Exhaling

For the past few weeks during my swim workout I have been concentrating on exhaling completely. It sounds rather silly to think about breathing, but it is amazing how much it has helped me feel strong during some hard swims. Yesterday one of our sets was 6 100 IM's. In the past I would have cheated on the butterfly, maybe swimming half of the length fly and finish with freestyle, but with my new mantra of breathing out (if I exhale loudly when my face is in the water no one can hear it!) I was able to do all 6 IM's with the 25 fly and even felt reasonably good going into the backstroke. wow.

So that got me thinking about what simple-sounding thing I could do during cello practice. How could I change a practice approach? The 'aha!' moment I had was thinking about feeling the bow against the string. I've been worrying about the flexibility of my bow hand, drawing the bow straight, and a whole host of other things. During the past couple of days I've been concentrating on feeling the bow - feeling my bow catch and move the string when I change bow direction, feeling and controlling string pressure against the bow during long slow bows, feeling the string when I change bow speed. The other issues are probably still there, but I've already noticed that my tone is much steadier and consistent. another wow! why didn't I think of that before?


Today we had piano trios and I got to be on the cello instead of the piano. Yay! We played the Mendelssohn D minor trio, the Schubert Eb major trio (love the cello solo in the slow movement!), Beethoven Piano Trio #5 (the 'Ghost'), and Fanny Mendelssohn's Piano trio. I am really happy with my cello. It is beginning to open up in sound. It was really fun to crank it up! after we were all done, I even got to try to play the Arpeggione sonata. There are sections that I can play now that I've never been able to play, and it is so nice to have a cello that can handle the high notes...really easy to play over the piano. it was so much fun today!

Lynn Harrell playing his Dungey cello

Below are videos showing Lynn Harrell playing his Dungey cello - the Mendelssohn D minor piano trio, with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Andre Previn

movement 1


movement 2


movement 3



movement 4

Busy!

It's been a busy week - got in some extra practice time because I actually had Martin Luther King Jr. day off as a holiday. Trying to fit in everything I want to practice is tough.

We had our first orchestra practice for the new year! The program is very nice - Holst 2nd Suite; Butterworth "A Shropshire Lad", and Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. I was really confused about which part I was playing - the cellos go divisi a lot and sometimes it was by stand and sometimes it was inside/outside...so a lot of the time I wasn't sure if I was playing the correct part.

This Wednesday I'm playing a gig at work with a flautist. We were supposed to play at the office holiday party, but the party got postponed because of all of the snow Seattle got around Christmas. We had to find some new music to play because Christmas carols in January didn't really seem like a good idea. So Friday we played some music together for the first time, to pick what we'll play on Wednesday. We're going to play some dances from Febonio op29 "Rustic Airs and Dances" (I've never heard of Febonio before!), and a Beethoven duet that was originally written for clarinet and bassoon. fortunately, today I was able to run through everything with the violinist in my chamber group...not much time to get it ready for Wednesday.

Today's chamber group was a duet for a while, then a string trio. The string trio we read was a keeper! It was 3 string trios by Hyacinthe Jadin (a male, not a female). We were pretty excited about every movement in every trio!

and last but not least...my lessons continue and we just started playing a Kummer duet op156, duo #4 - we played through all of the movements at my lesson on Friday and hopefully soon will be able to play it at speed. I have my list of things that I'm working on..
--loosening my wrist while bowing, right now really working on dotted rhythms and a quick snap of the wrist and getting the short note to articulate
--detached bowing (on the string and off the string)
--arpeggios: this week need to work on nailing the shift down from the root to the fifth of the chord when descending)
--shifting exercise from Sevecik op8
--trill exercise (based on Cossman)
--vibrato
--scales: work on controlling bow pressure so that sound volume stays consistent (my teacher pointed out the it looked like I was easing up at the tip and at the frog...and hence producing inconsistent volume/tone)

oh..and don't forget to have fun playing...!

chamber music!

my saturday group finally met, after more than a month off. The holidays, the weather, travel, all conspired against us. We had 5 of us today! We started with violin/cello - a Telemann piece, very nice. When our violist showed up we started a Mozart Divertmento. Then our other cellist showed up and she and I doubled on the Mozart. When our 2nd violinist showed up we switched to string quintets. I got another shot at the Schubert...one of my all-time favorite pieces...it's so much fun to play. We finished with a Taneev string quintet (2 violins, viola, 2 cellos...there is Taneev string quintet with 2 violas...but we never seem to have 2 violas) That one was deemed worthy of another time reading though it.

very fun and sure nice to play with everyone again!

and really good news ... I got pictures of my new cello ... hope I will get it in a month or so....

practice and other notes

My teacher recorded me playing Bach Arioso at my lesson on Friday. He had me play it with a recorded accompaniment track, thinking that I'd relax more if I was playing with something else. He was right; it was fun playing with the 'piano' because it helped me keep the beat steady. I was pretty happy with how much I've improved since the last time he recorded me playing it, about 1 year ago. For the first time I asked for the file - I'll probably post it in the cellobloggers space.

