This conversation with Gary Karr, Harmon Lewis, and Jason Heath took place in early 2018 at Gary and Harmon’s home in the Las Vegas hills. Harmon passed away in early 2023, and the ISB / Harmon Lewis Collaborative Keyboard Artist Grant Program has been established to honor this great artist and his half-century collaboration with Gary.
Gary passed away on July 16, 2025, after suffering a brain aneurysm. Read Gary’s New York Times Obituary.
The following transcription has been edited for clarity.
The Early Years
Jason: I’m thinking of the chronology. So you were the principal sub for the Met. When was that? Do you remember the years or the date range?
’61, let’s see, ’61 and ’62. Then, I got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to commission Henze. Part of the stipulation in the contract was that I’d have to give up all orchestral work and focus on solo.
Harmon: Explain what you did growing up in Los Angeles. A lot of people criticize Gary and say he has no orchestral experience. How many orchestras a week did you play in?
Gary: Seven.
[laughter]
Jason: You were playing in seven orchestras? How old were you when you were doing that?
Gary: As soon as I could drive.
Jason: Really?
Gary: Fifteen and a half.
Jason: Fifteen and a half, playing in seven orchestras, going to high school still?
Gary: Yeah.
laughter
Jason: Out super late, playing concerts, and coming back?
Gary: The concerts were usually on weekends, and I was up super late doing rehearsals.
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Jason: Who were you studying with when you were in Los Angeles? Everybody knows the story of the family of bass players, but in that time period, when you were playing in all those different orchestras, who had you been working with on the bass?
Gary: My first teacher was the same teacher who taught my grandfather, my uncle, and my cousin. He came to the United States from Russia, where my family came from. My teacher and grandfather were boyhood friends but took a different journey.
My grandfather and grandmother spoke seven languages fluently. When they left Russia, they went to Paris. They spoke French, so they were able to get out and eke out an existence in France before coming to New York. My teacher, Uda Demenstein, my grandfather’s buddy, and his wife went through Shanghai, as did a lot of Jews from Russia.
They went to Shanghai first and then ended up not in New York but in Los Angeles. By coincidence, he lived across the street from me, which was a great thing because he was long retired when I started studying with him. He was already an old man with a heart condition so that he couldn’t go out very much, but he managed to come across the street every day.
He always greeted me when I came home from grammar school, and I practiced with him. He was the greatest teacher I can imagine all those years. Having your teacher by you when you’re practicing puts me through my paces like a trainer.
On Double Bass Methods
Jason: So you’re practicing together. What were you working on?
Gary: Simandl. I hated it!
Jason: Really? And how ironic that you’re the demonstration photos for the International Music Co., years later.
Gary: I think Simandl is one of the worst things that ever happened to the bass today. I just don’t understand why that became the Bible. It is so bad.
Jason: Why did it become the Bible?
Gary: I have no idea. The strongest influence on bass playing, I think, in the United States, probably globally, which also is very odd, maybe even ironic, was Germany. The Germans really had a stronghold on the development of the bass, and they all used Simandl. But Simandl was Czech. What did that have to do with Germany?
The Czech bass players were far more advanced than the German bass players at that time and subsequently. They had gone beyond Simandl already, but the Germans didn’t. So we were stuck with the German school in the United States, and the Japanese were stuck with the German school.
One of the difficult problems with the Simandl is that there are a couple of problems. The Simandl Method doesn’t cover the whole fingerboard soon enough.
They have you playing in all the low positions. Never using a third finger, and all of a sudden, when you get to the higher positions, you’re supposed to have a strong third finger, never having used it. Which is already a weak finger to begin with. Many people who studied Simandl developed good first, second, and fourth fingers, but never could have a third finger.
That’s my problem. I do not know how to just go for a note in the upper positions with my third finger. I can’t do it. First, first, and second—it’s always first and second. I even use my fourth finger in upper positions because it’s much stronger than my third.
The other thing is that intonation is just ridiculous in Simandl. To play in tune between two and four, you have a finger in the way, so if you want to play a 7th with your second finger and then you have to play like E to F, it’s never high enough. You’ve got a finger in the way. So, intonationally, it’s wrong!
Another reason is that it goes half position by half position all the way up. And it covers one string at a time, so it doesn’t really have you crossing all the way to the E string when you’re doing all these positions.
Most Simandl people, if they play a C on the G string, have no idea what the second finger note on the E string is in that position because you learn it in these separate contexts.
