Evelina Khustavino

The violin is an expensive, rather delicate instrument. As a piece of artisan craftsmanship in its own right, it’s important for beginners to understand the instrument care tips and techniques that will maintain both its beauty and its sound quality. In fact, knowing how to care for your violin will enhance your learning process. Continued maintenance helps increase your personal investment in the violin and will help you identify problems before they have a chance to negatively influence your playing. A…

Playing the violin (especially virtuosity, associated with the sophisticated technique of the left hand) opens the creative abilities in a person, which later can be applied in any business. The violin gives a person a powerful imagination and flexibility of mind, increases the ability for creative insights, and develops intuition.

This is not mysticism, this fact is explained scientifically.The fact is that when we play some virtuoso piece on the violin (something from Paganini, for example), we are making…

It was early summer, hot day, I was about 13 years old, sitting at the class in the music school, it was “music literacy “ lesson, and we were going through the impressionism in music. I heard impressionists music before, of course, but this kind of music never was interesting for me, I can say I didn’t understand it and that’s why I didn’t like it, it was really annoying. And here we are…. Whole month of this… 

Claude Debussy famous French composer impressionist. So we are listening his compositions one…

Really you can enjoy any music or art if you trained yourself to hear or to see it. I don’t mean that you have to force yourself to listen all kinds of music or look at the picture endless amount of time, and eventually miracle will happen, this is definitely not the way to do it. 

The finger joints play an important role in violin bowing. They should always be flexible. The hand puts strong pressure on the bow through the index finger and this causes the necessary resistance from below, from the side of the thumb.
But the thumb, even when it presses strongly on the bow stick with its pad, must be extremely soft and flexible, especially in the nail joint. Just as the spring in a car has no effect on its movement, but creates comfort for passengers, the elasticity of the thumb is…

The hands of the violinist are following seam rules of mechanics and physiology as the body of an acrobat performing complex exercises. The anatomical structure of the hand, excluding minor individual differences, is the same for all the people. That is why,  in order to hold the bow correctly, a violinist needs at least a basic knowledge of anatomy. He must clearly understand the work of the joints and know what movements each of them can perform.

The shoulder joint - is    the most mobile. It can move…

Sometimes I had students, adults who 100% know what they want from the lessons, and this their order sounds like it: “ I don’t need theory and to learn how to read music notes, I just want to be able to play some tunes I heard by ears “… In moments like this I want to answer: “ Me too…” Play by ears is one of the most complicated skills on the violin and in general (depending on what tune, off course)

Looks like a simple question which requires a simple answer “yes” or “no”. But not everything that simple… In general everything what has to do with the violin is quite complicated. 

 Lest start from what do you mean by “play violin”?