Book review: Expressive Violin Technique: How to Teach and Acquire It

Expressive Violin Technique: How to Teach and Acquire It

Bruce Douglas Berg

106PP ISBN 9798989722709

BDB Publishing $27.95 

Expressive Violin Technique: How to Teach and Acquire It is a book that aims ‘to help violin students and teachers improve their playing and teaching by combining expression with technique’. Author Bruce Berg draws together ideas and tips acquired as a student from his violin teachers, including Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, and mixes them with his own methods, organising everything into clear sections addressing specific aspects of violin playing. Each chapter contains a wealth of exercises, both on and away from the violin, with a combination of instructions and musical excerpts, often supported by black and white illustrations. The advice flows freely and the tone of the narrative is relaxed, supportive and peppered with anecdotes from the author’s student experiences. The overall effect on the reader is similar to that of attending a lesson with a favourite professor.

The book is aimed at intermediate to advanced players, although the section on right-hand technique contains many bow-hold and bowing exercises that would be helpful for teachers of beginners, as well as a useful descriptive list of bow strokes, complete with practice suggestions. The section of the book dealing with left-hand technique, such as shifting, trills, extensions, scales and vibrato, is suitable for more advanced students, and contains a variety of challenging musical examples, including studies by the author and many excerpts from works such as the Paganini Caprices and Dont Etudes. The emphasis here is on improving existing technique rather than establishing that of the beginner, for which the author suggests other sources, including Fischbach and Frost’s Viva Vibrato and assorted works by Simon Fischer. The chapter on vibrato contains plenty of advice for developing the technique, offering strategies for helping to achieve continuity and evenness, and suggestions for troubleshooting a ‘sluggish’ vibrato. One particularly effective exercise uses the opening bars of Massenet’s ‘Méditation’ from Thaïs – the student is asked firstly to play the passage on one note while imagining the tune and varying the vibrato, and then to repeat the phrase, again on a single note but without vibrato, focusing on the bow.

The book ends with a detailed practice method for the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in which, as well as presenting a full edition of the movement, the author writes out a comprehensive series of exercises taking the student through the key technical points of the piece. This final section of the book brings together many of the techniques explored earlier in a relevant and thorough way, highlighting and isolating the various ways to fine-tune one’s technique in order to help the player interpret the music.

Throughout the book, the focus is mainly on the technical side of things, with the implication that the ‘expressive’ aspect of the book’s title will naturally be achieved through attention to technique. This is reinforced by the author’s statement: ‘Interpretation and technique are one and the same thing. If you know the technique to bring out your musical ideas, then you can bring your expression to the music.’ Dedicated students are bound to benefit from exploring some of the exercises in this book, and teachers will undoubtedly also enjoy recognising, implementing and adapting the many strategies and ideas collected here.

CELIA COBB