Lesson 77 - Get the Bowing going!

Today we focused on smooth bowing during string crosses or as Deryn puts it so succinctly, "Let's get the bowing going!" before we both collapsed in uncontrollable guffaws. We also spent some considerable time on double stops followed by arpeggios of the same chords; a very satisfying and challenging exercise and probably the most fun I've been having on the cello lately.

Deryn noticed that my bowing arm/hand/wrist have matured to a stage where they were loose but firm enough to form a good, stable bow hold that was still flexible to manoeuvre my way on the strings. Funnily enough, I came to that same conclusion literally within the last week or so during practice. Of course the level of concentration for this to happen did not occur overnight but meticulously and very slowly. It's a nice consolidation of all those sessions and I'm barely even scratching the surface but it has boosted a spike of morale to keep going.

Deryn spoke mainly about the strings as pivoting points and bowing as drawing breaths to sing; the tighter the grip on the bow, the smaller our mouths and the worse we sound. This made so much sense to me and it has allowed me to look at bowing in a totally different perspective.

When playing the Menuet, Deryn noticed that I was lifting my bow after playing some the of notes instead of staying on the string, a habit unbeknownst to me! The realisation only came into fruition when I was asked to play the piece very, very slowly. How odd that I was totally unaware of this yet there it appeared repeatedly when I played the passage again and again. We went through a couple of alternative fingerings at certain places to achieve specific tones (notes on open vs non-open strings) where ultimately, this was a matter of choice and dependant on the cellist's interpretation of the piece. This applied less so on the bowing side of things where we mostly followed the markings on the score instead of coming up with alternative ones.

All of this felt to me like a new level of cello-ing. Interpreting pieces sound very straightforward but it involves so many nuances of decision-making and justifying those decisions with a good performance without giving in to conveniences where lazy fingering and shortcuts are involved. When I put it that way, it all suddenly sounds rather overwhelming when really, it shouldn't be. One just has to pay attention to what they are doing but not be too precious about it!