Planning in Progress

Image by oksmith via openclipart

Although I have had a lot of fun playing the violin, since I had more time this week, I decided to start planning out my final presentation. I think to be safe, I will play something on the simple side because I do not want my nervousness to hide my true playing skills. I will probably play a scale to begin with as a warm-up, and afterwards, discuss the difficulties that I had playing the scale on the violin in comparison to playing the same scale on the viola. If we have access to a large screen, I could connect my phone to the screen to show my intonation via a tuning app. However, it seems likely that there will be technical difficulties, so I will probably not do this to avoid wasting time. I could also play some notes individually to inform the audience on some note names. I will probably give a quick overview about the mechanics of the violin after I introduce myself and before I play the scale. In this quick overview, I will mention the names of the different strings and describe the violin’s role in the orchestra. I will also address the confusion between a viola and a violin since I need to explain my experience in order to give the audience a sense of my playing skills before I started this project. After playing the scale, I will transition into a piece that is around 1 – 1.5 minutes. I will introduce this piece by stating around how long it took me to play a piece with similar difficulty and length. After playing the slightly longer piece, I will also discuss difficulties of learning how to read the treble clef and other experiences I had with playing the violin with other orchestra students.

This week, I learned that this 5 minute presentation may seem shorter than I think it will be. Before planning, I thought that I would have too little to say because my topic is self-explanatory, but I realized that I need to talk about the parts I had trouble with such as intonation and reading sheet music. I also need to consider the amount of time it takes to transition from playing to talking. I may need to tune before I start playing because the temperature may make the strings go out of tune. I could incorporate my tuning process into my presentation because it is an integral part of the playing process, but it needs to be quick. I am glad that I have a lot of ideas, but I need to narrow them down because I only have 5 minutes, and I need to play live during a portion of it.

For myself, I noticed that I tend to take a long time setting up, so I will have to rosin my bow and thoroughly tune during the morning before school starts. I also need to talk to my orchestra teacher about borrowing a music stand to hold my music while I play. Since this presentation depends on how quickly I transition between playing and talking, I need to make sure that my set up is organized and strategical. Next week, I will decide on what scale to play, and I will practice it with a tuner in case I want to display my intonation on a screen for everyone to see. I will also dwindle down my list of ideas to have a clearer vision of what I need to talk about so I can prepare.