That’s why I always love jazz bass players. They knew, and that’s one thing they knew I didn’t know.
I learned from them how to figure out what all the other notes were.
I was one of the first, probably among the first old people, to do a lot of stuff on the E string all the way up with the bow because it’s so practical.
That’s another reason I hate Simandl. I think that the 1 2 4 system is ridiculous.
Sometimes it requires a big stretch to do 1, 2, 3, and 4. Some people can do that if they have a big enough hand. And if they have a big enough hand, they should do it. If you don’t, 1, 3, 4, and 1, 2, 4, combinations work fine.
Jason: When I think about Billè, for example. It’s all written 1 3 4 in those books, and then when I’ve talked to people immersed in that world, they say it depends on context.
It depends on the harmonic context. 1 2 4, 1 3 4, which is just what you said.
Gary: I like Billè a lot better because there is flexibility there. I certainly like Billè because he develops your third finger early enough.
I have one fingering for a major scale. It’s so easy. 24 124 134.
Jason: The electric bass world would understand!
Completely. Where do you think I got it? I got it from the electric bass. You can play absolutely any scale on the bass with that fingering.
Jason: What else did you grow up with? What else have you experimented with? And I know people love your thoughts and some of those things that we all have on our bookshelves.
Gary: My teachers were old-fashioned. I did the 30 Etudes of Simandl with my first teacher. When he died, I studied with another man who taught my uncle and cousin. Herman Reinshagen, who was assistant first in New York with the Philharmonic and retired in Los Angeles.
He taught just about everybody in Los Angeles. He was one of the major teachers there, including jazz musicians and one of the top jazz bass players of the time.
Charlie Mingus studied with Rheinshagen. I would go to my lesson, and Charlie Mingus would be coming out. So I rubbed shoulders with him all the way in.
With Rheinshagen, I would do my solos, but I always had to do the etudes, too. I went through Storch Hrabe, all the books, and all the Gradus ad Parnassum. I did the Findeisen etude books.
After I no longer studied with bass teachers, I still referred back to the ancient books, but in a totally different way because, as I mentioned, I transpose a lot. So I’d take Storch Hrabe, for instance, and read through the whole thing, transposing it into a different key.
Or I would play the whole book an octave higher. I do stuff like that.
Jason: Thinking of it an octave higher or thinking of it as it would be down an octave, just taking it up.
Gary: Yes. I just read it up. It was a good exercise for the mind, but it was also great for technique because I’m constantly expanding it, using the same resources but in different ways. The result of that was interesting.
Today’s students don’t want to spend much time on answers. They want to get to the meat and potatoes right away. And for them, the meat and potatoes are (maybe) orchestral excerpts.
On Bach
I always insisted on Bach. I felt that if you’re not going to do études, you should at least do your Bach. And what I do on the Bach, I say, don’t do any of the bowings marked. Start fresh. I want to see what you can do.
So they bring it in, play it for me, and then I take my big fat eraser and get rid of all the bowings he put in. I said, “Okay, now bring it back next week with a new set of bowings.”
I make them do that three times. And that’s an etude. That’s how you learn.
Jason: That’s an etude, for sure. And that’s like a deep. I remember talking to Ed Barker, the principal bass for Boston, and he talked about practicing like that and varying it. It’s like having a ball of clay, and you make a crease in that ball of clay with every variation you do, like it’s widening and deepening.
Gary: That’s a nice way to put it. That’s it.
Jason: In terms of Bach, would you put fingerings in for people?
Gary: Rarely.
Bowing the Double Bass
I feel that the biggest challenge of playing the bass is bowing. I’ve never found fingering to be much of a challenge, especially with my weak third finger. You can do almost everything on the bass with two fingers. I never found fingering very interesting or complicated.
But bowing was always a big challenge, and every time they changed the bowing in the Bach, they’d have to change their fingerings because if you’re going to put a bunch of notes under one bow, you don’t want to move around with your left hand a lot.
The only interesting thing about fingering was the 1, 2, 4, and learning where all the other notes are on the lower two strings.
Jason: It’s so easy to get caught up in fingerings though, right?
Gary: All the books do.
I find that really distressing because of all the string instruments. The bass is by far the most difficult one to bow.
Jason: I think we know why, but what are some of those reasons?
Gary: First of all, the string responds slowly. The strings are fat and big, and it takes a real understanding to get them moving. I don’t know if you ever read the article I wrote for The Strad about conductors and how stupid they are.
