NOT MUCH INCLINED to perform tasks I don’t fully understand or with which I don’t agree, I, for better or worse, just stopped practicing scales altogether during my college years and halfheartedly played my last two ever at the occasion of my junior exam at the Israeli Academy. It is preferable, I convinced myself, to warm up improvising on my instrument, greeting it in the mornings in a friendly way, rather than subjecting it to some harsh and boring disciplinary action. I thought that working on every passage in my pieces with full attention to what my bow does, where all my fingers are, how they got there, and where ideally they should be is as useful as practicing scales, if not more so.

As far as I was concerned, scale work should never be divorced from actual music.

So without getting into a lengthy debate on the actual merits of daily scale work (which I happen to think is—and should be—debatable), how should one approach scale work, if not in the traditional way? I presented my viola students at the Jacobs School of Music with a plan that will allow them to gradually diminish their work on conventional scales, replacing them—again, gradually—with their own scale collection, gathered from actual music. It should be said that not before my freshmen graduate will I be able to label the plan a success or failure.

Meanwhile, this subject may be of some interest to young string players who desire to renovate and upgrade their work tools, and who are ready to question practices of time passed without fearing charges of heresy.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

Concerning our mainstream scale systems (e.g., Sevcik, Flesch, Galamian, and others) these questions have never been answered to my full satisfaction:

• Why repeat scales over and over with a fixed set of fingerings? Isn’t it true that fingerings should be chosen with a musical consideration in mind? If so, what is the point in “brainwashing” ourselves, or our students, endlessly repeating scales fingered one way, then, free-mindedly, exploring whole other ways to finger our “real” music? (I remember rehearsing a passage from Mozart’s Symphonie Concertante with a wonderful violinist friend, a former student of Heifetz and, as such, a notorious scale aficionado. Questioning him about his choice of fingering, I was categorically told that his was “the correct fingering for an A♭ major passage”—a statement illustrating my concerns.)

• Why limit our scale work to major and minor modes while, for quite a number of generations, most composers have not?

• Why limit our scale work to symmetrical patterns, so typical to ordinary scale systems, when most of the music we play is—happily—far from being symmetrical?

• Isn’t it true that today’s string players should apply different kinds of intonation to different kinds of passages? Shouldn’t we acquire, indeed cultivate, the ability and the flexibility to switch at will from an “expressive intonation” in a given solo passage to a tempered one when performing with a piano, to “just intonation” when playing Baroque music?

A different proposition is this heavenly, elusive “quartet intonation” (“with the overtones making love in the sky” as, to the sheer delight of many of my young students, I am known to have said in a Cleveland Quartet documentary). Why is it so difficult for any four otherwise excellent players to just sit down and play a quartet in tune? Is it not reasonable to suggest that stubbornly repeating scales with one-and-the-same kind of intonation could be detrimental to flexibility in intonation? What is the purpose of educating our fingers (and, doing so, our ears) to always drive to the very same spot on the fingerboard regardless of what intonation we would later wish to apply?

A FULL-SCALE INVESTIGATION

Abandoning traditional scale work altogether may have worked for me, but it may not necessarily work for everyone; years of teaching (and, yes, more than a few years of living), taught me that people are different, have different needs, and are capable of using different means to reach their goals. Indeed, I recognize that a great number of students do need—want—to begin their days with the discipline and purpose of scale work. To let them do just that, while also minding my own concerns in regard to the existing scale books and what I humbly consider their shortcomings, is why I presented my students with a new way of selecting their scale material.

I strongly believe that extracting scale-like patterns from existing music is the best way to choose material for daily scale work. Take for example, a section from Walton’s Viola Concerto, third movement, Rehearsal No. 46. Do forget for a moment that it is a familiar excerpt from a familiar piece, and work on it in the very same left-side-of-the-brain way you would on any abstract scale, taking care of shifts, smooth string crossing, evenness of sound. Examine it and find out if you want to use more or less bow at the frog or the tip, at the upper or lower strings. Find out what would be the best location for your bow between the fingerboard and the bridge in this particular passage. How percussive do you want your fingers to be? From how far away should they hit the strings?

Briefly, work on this excerpt in the same way you would on any abstract scale. But do it with your own “musical” fingering and with your choice of intonation befitting the passage (for instance, decide how “expressive” you want your intonation to be and whether or not you should increase the expressiveness the faster you play). And, by all means, allow yourself to celebrate your good and tedious work by giving the right side of your brain a fair shot as well, playing the passage with a lower level of technical thinking, and a higher level of musical desire and energy. Imagine playing this passage in an audition, in a student concert, in a grand venue (Carnegie Hall—after all, you practiced, practiced, practiced).

