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IN YOUR PRACTICE

I encourage students to practise sautillé intermittently through whatever else they’re doing, starting with some scales and open strings, just to relax the muscles. If you spend an hour or more each day figuring out the best way to play it, you will make good progress that will stay with you. Try to turn it into an obsession. As a kid, I would sit at school trying to work out how to play it using a pencil instead of a bow; and when I was practising, I would stop what I was doing every two or three minutes to try it again. At that time I was practising for five hours a day, and I tried everything – holding the bow with different fingers, at different tilts, in different places and with different grips – until it started to bounce.

If it’s still not working after you’ve exhausted all possibilities and you’ve been obsessed with it from the moment your eyes open in the morning to the moment you nod off at night, go online. Search for ‘sautillé: wrist angle’, ‘sautillé: bow tilt’, and you will get thousands of hits. See what new insights you can find.

If you can, work for a total of four to five hours every day. Record yourself on your phone, both to listen to yourself now and to create an archive for the future; force yourself to play passages without stopping; train your ear. Even if you can only do three hours a day, you should be able to get some good work done.

Scott Yoo, concert violinist and conductor of the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra, once told me he breaks practice down by drawing nine boxes on a piece of paper. Each box represents thirty minutes of practice, and the goal is to check off all nine of those thirty-minute sessions before you go to sleep at night, whether you do five in the morning and four at night, or all of them at once. It’s a nice way to give your practice day some structure.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

Sautillé is a stroke that we should all help our young charges to learn, so that they have it in their back pocket when they are under pressure and need to give the impression that they are playing off the string. One of the keys to teaching it is to acknowledge that we are all created differently. Someone who is 6’4” and 170 pounds with heavy shoulders is going to need a very different approach from someone who is 4’7” and 70 pounds. Whenever a teacher is rigid or dogmatic, it really gets my hackles up!

When I am teaching how to use sautillé in excerpts, I like to demonstrate in super-slow motion, so that my students can see exactly what I’m doing. I’ll tell them when I’m playing on the string, détaché, sautillé, spiccato, to explain how to blend one stroke to the next; then I’ll ask them to turn around and listen when I play the excerpt in tempo. Often they’ll say, ‘Wow, you’re hardly playing off the string at all, but really it sounds like you are!’ And that’s what I’m trying to give them.

If a student has been working on this for a month and it still isn’t working, ask them how much they have really been practising it. It’s not just about doing a bit at the weekend or in the evenings – you have to have a lot of willpower and be truly obsessed. If they are really struggling and you cannot get through to them, it can be a good idea to let them ask another teacher or player for their opinion. Sometimes all they need is a new perspective. INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING

FURTHER MATERIALS

On YouTube, watch great violinists like Oistrakh (left) and Perlman playing sautillé. Some of them break every rule in the book! Find videos of players similar to you in physical build to give you more insight into the best way to play.

NEXT MONTH Cellist Wendy Max on beginner bowing and rhythm