For the past few weeks he's had me work on loosening my right wrist and to practice making my fingers very flexible. It's starting to pay off, but I noticed that my stress response is still to tighten up on vibrato (at least for the very first time on the Arioso I actually kept playing vibrato throughout the note even when stressed out!) and to tighten up my wrist. At my previous and at this lesson he's had me starting to work on keeping my fingers flexible while crossing strings. Never a dull moment!

Today for our chamber group we were back to a piano trio. Since it's been quite a few weeks since we had this configuration, it didn't feel too bad. I was glad to be on piano because my right thumb is a little torn up and sore (thank goodness for bandaids!) so playing the piano was pretty nice to give it a rest. We made a cool discovery, playing Saint-Saens Piano Trio No. 1 in F major. What a lovely piece. Then we attempted to play the Beethoven Piano Trio #5, the "Ghost" but the ghost movement eluded us.. we started to play it but ended up giving up...slow movements weren't our friends today. Fortunately we had a rousing finish with Clara Schumann's piano trio. What a nice day!

I think I'm off tomorrow - most of my Sunday group is out of town. That means I'll have time to practice for chamber orchestra...Monday we played a Boccherini symphony and a Stamitz symphony, and got warned that we'd better practice the Dittersdorf symphony that we will be playing on Monday (which I've been diligently practicing at the end of my practice sessions)

and later this week it's travel time again, 3 weeks in a row :-( thougth I was going to get a break but I have these 3 weeks, then a break, and then September I'll start traveling more again....

Flexibility and Suppleness - My Bow Hold Dream

It's been a busy week with a trip to the Bay Area and working on a large project with a tight timeline. I haven't had a lot of time to practice, but will be able to practice some of the exercises I got from my lesson without a cello.

This week's lesson was about bow holds. I've been trying to modify my bow hold yet again, to get a different position for my thumb. I'm trying to make sure it stays flexible and supple - much easier said than done. When I'm not careful it tends to slip back to a more straight, rigid hold, which makes it hard to produce a full tone.

My teacher gave me a lot of hand exercises - I tried some of them while on my walk this morning. I definitely do not have a supple, loose hand. When I practiced today I tried some of the exercises - moving the bow up and down with just my fingers, rocking the bow back and forth over my (curved and relaxed - ha!) thumb, lifting the bow with just my index finger and letting the bow drop on the string. I really feel like I've started at the beginning again. Well...maybe not. For kicks I shifted everything to the other side --- bowing with my left hand and fingering with my right hand (and moved the cello over to my right shoulder) -- now if you really want to feel like a beginner again you should try that! I don't know why I did it but after I attempted to play that way I felt better about my attempts to play normally - definitely it was much easier!

My teacher also asked me to practice relaxing and putting more dead weight into my arm - asking me to ratchet up my volume even more. That was easier to do than relaxing my right hand! It was nice to hear my volume come up even more than before - need to get better control over it - sometimes I would press to hard and the sound would get scratchy.

Chamber music this morning was ok - I was on piano again for piano trios. I'm only playing the piano about once a week so it's always a little painful to play. We started out with some Haydn trios to warm up (they are nice for warmup - if my fingers are in the right location on the piano everything is just under my fingers). Then we played Mendelssohn's C minor trio (we had a laugh when we started when for some reason my brain spazzed and I thought it was in C# minor and I had to stop and reset my brain to the right key). We played a trio by Rheinberger, and then Schubert's Nocturno (for piano trio - gorgeous)! before calling it a day.

Work Wins, This Week

This was not a good week for work-life balance. Work won this week. Between the late night meeting with a team in India on Tuesday, flight delays on Wednesday, and work on a project this weekend, my cello has suffered from neglect. The balance thing is really pretty hard. I am looking forward to the day when I can balance retirement activities with cello! Although, if my dad and other retired people I know are any model, I know that even that balance won't be easy.

My lesson this week was good, despite the lack of practice time. My bowing has gotten straighter - after the previous week's video session I was able to straighten out my bow even more, based on this week's video. I'm now working on varying my vibrato speed during long notes, plus working on crescendos and decrescrendos during long notes (it's really hard to do a crescendo while getting towards the tip of the bow!). It was pretty fun during my lesson; my teacher played bits of a Janos Starker recording of Bach's Arioso and had me dissect what Starker was doing from an expressive standpoint and had me play the same passage, trying to emulate Starker's playing. It was fun - doesn't mean that I can't do my own thing - and enlightening to think about the range of things I could do with one phrase. It was really interesting to hear how Starker did something slightly different each time he played the first theme.

