Viola lesson recap - 1 Feb 2011

After a somewhat frustrating week of practice trying to grok the intonation of the first few notes on the fingerboard, it was pretty awesome to have my teacher essentially say "You seem distracted by that bit of scratchyness...let's try using a bit more bow, like this..." and all of a sudden have the viola start emitting a nice, clean, mostly in-tune B and C♯ instead of the noise of indeterminate pitch that seemed to be coming out of it before.

There was more, but I'm still kind of gobsmacked by the fact that I can land my fingers at an unmarked and seemingly-random point on the fingerboard and have a discrete note come out of the instrument as a result. ^_^;

ETA: As an aside -- putting the cart way before the horse, but this gives me hope for maybe one day being able to jam with people in diverse styles of music. This is Sonny Rollin's jazz standard "St Thomas" played on piano, congas, and......viola! =)