Teen Violinist's Daily Routine 1 Week Before a Show | Teen Vogue

Hello, I am Keller Winterhill and I am a 14-year-old

violinist

. I have been playing the violin for eight and a half years. I practice 11 hours a day and I am a student at Juilliard High School. Hello, pillar of practicing my violin to living in New York City, this is a

week

. in my life i hope to be able to do this the piece i was practicing this

week

was caprice number 24 composed by nicola paganini this is him right here it is considered one of the most difficult pieces ever written for solo violin and it is one of my favorites it has really difficult things like parallel octaves, fast changes, very fast scales, left hand pizzicato, double stops, triple stops, aka chords.

When I first heard this piece when I was very young, I remember hearing the left. hit the cauter part with your hand, this part of the piece is very difficult because it is different than most other violin pieces where the pizzicato is with the right hand, so it's not like I didn't know it could be done that with the violin at the beginning, so I was just looking at that like, oh, how do you do that? I want to learn how to do that and this week I was working on it very carefully because of this big performance I was preparing for.

I practice violin up to 11 hours a day this is what my day usually looks like 7am right now I just woke up before I start practicing I like to do yoga I'm following social distancing so I'm away from everyone else yoga really helps me because it really calms my mind and

violinist

s can have carpal tunnel or tendinitis stretching their fingers. I usually split my practice into three shifts, so I have my morning, afternoon and evening practice session during my morning practice session. I don't practice any of my pieces, I just practice warm-up exercises like scale arpeggios and etudes and these exercises are really helpful, especially for keeping my fingers nice and relaxed and fluid.

My first practice shift lasts approximately four hours after my first practice session. I usually have lunch or run some errands. Delicious ice cream sandwiches. It's starting to rain so I have to hurry home, but I have some great sandwiches for lunch. Sometimes I eat at home, this looks great, or sometimes I go out. Oh my god, I haven't been to a restaurant in months. I'm really excited that my afternoon practice is just an opportunity for me to take the piece I'm going to perform and really break it down and practice it very slowly after my second practice turn.

I usually have dinner with my family or have a drink. family time and I usually go on social media just to keep up with my followers and supporters, so for my third and final practice shift I usually take the parts that I worked on very slowly in my second practice shift and I work on them in tempo, which means playing at the speed they would normally be played in a concert. One of the things my teacher and I were working on this week was helping a lot with the Italian style of playing, so Nicola Paganini was an Italian virtuoso. violinist and an amazing musician and my teacher has been helping me play it more like an opera singer, just playing the violin like you're singing it so people can say oh, it sounds like opera, this piece you really want the bass. go out more and then maybe you want the soprano to come out more when I officially started playing the violin I was six years old and I was so hungry to learn that half an hour a week with one teacher wasn't really enough, at one point I had like five teachers , including a music theory professor.

Yes, it sure wasn't one of the most conventional ways to learn to play the violin, but it was great because I was getting different ideas from different teachers and whenever I wanted. play in a lesson my teacher would say I don't remember teaching you I really love playing the violin and when I go to bed I'm really exhausted because it's like a full workout you know all the muscles are working it's around 11 or 'watch I'm ready to deliver good evening so I've had my violin for about four years now it's more of a modern violin it's Dutch it's made in the 1930s it's still relatively young it's 90 years old in violin years there are violins that were made like in the 17th century and 18th century and there is a difference in the sound.

The violin is a very delicate instrument and overexposure to heat and cold. Hot and cold weather can be very damaging, it can crack wood, so I use this. a little device called a moisturizer and I dip it in water, I moisten it and it just keeps the humidity levels stable when I practice, I keep it overnight and I practice with it when I perform, I don't have it on also when I play outside I have to make sure they are only about 15 minutes at a time. I can never spend a full hour outside, so my bow is made of horse hair.