Saturday chamber group was fun - our other pianist was there so I got to be on cello the whole time. We played 2 Schumann piano trios, #1 (the d minor, for our pianist who was dying to play it - I'm not sure the rest of us were) and #3. He is such a good pianist - wish I could sight read on the piano as well as he does. We played through the Franck Piano Trio Op 1 #1 in F# minor. I really liked it but sightreading 6 sharps in tenor clef was pretty challenging. It's on our list to play again sometime. We finished with 2 movements of Novak's Piano Trio Op.1 and ran out of time. We liked it enough to want to finish playing through it another time.

Unfortunately I had to cancel out of my Sunday chamber group to work. I hate missing opportunities to play. I did get some practice time in this evening after finishing up work.

Lesson and Chamber Group Notes

I had a good lesson on Friday. My teacher put the video camera on me to let me take a good look at my bowing, and it has definitely straightened out. It isn't good enough yet; I could see that my up bows were at a slightly different angle than my down bows, but at least they were straight going in one direction and within a fairly narrow range on the string. I can hear the difference in sound. I played "The Swan" at the end so that I could see and hear what I sounded like playing something other than scales or exercises. After pointing out some other things I need to work on, my teacher said that my playing was the most consistent it's ever been! So, progress! Yay! And so much more to work on! He has been reading Daniel Levitan's This is Your Brain on Music which I read a few months ago, so we had a good time joking about how many hours I had left to go on my 10,000 hours to become an expert.

I got to play cello this weekend with my Saturday chamber group. With people still out we were still only a piano trio. We played through a Raff trio (can't remember which opus) and the Clara Schumann trio (so that our other pianist could play/hear it). I think it was the first time I got to play the cello part for her trio - all of the other times we've played it I've been on the piano. We finished up with a Spohr trio. Hope next week one of our violas can come - and our other violinist - so we can get back to piano quintets (or some configuration other than piano trios, which are nice, but we were getting quite a bit of variety for a while).

My Sunday group was a hoot. Our other cellist, who has been playing the cello for over 60 years (I kid you not) was there after an absence of 3 weeks. I love playing with her. We played the Vivaldi G minor double cello concerto and had a blast. We're trying to get it gig-ready, which means that I probably ought to spend some time practicing it on my own...I only seem to play it when I'm with this group. We played through the first 3 movements of Dvorak's "American" quartet, which really gives the 1st violin a workout! The 2nd movement gives the cello some lovely parts to play, but pretty high - hate that false treble - and even playing an octave down it was getting way up the fingerboard. We finished by reading through Mendelssohn's 3rd string quartet (Op. 44, No. 1) - lots of fun - and not quite as tricky on rhythm as the Dvorak. What was encouraging (to me, at least!) was that I could hear that the bowing exercises are paying off - I could hold the volume of long notes much more consistently (not dying off when close to the tip of the bow!!!).

We got a note from our conductor! Orchestra rehearsal starts September 10th!

Cat-atouille and Cat-atonic

We went to see Ratatouille today and I really enjoyed it. Animated movies seem to be the only films we go to see these days (with an exception for Lord of the Rings). When we got home our cats were being their usual selves - we decided that Marley (our crazy black cat) was really Cat-atouille and Ziggy (the Queen of Comfy) was really Cat-atonic (she does spend most of her day in bed).

My lesson yesterday went well. It really helped to have a mirror so I could see whether I was bowing straight. I may have to break down and buy one. I could hear a marked improvement in tone (yay!); I've spent most of the week concentrating on keeping my wrist in a neutral position and it is starting to pay off. Hopefully within a few weeks I won't have to think about it so much--after practice makes something permanent (thanks Cellodonna for that insight!), I can focus on some other aspect of my playing. Using the mirror I could see how much my bow wandered up and down over the string, and by the end of the lesson I could see it traversing the same spot much more tightly. So that's this week's task - practicing bowing in a straight line!

My chamber group was small today, just a piano trio. I was on piano today, and boy did I get a workout. I haven't really played the piano much in the past few weeks - too much travel, work, and focusing practice time on cello - so when I started warming up this morning I could feel how stiff my fingers were. Actually I'm not really playing the piano much now other than playing for groups. We started out with Clara Schumann's piano trio. I've also been reading through some of her solo piano music (thank you Dover!) as well as music from Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Both composers have been sadly neglected - women weren't really 'allowed' to be composers in their day, a major loss to music. I am looking for Fanny Mendelssohn's Piano Trio which I have heard is really wonderful. Clara Schumann's trio was a good warmup for the rest of the morning.