Jason: Describe some of those reasons.
Gary: Lots of things happened. In Europe, the beginning of orchestral playing dates back to the early 1800s, or even the late 1700s. Most of the playing, of course, was German bow. The conductors would see the cellists moving, and they wanted more sound from the bass all the time.
They figured out how to get more sound by using more bow. So they were always asking for more bow, which is the wrong thing.
If you wanted more sound, you would use less bow and get closer to the bridge. But that was their solution. The result was that all the German bow makers, like Pfretzschner, made these stupidly long bows to satisfy the conductors.
And then, of course, they’d have to use more rosin because the bow doesn’t want to go that fast across the string, so you’d have to put more rosin on. That created a whole traditional way of bowing the bass, which is wrong to begin with, I think, which is still very present. And it’s still very prevalent.
Gut and Steel Double Bass Strings
Jason: Gary and I were at his Jim Hamm bass and the string spacing and how much closer together it is than what you see in many basses. He also described why basses are spaced so widely. Can you describe the gut tradition and how this came down?
Gary: I spent most of my youth with gut strings. You needed wider spacing. First of all, they were thicker, so they took up more space, and then they swang more. Also, they had to be higher off the fingerboard because they weren’t quite as taut as a metal string.
What they did for the lower strings was that if you wanted your strings a little bit closer, they did these cutaway fingerboards. So the top two strings were like a normal fingerboard, and then they would drop the fingerboard suddenly for the lower two strings.
For years, you couldn’t even buy an ebony fingerboard to put on your bass that didn’t have that drop-away lower two. That was just the convention. It took all them a long time to wake up to the fact that you don’t need that cutaway with metal strings.
There were other things, like the basses manufactured with small end pins. The longest was maybe six to eight inches at the most. That was it. That’s all you can get. You couldn’t even buy one longer.
Double Bass Posture
And, of course, bass players kept getting taller, too. So they’re bending over their instruments, which became a way of playing. I couldn’t believe it. There were schools where they bend over with the instrument, and they kept the instrument from twirling around by holding their foot up, foot on the bottom of the instrument, and stuff like that.
They had very strange postures, all of which were related to the fact that they never thought of raising the bass higher so they could stand taller.
Jason: If you took the bass away from someone standing in that posture and holding that posture for any period of time…
Gary: I wrote an article in International Musician (this was like in the early sixties), about that. Fortunately, some bass players, especially tall ones, said, “Oh God, this sounds good. We better get one of these long ones.” They started manufacturing long end pins.
You came in with that wheel. Nobody had wheels. One of the first ones ever really developed with that airplane wheel on it was in Wisconsin. That was the first ISB. 1967. It was the first one that had that — that’s from an airplane. It’s a great invention.
Jason: You saved a lot of bass player’s arms.
Gary: Bass players always complain about a bad back, and I thought if you’re standing up in proper posture, why should you have a bad back? Then I realized, yeah, you have a bad back from carrying the bass.
Think of all the times you’re carrying that bass; you’re really putting a strain on your back, and there’s no easy way to carry the bass. The most efficient ergonomic way of carrying a bass is probably on your back. But who does that?
Jason: That sort of wheel has been a total lifesaver for me, especially having lived in Chicago and dealt with the snow. I could get through the snow bank much better.
Gary: Another thing. Reinshagen, my teacher. He was just aghast when I came to his house with the wheel. He was shocked.
Stenholm was the guy in Wisconsin. Robert Stenholm. Okay. He also made machines (bass extensions). He was the first to create a truly effective wheel for this airplane design. This had a spring in it, too. A shock absorber. It was really good.
So Reinshagen, he had never seen that before. That was my invention because I was such a lazy kid. You have no idea. So I made one. I made a wheel. It was just a little wheel. I figured out a way to stick it into my end pin.
When I bought Reinshagen’s bass, it didn’t even have an end pin that you could raise or lower. There was no screw on it. I got six wooden carved end pins—each one for different heights.
I said, “How did you carry your bass in New York all those years?”
He looked at me in amazement. “Carry the bass?” he said, “We never carry basses. We always have bass carriers.”
These were professional guys.
Jason: I remember hearing about that. Yeah, that’s a different era.
Gary: Union carriers. Yeah. He never carried a bass in his life.
Jason: Can you imagine?
Gary: I don’t think I would have retired so early if I could afford a bass carrier.