The hairs and some hairs are different colors, but mine is more standard. This way and over time I can lose a little bit of hair, so you see, there's like a little gap here and there's also some sweat and oil built up on my hand. This is my resin and I focused a little more on the bottom. half and I don't do this every day only when I feel like I really need it, it just gives the violin a nice clean vibrant sound. I also have to clean the rosin dust off the violin because it can get a little gross over time. and sticky this week my bow has been giving me a bit of trouble because it needs a new hairstyle and since I was using the rosin a lot more I had to keep cleaning the dust off the violin because I didn't want any of it.

It also happened to the violin as it was getting closer this big performance, I was really stressed because my bow wouldn't hold up the night before my performance, I broke my string in half, I was in the middle of practice and then my string. My E string broke in half. My gig is literally tomorrow and I was hoping they would have another rope and thank God I did. The rope is so thin I actually thought it wasn't there, so I freaked out like, oh no. Thank God it didn't happen during my performance, which was tomorrow, that was scary.

I really wanted to practice later in the evening, but since my string broke, I decided to finish early and start again earlier the next morning, the night before my performance. a really great facial one of the things i have been exploring during the kovid 19 global lockdown is facials. I am very excited about my performance for tomorrow. It's drying out so I can't move. Good morning, it's 4 a.m., I really got up. early so I could practice the morning of the presentation I felt very refreshed and I went straight to practice as you can see I'm still in my pajamas I wanted to have a really good breakfast so I ate some avocado toast and I'm going to Hurry up because I have to go back to practice because in a I'll be performing for Lindsay Sterling for a couple of hours.

I don't really feel like eating, I just want to like practicing. I wonder why I have to eat, but um, it's really good to give your body all the energy you'll need, so even though the concert was on zoom, I still wanted to dress up and the dress I chose has a little backstory. when I acted in Women in. the world summit the 10th annual summit last year I remember I was backstage and I was getting ready to perform and I walked past anna wintour she just looks at me and says oh your dress is so pretty I was impressed and I was so I was honored by comment and decided I really wanted to wear this dress.

It's

show

time. Hello everyone, thank you very much for coming. In fact, I was warming up right before. I joined the Zoom call today. We are very lucky to have a special event. Guest Miss Lindsey Sterling joins and says hello, how are you? And I'm great, thank you very much for coming. I couldn't believe that she had seen the videos of her and the medleys of her. I love the way she combines choreography and music. It's so magical and just seeing her right there on the computer talking to me I was like oh my gosh I'm so excited when she joined the call it was definitely like oh this is real I'm performing for Lindsey Stirling what are you?

I'm going to play today I'm going to play Nicola Paganini's 24th caprice once I played the first note I was ready to set the stage when I perform it, it's just me, the violin and the bow, and I'm really going to get into this space. where I'm really incorporating what I've been practicing for the past week, I'm really just emoting and telling a story through my performance, I'm not thinking about things like oh I hope I hit this note, oh I'm doing well, it's like going to thus. If I feel like I make a mistake, I still say wow, oh my gosh, relax all the time and that's one of the premium violin pieces.

When I finish the last note, I feel very relieved and I just feel good, I did it, it came out great and I can't wait to hear what everyone has to say. I just can't say enough about your articulation, your use of the bow and using the appropriate places on the bow to capture all the expressions you made, the variety and depth you brought to that piece was just phenomenal. Thinking about music as a story changed everything for me and made it so much fun for me to write pieces and tell stories, and you're just a storyteller. in the way you played the violin today and I was like, yeah, I know that because when I was practicing I was really trying to express that through my playing and I thought, wow, she realized that, oh my gosh, It was just that.

It was an incredible moment and I will always remember it. It will be very exciting to see how they take advantage of it and share it perhaps in different ways. Thank you, good luck to all of you, you are amazing, you are beautiful. You are strong and I feel so lucky to be able to spend this morning with you, oh my gosh, I'm sweating right now, like it's so hot and oh my gosh, I'm so happy. What I like most about playing the violin is how I can really express my feelings and emotions by playing in front of an audience.

It's an amazing feeling when I hear comments and how they say oh yeah, it's so beautiful I can feel like you're telling a story. I can feel how I really feel the music. I can put my own feelings into the instrument and it's like this connection that we both have and it's beautiful.