By Rupert Guenther: Warm ups are a big topic for a lot of players. Many people have their preferred routine, and there are a lot of theories about the matter. ![Warming up]()
My former teacher Professor Helfried Fister in Austria blew my ideas out of the water in a lunchtime conversation at a summer mastercourse when I was visiting him in 2007, when he shared with me that he doesn't think warm ups are necessary.
Bearing in mind that he has an incredibly well developed view of playing the violin (Helfried Fister was a protege of the famous Slovenian violin pedagogue Igor Ozim and served as Ozim's assistant teacher for 13 years at the Hochschule in Cologne, Germany), I thought that his perspective was worth exploring.
It seemed to me to be a call to knowing thoroughly what I was doing when I play, so that everything is very conscious, and therefore not to rely on "habits" or "body memory" as it's sometimes called, to save me as they kick in unconsciously within a certain amount of playing time which may be described as "warming up".
So I began exploring what this topic might really be about.
I eventually arrived at a new approach which indeed provided me since with virtually no warm up time being necessary to be in good playing form each day.
I found that playing any music expressively with a warmth of tone that I love warms me up in all aspects of my playing very quickly.
I have added to that some all-interval playing (after the teaching of Norwegian violin virtuoso Terje Moe Hansen) over the full length of the fingerboard for just a minute to bring my intonation and left hand spatialisation on board, and I'm good to go.
But of all things, it seems to me that it's the deep personal engagement with the music which really turns my playing on.
And I'm also a listener when I play, so I'm shaping everything according to what I'm hearing, all the time from the first note.
What are your approaches and why do you feel they are necessary - perhaps it's time to explore and see if you are limiting yourself in anyway in order to quickly come to peak performance?
You might also like:
- Violinist.com interview with Simon Fischer: Warming Up
- Warming Up, Going Back to Basics
- Should I practice my concerto before orchestra rehearsal?
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