Lesson 107 & 108 - Unnatural

Lesson 107

The very idea of pulling when you do a down bow seems counter intuitive but ask any cellist in the mortal realm (those like me, not the geniuses), everything you do on the cello is "unnatural". At least, the way non-cellists have been largely living their lives anyway.

So when Deryn tells me to pull the bow during a down bow, I struggled. Until, that is, I focused all the brain power I had left to realise the concept and when it "clicked", the down bows sounded solid; like I finally made contact to the full extent of the string with the bow hair. Of course, this also left me mentally extinguished which, I suppose is better than being physically drained.

Recently, it seems as if everything I've been doing on the cello is wrong and all I've learnt up till now has not been digested at all! Deryn says this is again, normal and not at all what it seems. I've now begun to understand my abilities within the cello as opposed to just playing as told; I've levelled up. Pretty sure there should be a victory tune playing right now to signify this!



Anyways, the Popper piece was in serious need of generous, solid bows and my thumb positions needed a lot of work. It seems I've been rocking my hand to accommodate the higher notes so the shape of my hand was constantly shifting. Instead, I had to make sure to see the top of my left hand and that I was to play on the strings; from above. We haven't paid enough attention to the thumb positions so these new instructions were handy.

When we played through some of the double stop exercises, Deryn noticed that my fingers were sliding away from the frog as if to accommodate balancing over two strings. I was slightly aware of this but did not know it was a bad thing; I've been slip sliding all over that bow for ages if I were to be honest. Or at least, I thought I was. Of course, it also occurred to me all those times Deryn kept saying that the bow hand should be "stuck" to the bow and the shape should remain as is but loose and flexible. Gah :/



For all the kids at music school :}


Lesson 108

This week saw me figuring out the redistribution of weight from the left arm to the bow arm. It seems I've been depending too much on the left when it should be just a light touch on the string, from above (kinetic touch via Bunting).



I'm still figuring this out as it's been something I've been doing and learning to undo something takes a while for the brain; ie. I'll have to practise this "new" method longer than I've been playing. Hooray!

To help me with this mission, Deryn assigns Sevcik Exercise No.4 Variations with whole bows more so for the rhythms than anything else. I could apply any tune to this, like say the Popper piece and that I made sure to play the variations according to the tempo indicated for maximum effect.

We played small sections of the Popper piece, slowly and meticulously before raising the bar and changing variations. This not only establishes intonation, precision and better overall performance of the piece as the tempo increases but allows me time to familiarise myself with the notes towards memorisation of the entire score.

Next lesson, I'm to get up to bar 38 and Deryn will go through bars 39 till the end. The Popper piece has been a long time coming (5 months!) but it has been the most challenging and most rewarding. To be honest, I'm undaunted by the prospects of learning the next one!