A few years ago I experimented with putting my baroque violin low, holding it as directed by Geminiani in his famous treatise: ‘The Violin must be rested just below the Collar-bone’. This position is fairly unusual even amongst baroque violinists. (It’s not so unusual in the folk world). I’ve since returned to a more usual semi-chin-off on-the-shoulder position, but the time I spent playing in a different way was useful, fun, and illuminating.
I’ve always loved the violin but I never much liked that feeling of having a chinrest on my face. With the shoulder-rest as well, it felt as though there was too much stuff impacting on my jaw. With the baroque set-up, I felt a lot more free. The violin is able to move around, and you can (revolution!) move your head and leave the violin where it is. Different people make up different ways of cushioning it with pieces of chamois leather and things like that. The first word that I used when I started doing this was ‘liberating’.
Some still let the chin sit on the violin, relaxing the neck downwards (a useful cheat is to use the tailpiece, that central bit on the top that holds the strings in place, where the instrument has a bit more height). In violin class I’ve heard Margaret Faultless pointing out to students that there’s not such a massive gap to fill if you keep your head relaxed and let it sink slightly, with the back of the neck long. (She observes that many people instinctively force their heads up to ‘accommodate’ a violin – it’s as though the violinist needs to work at losing the instinct to create space for a modern instrument with all its heavy paraphernalia of chinrest and shoulder rest). Remember the Alexander incantation: ‘I allow my neck to release’.
Chin-off-on-collarbone violinists (are you following?) let their violins sit on their collarbones and just balance.
Previously, my policy was to aim at this (surprisingly possible a lot of the time) but to allow myself my chin when I wanted it, say when shifting my hand downwards, or to stop the violin wobbling when playing a lot of notes.
(Yes, that amounts to a confession that I never properly learnt the Super Downward Shifting technique, involving an impressively mobile thumb, which truly committed chin-off players have to master. If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, just picture balancing a violin using your left hand at one end and your collarbone at the other. Now you have to move your left hand up and down the neck of the instrument, in order to produce lots of complicated notes in tune. And all the time, one of your priorities is not to drop this expensive object. You either give up and say ‘That is ridiculous!’ or you get creative, letting the fingers and thumb be in different places so that everything stays stable).
So, I was in the chin-on-some-of-the-time team.
But at this time in my development, I was unconsciously compressing my trapezius the whole time in an attempt to close the gap between my neck and the violin. It would ache after even a short session, and I absolutely knew that I was raising my left shoulder slightly to facilitate playing.
To me, this kind of tension wasn’t acceptable. It was time to make a change. And very soon after I’d begun my Radically-Historical-and-Low Violin Position, I realised something surprising.
I found that cradling the violin in the hollow under my collarbone, ‘turning the right-hand Side of the Violin a little downwards’ as instructed by my eighteenth-century tutor, gave a lot more stability than having the instrument balanced higher up. Held this way, the violin felt snug. Bowing felt good and intuitive, natural and easy; the bow had to be held lower down, and I could almost – almost! – pretend to be a cellist. Even shifting was OK (I’ve pages of notes to share with you on this).
I want to share my notes from the first day I did it for any committed length of time. That day I was mostly playing the Double of the Courante in Bach’s B minor Partita for solo violin. This piece involves lots of adjacent notes and scales. That’s good for your first adventures in chin-off playing. It has a few leaps too, however, which are a bit more challenging.
I started with ‘normal’ chin-off, ie. on the collarbone but the chin not touching. I wrote: ‘As the morning wore on I felt like I was making an effort to keep my chin from touching the violin. If you release the back of the neck, head ‘nods’ forward, as various Alexander teachers have said. A new way to hold the violin: not so stressy after all.’
However, at that point I put the violin lower, because I wanted to see what would happen if I took away all temptation to raise my shoulders.
My discoveries were surprising…
- The position encourages flow. It’s easier to keep going than to stop.
- It encourages extending out of a position, being creative and flexible. Moving fingers is the first preference. Then hand.
- Downward shifts are the difficulty. Upward shifts aren’t really any different. You have to face the need for downward shifts and plan ahead, though. There were moments when I realised I’d left it too late, and I couldn’t get back down. Like a cat stuck up a tree. Call the fire brigade…
- Two kinds of downward shifts are favoured: firstly, semitone shifts of one finger. Secondly, sometimes it works to step the first finger back whilst under cover of another finger.
- There’s a basic conservatism about shifting. This often means that you spend much more time in second position. Yikes! It’s just easier to shimmy into second than to leap into third. As a general rule, you shift the hand no higher than necessary, so you use the fourth finger a lot.
- I wrote that open-string downward shifts aren’t good (although they’re fine going up). Later, I realised that when you hold the violin against the chest with the scroll high as Geminiani advises, the violin is in a way pushed into the body and even open-string shifts are possible. That was a lightbulb moment. The violin is really secure. Later, I used open-string shifts a couple of times in the Christmas Oratorio…
- Try to put shifts – where unavoidably clunky – at a natural gap. Think of what you’ve read of the natural gappiness of early keyboard fingerings, and embrace the potential of baroque-style playing to be slightly less continuously-phrased when you want it to be.
- Fingers work harder. You’re swan-like: serene with furiously-working fingers.
- (This is just from doing it. Which is sometimes your best treatise).
- Vibrato as you learn in modern training is difficult to do. Geminiani’s famous ‘close shake’ in this position merits further exploration.
- The low position encourages a feeling of the shoulder relaxing. Hurrah!
- At this time, under the collarbone felt more secure and less wobbly than chin-off on the collarbone.
I did return to holding my violin on the collarbone (using my chin as little as possible). I’ve worked on staying free in my shoulders and neck and not tensing up, and this position feels good now. But I’d recommend trying under-the-collarbone playing and seeing what it can teach you.