Differentian and the Benefit of Practicing With Awareness

Differentiation and the benefit of practicing with awareness So often the approach to string pedagogy is one of trying to imitate what the teacher is doing, or asking the student to copy something being demonstrated by the teacher. But the future of one’s technique and it’s naturalness may hinge on whether the playing is built largely on copying something external vs. becoming aware of something internal. Philosophically it’s the difference between trying to correct something vs. noticing everything about it. It is similar to how a baby learns to walk. While walking is highly complex it is learned in a non verbal observational mode. We don’t take babies to ‘learn to walk’ schools, for example. It is a process of trial & error on an almost entirely Kinesthetic level – that is noticing everything about the process of movement and how to zero in on discomfort & inefficiency. built on fix mistakes or of differentiating optimum vs. inefficient movements. This happens largely as the shift goes from focus on muscle movement to understanding how the skeleton can inform what the muscles do. Differentiation is a means of noticing comfort vs. discomfort. The problem is that many players can go along using their body in a manner that produces discomfort, but have no way of changing what they’re doing because they don’t know a better approach. Therefore it may be up to the teacher to ‘notice’ when the right shoulder is hyper extending, for instance, guiding the student to relax the humerous bone back into the shoulder girdle where the arm/shoulder and back as a whole can then function as one. After awhile the student will be able to differentiate comfort vs. discomfort and self correct intuitively. Applying this principal to excessive elevation of right shoulder when bowing. It is clear from the photo that the shoulder girdle, including Clavical, Acromioclavicular joing, Acromion, Scapula rest atop the rib cage. Thanks to gravity this is so. ‘Relax the shoulder’ or ‘lower the shoulder’ are commands put upon me for years. I understood through training that tightening & elevating the right shoulder when bowing, was not an optimum approach. But the question was, how to make my body aware of a more efficient use of the skeleton/muscles with the endgame, natural self-correction and differentiating when the body is not comfortable with itself. While making changes is the goal of noticing or differentiating movements, it stems from awareness and a lack of trying to change something before it is first fully noticed. How does a student ‘notice’ the Humerous bone, how does the student notice that they are hyper extending the shoulder forward or upward, in an attempt to control the movements of the bow and sound production. Therefore one of the key objectives is noticing when the Clavical is elevated or raised, vs. a sense of resting atop the shoulder girdle/rib cage.