the basics that I new when I was younger.  The first day I started I didn’t know the names of the strings, but over the next few months my sight reading improved (it was never very good!) and my intonation, while still poor was head and shoulders better than it was at the start.  my fingers were at least beginning to remember their place, and the sevcik excercises proscribed by my teacher really helped.

For the first year I managed to practice almost every day most days for a couple hours.  This may not seem like much compared to how much advanced violinists tend to practice.  However, considering I was doing well years ago if I practiced for 45 minutes three times a week, two hours a day for almost a year with pretty good regularity was a breakthrough.  I was able to sustain this because I really wanted to get better, in other words, I was highly motivated.  Also, I was severely challenged by it, but as importantly I was purposefully and deliberately making myself do at least some of the things I knew to be good practice habits and the results were noticeable.

One of the most difficult things I find in practice is to get into a mindset of developing a skill brick by brick.  I have always wanted to be able to play it all now, and still do.  I have always struggled with the application of something.  I usually get the idea and then I feel as if I’ve got it completely.  I tend to be a big picture thinker who abstracts, distills and processes information, usually discarding much of the detail.  With the violin, there is very much detail that one must apply.  It is not only the concepts that are important but one must train the body and the mind to be able to make the movements that make music.  This is a process that must be developed brick by brick.

I am learning that I need to get myself into a mindset that playing and practicing are two slightly different things and that playing is good and important, but practice is where development, especially technical development occurs.    I have switched back and forth over  a couple month cycles from focusing on a challening piece of music and almost exclusively working on that, to concentrating on some exercises or scales.  My poor teacher probably thought I was a bit crazy as I would suddenly switch what I wanted to do out of the blue, and then before a piece was anywhere near playable I would start to focus on this or that item of technique or exercise.  So, perhaps this has not given me much of a playable repertoire, but I do believe I have maintained a fairly good pace of advancement.

I did however feel the pace of advancement start to slow toward the end of that first year of lessons.  New abilities took longer to get and this was a little bit frustrating.  I was approaching a plateau.  By the time I discontinued lessons and was on my own I feel as if I was becoming a bit entrenched in one.  This proved challenging.  The lack of lessons made focusing more difficult and other aspects of a busy adult life made consistent practice harder.

So, for a few months, my practice time dropped and I started missing a few days here and there.  But, I persevered as much as possible and while navigating this plateau was hard, I was committed to pushing on.  I tried to focus on some very narrow aspects of my playing and I also concentrated a bit more on refining existing abilities.  I have a suspician that plateaus are our brains way of consolidating new information and that while we don’t percieve advancment in a plateau period, there is some critical development taking place, particularly consolidation.

Recently, however, I feel as if I am beginning to come out of this plateau.  I have noticed that some simple things in my playing, such as my bow control and control over tone throughout a passage has markedly improved.  I have often felt that my bow is out of my control and that I am barely hanging on as it careens wildly across the strings.  Now I have moments of dexterity where the notes sound strong, squeaks and squawks momentarily disappear and a string crossing or an arpeggio or even a shift works out pretty well.  This is a small but significant victory.  I have felt before that I struggled to make the simplest passages sound good.  Sure, I could play the notes and mostly play them in tune and with practice I could make a passage come out ok, but when I would sight read something simple but new it sounded terrible.  Now, I am starting to get more confidence and strength on the bow and my intonation, when warm, is much better.

Perhaps I have overcome this plateau and a new pace of accelerated improvement will ensue.  Regardless, I am committed to this instrument and enjoying the ride.  I am determined to gain consistency in shifting and playing in position, and one day I will get my hand to wiggle.  Why is vibrato so difficult!