Moving the mouse cursor over the top of the page will display the menu bar.
When playing the violin my goal has always been to communicate and emotionally move my audience. I saw this as an important role as a musician in general, but it was also important for me as a human being. From the first moment I began thinking about my Masters research, I was aware that I would spend hours of practise on the violin and likely read many books. I really wanted to work on something that I was passionate about. I have always been interested in body movement. I love violinists who move easily on stage and I have always been curious about how they connect so well between their body and the instrument. I wished to have the same freedom in my own movement when playing. Violinists such as Janine Jansen and Pinchas Zuckermann were always a great inspiration for me. They were so full of power and emotion in both their musical and physical expression while playing. I felt that this kind of physical expression wasn’t my strongest point as a violinist when I started my research process. Sometimes I felt stiffness in my muscles while playing. On other occasions I had the feeling of not being able to transmit the emotions of the piece to the audience in its totality because I was having blocked or stiff movements. I also felt that my sound was affected by this stiffness. For these reasons I wished to examine the effect that body movement has on my playing. I also wished to explore how I could help my violin sound and musical phrasing through awareness of my motion. I wanted to connect more with my audience as a musician and as a person and I wished to do it through movement, but how could I connect these two subjects? Further, how could movement and physical awareness affect my violin playing? I started asking others such as teachers and musical peers about methods and ways to expand my range of movement and how to connect it with expressivity. It was a complicated topic and difficult to define what I needed. My research coach, Nicole Jordan suggested that I contact some experts in movement analysis such Annemieke Wijers from the dance and health department of Codarts. I needed a place to begin research into movement and expression. During the talk with Annemieke I was told about Laban Movement Analysis and it became the starting point of my research.
This page contains media that is intended to start playback automatically on opening. This may include sound. Your browser is blocking automated playback. Please click here to start media.