[Illustration:  Musical Notation]

I prepare every shift.  Absolute accuracy of intonation and a singing legato is the result.  These guiding notes indicated are merely a test to prove the scientific spacing of the violin; they are not sounded once control of the hand has been obtained. They serve only to accustom the fingers to keep moving in the direction in which they are going.

“The tone is produced by the left hand, by the weight of the fingers plus an undercurrent of sustained effort.  Now, you see, if in the moment of sliding you prepare the bow for the next string, the slide itself is lost in the crossing of the bow.  To carry out consistently this idea of effort and relaxation in the downward progression of the scale, you will find that when you are in the third position, the position of the hand is practically the same as in the first position.  Hence, in order to go down from third to first position with the hand in what might be called a ‘block’ position, another movement is called for to bridge over this space (between third and first position), and this movement is the function of the thumb.  The thumb, preceding the hand, relaxes the wrist and helps draw the hand back to first position.  But great care must be taken that the thumb is not moved until the first finger will have been played; otherwise there will be a tendency to flatten.  In the illustration the indication for the thumb is placed after the note played by the first finger.

“The inviolable law of beautiful playing is that there must be no angles.  As I have shown you, right and left hand cooerdinate.  The fiddle hand is preparing the change of position, while the change of strings is prepared by the right hand.  And always the slides in the left hand are prepared by the last played finger—­the last played finger is the true guide to smooth progression—­just as the bow hand prepares the slides in the last played bowing.  There should be no such thing as jumping and trusting in Providence to land right, and a curse ought to be laid on those who let their fingers leave the fingerboard.  None who develop this fundamental aspect of all good playing lose the perfect control of position.

“Of course there are a hundred nuances of technic (into which the quality of good taste enters largely) that one could talk of at length:  phrasing, and the subtle things happening in the bow arm that influence it; spiccato, whose whole secret is finding the right point of balance in the bow and, with light finger control, never allowing it to leave the string.  I’ve never been able to see the virtue of octaves or the logic of double-stops.  Like tenths, one plays or does not play them.  But do they add one iota of beauty to violin music?  I doubt it!  And, after all, it is the poetry of playing that counts.  All violin playing in its essence is the quest for color; its perfection, that subtle art which hides art, and which is so rarely understood.”