From the ARCHIVE

Violin pedagogue Percival Hodgson advocates a system of pattern recognition to help young players, rather than the laborious method of learning the names of notes

FROM THE STRAD FEBRUARY 1942

VOL.52 NO.622

The brain appears to have an inescapable need for turning everything into patterns. This propensity applies to violin playing in many directions, and should be stimulated in all. For example, if we sing or hum a tune, the chain of sounds becomes an aural pattern; bowing is only correct when the hand and arm movements describe beautiful curving patterns in space; reading whole groups of notes at a glance is only possible when the written symbols of music lose some of their detail to us, thus forming easily recognisable visual patterns; and it is impossible for left-hand movements to gain rapidity until they link themselves into a chain.

All modern violin schools take advantage of this mental tendency to scrap details, and so-called “semitone” systems are really methods of facilitating pattern-formation. Nowadays it is almost as though the fingerboard had become a keyboard, instead of having, as a child once remarked to me, “no notes on it.” My practice is to train pupils to focus almost entirely on the sound at the moment of performance, while working out patterns apart from playing until conception becomes subconscious.

In the same way I advocate a very thorough theoretical training in keys, intervals, chords, etc., yet unhesitatingly permit beginners to play scales containing sharps before knowing the names of the notes, and without having the slightest notion of what a sharp is. If I were a pianoforte teacher, I could imagine myself teaching a child the aforesaid scale of C sharp in the same way, as a pattern, but I should assuredly cause him to realise the relationship between the movements and the symbols representing them in due course.

It is even unnecessary to know the names of the notes. For example, if two notes are on adjacent lines, or in adjacent spaces, the interval will be a third, no matter what register of the instrument they may occur in. Reading in high positions is enormously dependent on automatic interval recognition.

An enormously quickening effect on both reading and playing becomes evident when the player’s pattern-recognition extends to the recognition of simple chords Although we meet these mostly in arpeggio form, it is necessary to acquire facility in seeing them as chords. I would suggest limiting this work to common chords, dominant sevenths and diminished sevenths for our purpose, concentrating on a few of the simplest keys and particularly on what might be described as “violin keys.”

JONAS HOLTHAUS