Double Bass Rosin
Jason: We were talking about rosin, the soft rosins, and how that’s a holdover from the gut string era.
Gary: Oak Rosin was very popular at the time. They put something in the rosin to keep it from powdering because when rosin powdered on the gut strings, not only did it eat it up and then the string would start to unravel, but it’s scratchy. You would make a scratchy sound. You wanted to minimize that.
There would always be a modicum of powder on the string, but it didn’t have to be so much. That was why we used the soft rosins. And I remember the days when, because this is Los Angeles, if you left your rosin in a parked car with all the windows up, you came back, and it looked like it had been fried.
When they changed to metal strings, they didn’t change the formula because metal strings ate up the rosin faster than gut. They were selling more of it, so why change it? They thought they were onto a good thing.
It never changed. From that point on, all the bass rosins had some kind of softness to them.
I started using cello rosin early on when I switched to metal strings. Cello rosin did powder, and I didn’t like that very much. I didn’t use a lot of it.
I had to learn something my teachers didn’t teach me: how to project a sound above a symphony orchestra without straining. I found the only way to do that was– there was no other choice– I had to learn how to play closer to the bridge than I had been taught.
Gary: If you used a sticky rosin, the bow would not move. So, I had to do a harder rosin to allow me to go closer to the bridge.
Then, this French company that put out Bernardel rosin made a bass rosin with the same basic formula as cello, although a darker sap, which works really well. That’s what I’ve been using.
Jason: And you made that transition from gut to steel. You shared with me about Stuart Sankey, who was involved with the first public performance on steel strings. Can you tell that story?
Switching to Steel Strings and Changing Bridges
Gary: It was in Aspen, and I had to play in the student concert.
The day before the concert, he put on steel strings. And I’d never played on steel strings before. So, I had to make that transition really fast. In the end, I think I look back very favorably on it. He made me very flexible. And then, before my town hall debut, he changed bridges. on my bass, that was the same day.
Jason: Why did he think you needed a new bridge?
Gary: All of a sudden? I have no idea. I don’t know whether it was a bit of a sadism or being a good teacher. But in the end, I learned from it because I had to adjust. It was not like my other bridge, and so I had to adjust very fast.
Harmon: With the Koussevitzky bass, Gary traveled with five bridges.
Jason: For different climates?
Gary: Yeah. I had a jack. I just put it underneath a bridge: jack it up, remove it, and put the other bridge down. It only took me 30 seconds. Actually, it was a lot more efficient than those adjusters.
I did have adjusters on my bass early on when they came up with the idea of adjusters. I tried it out.
First of all, I was unhappy that it took so long to change a bridge’s height. It wasn’t an easy fix, so I wondered if I could change a bridge faster just by doing it manually, one bridge to another.
That didn’t seem to be much of an improvement. But then, when I became really sensitive to playing closer to the bridge and all this stuff, I realized that those adjusters interfered with the way the bow felt on the string. It was like taking a bath with your socks on.
I hate playing on basses with adjusters. I’ve had to do it, and I really hate it. I just don’t like the feel at all. I’m very proprioceptive (definition: the sense of body position, movement, and force), and that’s a term I use often.
Feeling the Sound vs. Hearing the Sound
I think I feel the sound a lot stronger than I hear it. I’m convinced that if you feel the sound if you listen if you’re trying to listen to what you’re doing, it’s too late.
Jason: Are you feeling the vibrations from the instrument, or are you feeling like the air moving?
Gary: All of the above, but mostly the bow. If you’re sensitive to the way the bow feels on the string, that kinetic energy we were talking about. If you feel that contact and the way the bow vibrates, that determines the speed and the amount of weight you need to put on the bow. If you become sensitive to that, it’s very physical.
In addition, the bass is leaning against your body, and you feel it all along your body. When standing up or sitting down, a knee stops the bass from turning, so they get it over there, too.
I always love to play on a podium. I did that mainly because I wanted to raise the F-holes a little bit. The violins are up here, and then the bass F holes are way down there. I thought I should be the same height as the conductor. It’ll project better. What I loved about standing on a podium is that it vibrates, and my feet get a nice massage while I’m playing. I love that feeling.
I’m getting all this feedback, all this physical, proprioceptive feedback. It’s just really wonderful.
Harmon: Talk about Hector.
Gary: Yeah, Hector Tirado. He’s a guy you should interview (we did.) He’s so interesting. He is astoundingly deaf. There are different levels of deafness, but he’s way, way down there.
