Lesson 84 - Slippery fingers

It's another 2 hour lesson today, a format I'm really growing fond of as it feels far less hurried than my usual hour and a half.

As it's been a whole 3 weeks since the last lesson, I've had quite a bit of time getting acquainted with the new cello, Gracie. And for all my faults, I can confirm that she is a real trooper and team player. She remains reliable, even surpassing my expectations at times. I just need to learn how to play her. Or rather, how to use her to bring out the best of my abilities for at the moment, you could sum up my playing as, "timid".

It becomes even more obvious when playing a piece like Schumann's Schlummerlied. Only after Deryn accompanied me on the piano that I could see the potential of the piece and played accordingly. Deryn suggested that maybe it would benefit me if she looked for a pianist to accompany my playing every few weeks or so. As the cello really shines in repertoires for such situations, it would also give me something to aim for.

To be honest, the thought of subjecting anyone to my cello playing is really daunting but I cannot deny the prospects of the idea so l immediately agreed. Perhaps there is an opportunity out there for an amateur pianist to pair up with me.

For most of the lesson, we tackled a recent issue I have been facing with Gracie - stability in the left hand - which I referred to as, "slipper fingers". It only happens on the A string but Deryn tells me it's mostly me still adjusting to the smaller size cello. She did notice that my intonation was much better so probably what I really needed was a smaller cello after all. But you know the old saying, "a good craftsman never blames his tools". I suppose playing the cello is considered a craft?

In any case, it looks like good ol' Feuillard is here to the rescue, especially the first chunk of exercises on Trills. Slow playing of any of the examples, coupled with a few from the next few chapters should reinforce stability where it's needed. We also went through a few of Feuillard's 3 octave scales with a different kind of universal fingering. Using this with Bunting's warm up exercises should hopefully establish familiarity of notes on fingerboard which I'm still really struggling with.

I realise that for the majority of the time I was learning the piano at an early age, I was heavily dependant on the visual clues of the piano keyboard so I was more reacting to patterns than actual learning of theory! This obviously does not translate as easily with the cello but this instrument is still so very new to me and one day, it will not be as much. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.