[The Lesson]

As my Erhu exam approaches, I guess I’m getting more anxious about my progress. I don’t really know what to expect in the exam, or the standards of the judges.  For me, I’m just worried about being able to stay in tune. There’s some days where I really like my tone and intonation as well. There’s other days where it seems like every note I play is out of tune and scratchy. In my lesson, we’ve already started working on the first etude piece music for level 3. So in that case, I’m going to assume that my teacher thinks I’m adequately prepared to take the level 2 exam. In the new etude we’ve started to go over, there’s two new keys to learn (C and B-flat). The piece itself is just to practice playing the pentatonic scale, so I didn’t learn any new techniques. My teacher kept mentioning that when I started playing pieces from level 3 I will have to learn 快弓(fast bow). When we played this etude he pointed out that although the speed he wanted me to play at was relatively fast, I still need to make sure that I use the entire bow to play each note. On top of that I need to make sure that I’m using my wrist to move the bow. I watched a few videos about fast bow, and it seems like all of what my teacher was emphasizing in this weeks lesson was to prepare for learning fast bow. We’ll see what happens in next week’s lesson.

I’ve been thinking about how to make my practice sessions more effective and also how to squeeze in more practice time. So I’ve decided to try and break up my practice sessions into morning and evening sessions. In the morning when I’m fresh, I’ll go through the more tedious things like practicing scales and the practice etudes. In the evening I’ll focus on playing through my exam pieces. I don’t even know if I can wake up in time to do that, but we’ll see.

[Practice]

[This Week’s Goals]

1. Be able to play the D major pentatonic scale etude (the second position part) in tune, and at 100BPM.
2. Play the 1st exam etude at 60BPM without stopping including the additional parts below.
3. Same as the above with the 2nd exam etude, also make sure to have the do on the inner string in tune.
4. Play 弓桥泛月 all in tune, with clear vibrato, and without stopping.
5. Play 送别 in tune with clear and steady vibrato.
6. Play 好一朵茉莉花 all the way through without stopping.