[The Lesson]

[Overview]

This lesson was something else. We had our labor day holiday, so my friends and I decided to go watch a movie on the same day of my lesson. For convenience, I told them to just come to my lesson so that we could go watch the movie right after. Seeing three black people together was a little bit too much for my erhu teacher. I introduced my friends to him and told him their backgrounds and he was super excited the whole lesson. At the end of the lesson he whipped out two erhus and had us all take a picture together. He posted the picture along with a short bio for each of us on his WeChat. The funnier thing is that the music school ended up using that picture to promote their erhu classes. Ain’t that something. But anyways, in the lesson, we pretty much just polished the piece from last week.

[Technique]

There were no new techniques this week, but, he did point out some ways to improve my playing of 小花鼓 (Little Flower Drum) we were working on. I guess you can call that a technique?

1.  In measure 3, the first mi should be played sforzando (with sudden and strong emphasis). Also, there should be a slight pause between the mi and la of this measure. There should also be a slight pause after the two mi’s in measure 5.

2. In measure 58, I need to make sure to take a slight pause after the first mi.

[Repertoire]

In this lesson we went back and played 好一朵茉莉花 (Jasmine Flower), then we played 我是草原小骑手(I’m a little Prairie Horse Rider), and finally we played 小花鼓（Little Flower Drum).

[The Practice]

[This Week’s Practice Plan]

I’ve decided to make this section a record of what I practiced week to week. I’ll put some recordings here to track my progress in a more tangible way as well. I usually practice about one hour a day, and I have a lot of other things I want to get through during the day. So I’ve found that the most effective way for me to practice is to break up what I want to practice into chunks and practice one specific phrases or even smaller sections for 5 minutes each. That way my practice is focused and at least it feels like I’m making some progress. I also write out the specific thing I want to improve in that particular passage.

Warm Up

1. Practice vibrato at 125BPM

2. Practice long bow on an open string

3. Practice the F major scale against a drone tone

 

小花鼓 (Little Flower Drum)

1. Measure 3: Szforzando on the first mi, and make sure to take a slight pause between the mi and la.

2. Measure 5: Make sure to take a break between the first slide and the second slide.

3. Measure 26-27: Practice the slides

4.Measure 27-30: Focus on getting the intonation correct

5. Measure 32-33: Focus on intonation and getting that slide articulated clearly

6. Measure 34-35: Practice intonation as well as the crescendo

7. Measure 43-44: Make the trill crisp and clear

8. Measure 57: Take the pause, and trill crisp and clearly