Week of November 29

G-flat Major Scale
Kreutzer 14
Fuga from A-minor Sonata

I have never played a piece in G-flat, and there's a good reason for that:  it's a bewildering key.  I can only think about the notes, like G-flat, C-flat, by converting them to familiar ones like F sharp and B natural.  It's very high on the E-string, because the three octaves begin not with open G but G-flat nearly an octave higher.  This is the highest 3-octave scale Flesch will ask of me. 

The open strings provide little consolation on this scale.  In many cases, when you get to the top of a scale, you can just play an open A and hear if you're in tune or if you've wandered into another key on your way up the E string.  For G-flat, you have two options:  play an A and think "am I a major sixth plus 2 octaves above the A?" (an interval that isn't particularly easy to hear); go to the D string and listen for a major third plus 3 octaves. 

A fiddler would just tune the whole violin down a half step.