Even wearing super audio hearing aids, he still can’t hear you too well. He reads lips. He studied with me when I taught at Yale and then subsequently came to many of the Karr Kamps. First of all, he produces the most beautiful sound on the bass. It is so warm and so gorgeous.
When he studied at Yale, he would come to the lesson and play. The sound was always nice, but there was something wrong, something missing. I always felt it, coming from such a similar approach to the bass as he had to do.
I said to him, “Would this be insulting?” I felt very embarrassed about asking.
“Do you mind taking your hearing aids away? Just put them on the stand and then play this again?”
He played it again. The sound exploded. It was the same gorgeous sound but much bigger and more projecting. The intonation was so much better.
I said, “From now on, you can leave your hearing aids at home. When you come for a lesson, read my lips. But I want to hear you play without it. “
This is the way he played, and it was absolutely fabulous. Then, we did a concert in Victoria during Karr Kamp. We do a concert, an annual concert every year. He and I played duets together. We rehearsed on the stage in the hall. And I didn’t really, I wasn’t looking at him, and his sound was so small.
I said to him, and I looked up, and he had his hearing aids on. I said, “Would you take those out?” Harmon was in the audience, and several people in the class were in the audience for the rehearsal. He took them out, and again, the sound exploded, equaled mine, and it was just perfect. Wow!
It’s such a big difference. But the amazing thing was the way it changed the intonation.
Harmon: Gary still says to this day, you feel intonation, you don’t hear it. You can’t change it after you’ve already heard it.
Gary: Your finger can make a very fast adjustment because it feels the sound, too.
The strings vibrate a lot under the finger, and it can make that adjustment faster than your ears can hear it. He’s written about it. He’s, and it’s really interesting.
When he played with piano, I asked him, “How do you hear the piano?”
Because he can’t, that’s the amazing part.
He said what you just said, which I never realized. I probably do, too, but I never had to refine it to the degree he did. I get it from the air.
Harmon: I said, “How do you always know?”
Because I don’t play with a bass player with a line of sight.
I think it’s too late if you wait to be seen. I don’t want anybody giving me nods and so on and so forth. I look away from them. Because you can feel it better and be more accurate. And Hector said, “I just feel the air from the piano.”
When you’re ready to play, I know that you come in and that it’s there.
Jason: Proprioceptive, I love that word. That’s a great word. Was that something you always intuitively got, or do you remember becoming more in harmony with that at a certain point?
Gary: I was never aware of what I was doing. It was instinctive, and it was so instinctive that it wasn’t until I started teaching, probably, that I had to formulate in my mind what I was doing.
The instinct was there from day one because I had a wire tape recorder, a performance of me at nine years old. And the sound was still my sound, and it was different from anybody in my family.
And that sound is a physical thing. It has nothing to do with a concept. It’s a feeling.
Jason: So Hector, by taking out those hearing aids, he tapped more fully into that, and all of a sudden, everything came alive. Another student, maybe not with the hearing issues, how do you get people to tap into that?
Vomit Exercises and Shifting
Gary: During Karr Kamp, every morning, we did an hour and a half of exercises altogether, like Vomit. Vomit is a physical exercise. It has nothing to do with fingering.
Jason: It’s easy to think it’s just that, right?
Gary: Yeah. It’s a bowing exercise. It was misinterpreted. It’s been misinterpreted by so many people. It’s a bowing exercise. It really is a challenge to the bow.
Shifting on the bass is wrongly perceived as a left-hand maneuver. Shifting is a right-hand maneuver.
Once you understand that, it’s so much easier, but you have to practice shifting an awful lot with your left hand because you don’t know what you’re doing with the right, and it takes forever to really get a sense of what’s happening.
But in actuality, what you’re doing is refining your right hand, but you don’t know it.
Why not know it and do it right from the beginning? Shifting teaches you bow placement and bow speed. Because you’re shifting from a low note to a very high note. So you have two distinct, different speeds. And the closer you can get to the bridge while you’re doing it, the less the ratio, and that’s what you’re aiming for.
I would have done it faster, but the class determined the tempo of this thing. Our vomits, believe it or not, lasted 45 to 50 minutes of the hour.
Jason: Wow.
Gary: Yeah. Bowing is The other technical thing I would do for the warm-ups. I think the hardest maneuver on the bass is string crossing.
String crossing, for the same reason as vomit, is hard because you’re doing two speeds. When crossing strings, you must be sensitive to the different responses you get from each string. It’s much more definitive than it is on a cello or violin.
