Lesson 32 - Fourth Position

Today I shared my concerns about the abnormal length of my left fingers obstructing my playing Chapter 24 of Book 2 with ease, along with pain and discomfort to a certain degree. After showing her a couple of passages, Deryn suggests playing the exercise really, really slowly to familiarise the fingering pattern whilst maintaining a good, solid tone and contact on the bow. I seem to always skip this very vital bit of practise or rather, forgetting to remember that a good established bowing hand makes all the difference in playing.

Another method I could use is lifting the fourth finger oh so slightly but still retaining position during the string crosses despite Langin's instructions; keeping in mind that they are there to guide the student for a particular reason but not the only definite means of method. This was what I was doing throughout practise, along with "tunneling" - a method I sometimes use to compensate the extra length of the second finger of my left hand. I am not too fond of this method as it encourages bad intonation and playing on the finger tips which is rather uncomfortable; all in the name of clean string crosses.

Deryn then points out that the majority of the notes are played on the D string so letting my bowing arm to begin and end at that angle will allow the string cross from G be more natural as there is very little adjustments made to accommodate it. This analytical approach to such a simple passage really drives home the fact that I should really pay more attention to the pieces I play!

We then played through a few major and minor scales and arppeggios to warm up the cello and ourselves as it was far, far too cold. I find that the cello suffers from a mild flu when the weather gets like this; she sounds muffled, her strings resonate less and they feel tougher to press on. This combined with stiff, cold muscles and fingers make an overall not too brilliant experience. Fortunately, I have the portable heater right next to her :}

Later we proceeded to play Chapter 24 again but extremely slowly and I can the difference Deryn mentioned earlier about my fingers getting more comfortable as they ease into their positions at a rate I can cope. Play slow when in doubt!

Finally, we moved on to the most exciting bit of the lesson ~ Fourth Position which requires Langin's Book 3. Deryn says we will touch on pieces that require other positions only after she has covered all the basic 4 positions with me as that would mean I am at least familiar with them and not tackling more than required.

I really love and appreciate it that Deryn starts off a new lesson with theory and concepts before we apply it to practical. This usually prompts a brisk "question and answer" session from me as naturally, I have tonnes of inquiries about how the cello works and the part it plays in music history. This time, we meandered to "how many positions does the cello have in total?" - officially, 7 but it gets fuzzy after that when we get to harmonics and thumb positions which Deryn proceeded to demonstrate, to my delight. We then covered the first few exercises where I also tried out harmonics and played the duet by Romberg which continued to the next page on a different string. I am to practise the entirety of this chapter for next week.

Like most human beings, I am a curious and motivated person so it has taken me a lot of will to not look into trying out things before Deryn introduces them to me. I do, however, believe that it would be better for an expert to guide me than coming at it from a presumed perspective, especially in this case where "everything you thought you knew is wrong" which is one lesson learnt from learning the cello!