Lesson 146 - Transposing

It's been a bit of a slack week cello wise due to other deadlines.

Managed a meagre one day working on the Beethoven Sonata using notes from last week. It has been less of a struggle playing the notes but it is starting to feel like a mild plateau again. Then again, it could just be that I'm suddenly overwhelmed by the potential possibilities from overcoming the especially steep hill that was recently plaguing progress.

Pablo Casals, at age 90 responded to someone asking him why he continued to practise - “Because I think I am making progress."

Whilst some may find this depressing, it's really about the infinite lessons to be had when playing the cello - the lifetime companion.

During lessons, we spoke about the Suzuki method and how differences in the western culture didn't translate the concept as well as it could; the books were taken at face value instead of this holistic approach, where the nature of group lessons seemed attractive and cost effective to schools as opposed to the traditional one-to-one lessons. This, however, does not take into account that eastern Suzuki teachers trained for many, many years in the method to make it work.

Such is the sad state of schools without a music curriculum, and soon - art.

Today we looked at transposing music. I thought hard about what to tackle in today's lesson but I didn't want it to be the usual stuff - Deryn suggested looking at pieces or discussing scales. The latter sounded interesting so I brought up jazz scales where it was suggested that I could maybe get a basic piano jazz scale book and focus on the bass clef for cello instead.

We then took a small section of the Beethoven Sonata (bars 122 to 130) and transposed it down to F Major.

To warm up the body and mind a bit, we played B flat Major 3 octaves scale and arpeggios before proceeding to F Major.

Just keep in mind the first note of the bar in relation to the tonic of the scale. From there, it was pretty straight forward to transpose. Easy peasy!

Minor scale, however, is a totally different ball game.