After playing hundreds of events throughout the years I have finally put some of my personal arrangements down on paper. This version of the Star-Spangled Banner is both fun to play and enjoyable to listen to. There is a balance of jazzy chords without losing the character of the piece. This is both a challenging work to practice a multitude of finger patterns and a great performance piece.

For those who are still working on chords and double-stops, the three-note chords can be altered to just playing the top two bringing the difficulty down.

Quarantine Etudes for Violin by Dr. Piotr Szewczyk
Composed in May 2020 during the global pandemic.

All major etude books for violin, including those by Mazas, Kreutzer, Dont and
others, are firmly rooted in romantic harmonic language; minor and major triads,
arpeggios, diminished and augmented chords, dominant 7th etc.

A 21st Century violinist will encounter a much more varied musical language.
Those standard etudes don?t prepare students for octatonic scales, various
modes, whole tone scales, rapid chromatic twists and turns, atonality, extended
jazz harmonies etc. that are a big part of contemporary music.

I created these bite-sized etudes to help students experience different musical
languages and go against the ingrained familiar patterns their fingers are used to.
I hope they will be fun and adventurous challenge for violin students of all ages.