If you are a violinist, you could give the passage from the first movement of Sonata No. 1, Op. 80 (m. 79), by Prokofiev the same treatment. For a greater benefit, ask a pianist to donate a little time and play the piano part with you during some of this scale work.

Or try the first movement of Berg’s Violin Concerto (m. 169). By the way, what kind of intonation does a 12-tone passage deserve?

The passage from Bartok’s Quartet No. 3 (coda, m. 3) offers the cellists among us an interesting scale-like workout on one string (violists can find the same a staff above in the score).

Want to cover a bigger range of your instrument? Try the opening section (and the concluding major version) of Caprice No. 5 by Paganini. Similarly, a violist can find plenty of good scale work in Bach-Kodály’s Fantasia Chromatica.

The list of scale-like fragments from actual music is endless. Almost every piece of music we play has some potentially useful scale material. Right now, I happen to find a passage from Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata (second movement, m. 169) on my own music stand, begging me for some serious scale work: slow, controlled, and calculated at first; devilishly fast, brilliant, clear, and smooth by the end.

Now imagine a whole book full of passages like this, all extracted from actual music. An extensive collection of scales of all kinds and shapes: Tonal, modal, atonal, microtonal (we are living in the 21st century!), chromatic scales, arpeggios, double-stops (using all intervals, not just selected ones), scales over a single string, scales all over the instrument, scales derived from different periods and styles, scales of all levels of difficulty and complexity. An album like this, if one existed, would add musical dimension and maybe some more fun to our scale work while catering to order and discipline in our playing. (For many years I was secretly planning to be the author of such an album. With a certain smile I remember dreaming of hundreds, if not thousands, of string players beginning their days with the Arad Scale Book and how flattering to a thirsty ego it would be….)

BOOK BUILDING

Here is the idea I presented to my class in order to make our imaginary scale book a reality. First step—the student learns to copy music on the computer, using a music application such as Finale or Sibelius (worth learning anyway). The student then begins to select scale-like passages from actual music that he or she is working on—or listening to—in solo, chamber-music, or orchestra repertoire. The selection is then copied on the computer and added to a file. Given time, the file will contain a growing number of excerpts. A modest number of two scales a week will multiply into eight a month, 96 a year, 384 (okay, I am joking) by the time a freshman will perform her or his senior recital.

Thanks to the computer, the file can very easily be organized into groups under such headings as tonality, period, genre, level of difficulty, or type (arpeggios, double-stops, chromatic scales, and so on). In addition, scales could be easily transposed so that a short selection on a single string could be practiced in all other positions as well.

Any collection, be it stamps, art, or butterflies, begins with the basic and the common, and then becomes more sophisticated and precious, mirroring the growing passion and knowledge of the collector. Likewise, our scale collection, simple to begin with, will increase in quality as it will in quantity. The amassing scales will become more and more useful, beneficial, and interesting as we collect them.

I can see my students and others—not unlike kids exchanging stamps or baseball cards—discussing and exchanging their collected scales. I can easily see them, as children of the 21st century, doing this via their beloved e-mail, websites, MySpace, YouTube (or, dare I say, via StringPedagogy.com, an astonishing website created by my very significant one, Mimi Zweig, whose endorsement I am not that sure to get—she loves Flesch and Galamian).

When I first presented the plan and the reasoning behind it to my class, I could sense a fair amount of hesitation. This was understandable. After all, so many students around them are practicing conventional scales, as do most teachers, as did, religiously, generations of string players before. Didn’t Heifetz!?

Yes, he did.

Arguably the greatest violinist of all time, Heifetz used to practice many hours of abstract scales and demanded his students double the amount. Why not do precisely the same? Wouldn’t many of us give our souls to experience one Heifetz-like moment in our entire performing lives? I would (and, for the life of me, can’t), but I also have to allow that Heifetz—as did Primrose, Casals, and many other giants of their instruments—lived in his own time and that we live in ours. The art of one generation is never an exact replica of that of another generation. The music we play today is not necessarily the same music played 50 years ago (50 years of newly composed music is a considerably long time in the history of music), nor do we want to play it in the very same way. To become an integral part of a new generation of performers, be it orchestra members, chamber-music players, soloists, or teachers, music students (and their teachers) might not find it a bad idea to reexamine and freshen the material from which they are working.

The plan I suggested to my own students (for fun and for a 21st century flavor, let’s call it the iScales) is just a very small token of what can possibly be done in the spirit and means of our time.