YEHUDI MENUHIN
Violin Tutorial
''The best teacher is the one who himself has had to struggle to learn.
I imagine that whatever contribution I can make to teaching derives
from having had to rethink and re-create my technique."
"I often say I was born old and I get younger with the years."
"Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent,
melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed,
and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.”
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
1. The Preparation
If I wanted to play the violin, I had to work.
Because anything that one wants to do really, and one loves doing, one must do everyday.
It should be as easy to the artist and as natural as flying is to a bird.
And you can’t imagine a bird saying well, I’m tired today, I’m not going to fly!
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
2. Right Hand First Exercises
"We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent,
supported by everyone,
in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process....
We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying
a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee.
The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road
and that our initiatives are most pressing."
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
3. Left Hand First Exercises
“Each human being has the eternal duty of transforming what is hard and brutal into a subtle and tender offering,
what is crude into refinement, what is ugly into beauty, ignorance into knowledge, confrontation into collaboration,
thereby rediscovering the child’s dream of a creative reality incessantly renewed by death,
the servant of life, and by life the servant of love.”
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
4. Right Hand Playing
(incomplete)
"I can only think of music as something inherent in every human being - a birthright.
Music coordinates mind, body and spirit.”
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
5. Left Hand Playing
“The more variety there is, the more opportunity for seeing a wide range of expression,
whether in painting or music or politics, the more we depend on the discipline,
the sense of responsibility, the sense of values, the sense of proportion of the population.
And one of the great difficulties of our age is that we have a greater freedom
than we really deserve or than we can cope with.”
Yehudi Menuhin Violin Tutorial
6. Left and Right Hand Coordination
(incomplete)
"One should feel, in the right arm, the sensation of the bow hair on the strings....
The moment tension or hardness enters ... the vibrations will not be felt."
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