Body movement awareness as a path to expression in violin playing

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.