On the violin, you can go to the G string and still draw it pretty much at the same speed as the E string and get a fairly decent sound. It would be better if you slowed it down for the E, but you still can. The ratio is much closer.
Bow changes are taught in all these books because the bow is moving so fast. But when the bow moves at the right speed, you don’t have to teach a bow change. You’re already slow.
Gary: My bow changes are very slow, so what’s there to do? I hardly do anything.
My teacher, Herman Reitzaugen, used to criticize me for that. He told me, “You know, when you go to New York, they’re going to make fun of you for not using more wrists than your right hand.” I remember him telling me that.
[laughter]
Gary: The wrist should be relaxed all the time and flexible, but it certainly shouldn’t be used to begin a bow change.
Jason: When you’re feeling the sound, that whole proprioceptive sensation, when you’re moving that bow, where is that coming from?
Gary: Mostly the back. I make minimal motion in my arm. My elbow doesn’t move much, and my wrist doesn’t move much. All the power comes from the back. The reason I use my back Is because it puts more weight on the bow, which makes it move slower.
I don’t want a fast bow. If you use a fast bow, you really are cutting off your back. You can’t use a fast bow if you’re using your back. But if you want to slow the bow down, a good way to do it is just to concentrate on the back, and it automatically slows it down because the back doesn’t move that fast.
Practicing
Jason: You’ve spent your whole career looking out a window practicing. You’ve got this gorgeous view here in Las Vegas of the mountains, and then you go outside in the morning and practice pretty much every day.
Gary: Yeah. I love to practice in the sun, and I’m not going to take a regular bass out there in the sun. It’s not good for the instrument, but I have an Alter Ego bass, which is a skeletal bass, and I stand behind a chair with a high back so that the body of the skeletal bass, the little wood that there is still in the shade for most of the time.
Harmon: Jim Hamm modified the skeleton so it feels exactly like his hand bass.
Gary: Yeah, it feels like my Hamm bass. And it doesn’t have any sound. It’s really a great way to concentrate and focus on proprioception because it’s very “unnatural.” mostly physical.
I love to practice outside. It’s like looking out the window. It’s very calming. Nature is calming. When I traveled and checked in, I said, ” I don’t care what the beds are. I don’t care what anything is. I just need a good window to look out of because I spent a lot of time working looking out of the window.”
The other thing, too, is that if you’re memorizing music, it’s a nice way to do it. You look out the window, and you don’t have music in front of you. I’ve memorized most everything I play.
Jason: What’s the first thing you do when you take that bass outside and play?
Gary: What I’ve done for most of my life is the first 20 minutes, sometimes 25 minutes, it’s warm-up.
I start with thirds. I do a lot of double stops as a warm-up. Because double stops, first of all, from a bowing standpoint, are twice as hard as a single note. And the second thing is that intonation-wise, it’s much more challenging than a single note.
So, I do scales in thirds. Usually four scales and patterns in thirds all the way up and down. And I do scales in sixths, the second octave, all in sixths using two different fingerings, one and three, and thumb and two. And I do scale patterns across the strings. That’s my warm-up.
In recent years, I have been doing a Paganini piece next, not the Moses Fantasy. It’s another one, and it has six variations, like my etude. I know I’m in good shape if I can get through that. I was doing that almost every day, and that really loosened me up and got my bow going.
Since we came down to Las Vegas, I found going outside in this very dry temperature when I’m doing thirds and sixths really hard on my fingers. They were cracking in the sun. I’d never had a finger crack, and it was painful, so I just thought, gee, maybe I shouldn’t do these thirds high up because maybe I’m doing damage to my fingers.
But I wanted to warm up on something else. I’ve memorized three Bach suites, so I decided to start memorizing the other three. I’ve been working on the fifth, memorizing the fifth. And so I go out every day for 20 minutes to 25 minutes.
I have them all, almost all memorized now. That’s a good challenge, and there’s a lot to play. Bowing-wise, it has lots of double stops, so that’s really good.
After I do that, if I’m learning a new work or if I’m going to perform something, I’ll play through that.
When I played in Amsterdam in May, I played 90 minutes of music nonstop. It was all from memory; I just went through the program every day.
Oh, I just love playing and talking about proprioceptivity.
I’m enjoying that so much. I’m learning more and more about the bow. I’m playing a slower bow and closer to the bridge than I’ve ever played in my life. And it just feels so good.