We then moved on to Robert Schumann's piano trios, playing the first 2 trios (No. 1 Op 63 and No.2 Op 80). The first movement of No.1 is a killer rhythm-wise (but all of the rhythm work I've been doing is helping immensely!). The last movement of No. 1 was the most playable, and No. 2, while not easy, was easier to play than No. 1. I like No. 1 better but, wow, I nearly died trying to play the first movement - like always, wish I had more time to practice.... After those 2 trios we were Schumann-ed out and switched to Lalo's third piano trio (op. 26). We've played this one a few times before, and we did the first movement pretty close to tempo, and managed to hang together while killing me on the piano. The 3rd movement is beautiful. We all nearly died on the 4th movement, which we again took close to tempo (why, I don't know...maybe it was because we were running out of time.) I have to admit that it is sounding better; the first time we played it months ago, especially the 2nd movement, it didn't sound much like music. I was ready to toss in the towel after the Schumann; after the Lalo we were done and I was definitely Cat-atonic.....

Sore Fingers

Whew! I have been playing a lot in the last few days. My fingers are sore!

Last night my Sunday chamber group had a gig at a local art festival. It was a lot of fun and one gentleman even said that he thought that he was listening to our favorite classical radio station, KING FM (yeah!, Cello Gal!! my favorite too!). I think he was being really nice but it sure was a nice compliment to hear!

We played the 3rd Brandenburg concerto, Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a couple of Scott Joplin rag tunes, a few pieces from Handel's Watermusic, and some Scotch and Irish airs (Irish drinking songs in an arrangement by Beethoven). It was a lot of fun and many audience members came up afterwards to say how much they enjoyed it. I think we'll even get a few more gigs out of it too. In a move that I don't recommend, it was the first time I had seen the Scotch and Irish airs so I was sightreading when we performed it. The group practices twice a week, and I can't make the Friday practices since practice time is during the day when I'm at work. For some reason I had never had a chance to play those tunes until last night. Fortunately the other cellist in the group does go on Fridays, so I just followed her lead and listened to whomever was playing the melody to figure out what to do. What is really fun about this group is that we're good at listening to each other - I noticed many times when our tempo drifted a little bit that we drifted off together, and returned back into tempo together. The other fun(?) thing was that my partner cellist and I seemed to make the same mistakes! We both screwed up and missed a repeat in the Mozart and both came back in at the same time, together. Like a cat! Like we meant to do it! It was very amusing. We liked the fact that we screwed up together (that example wasn't the only time ) - but that way no one could tell!

This morning my Saturday chamber group met at our other pianist's house. I was thankful that I could at last play the cello - I've been on piano for so many weeks. The group was really not balanced well, though - today we had 3 cellos (at least for a while), 1 piano, and 1 violin. We started out with the first Lalo Piano Trio and then had a real treat. Our violinist sat out (very happily, to listen) while us cellists played the Popper Requiem for 3 Cellos (I've linked to a video of it with the piano reduction of the orchestra score). What a gorgeous piece. I played the 2nd cello part. I had never heard it before, and got teased about not knowing about it - (but what would I know about about the cello repetoire - having been a solo pianist for most of my life???) Afterward we talked about playing it with our orchestra - wouldn't that be fun???? After playing the Requiem (again, the second time for 'redemption', as our pianist put it to describe the decision to take repeats when we were playing the Lalo trio), we played through Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat major (op.100) (with some opportunities for 'redemption'!). If that wasn't enough, we played though Arthur Foote's first piano trio - what fun - I had only played the piano part before and it was so much fun to play the cello part this time. And much easier since I had spent a bunch of times playing through the piano part, reading the score too (pianist's job!). Foote was a late Romantic composer who was entirely educated in the U.S., and then unjustly neglected partially because he had not studied in Europe. We've played through some of his other chamber works and they are wonderful to play and hear. I was exhausted at the end of this, and I still had my lesson to go later in the afternoon!

I have sore fingers...good thing my Sunday group is taking a break...will spend some time on Sunday on some sorely needed practice time instead. More on my lesson later...

Chamber Music Time!

Ahh..it has been a good music day. I love it when I have time on the weekends for a lot of music. This morning my reading chamber group came over to my house and we were all exhausted at the end of the morning. The one frustrating thing is that every week we go through the email ritual of figuring out who's going to be there. We've gotten better at it - we haven't had a week in a while where we haven't had music for day's configuration of players. But various members will show up at different times,so we change what we're playing as people show up.

This morning our first violinist showed up first. We've had many weeks on the past where it has just been the 2 of us, so I've gotten to the point where I don't even have to look at her while she's playing anymore to know what she's going to do. We played the first movement of Beethoven's "Spring" sonata while waiting..then our other cellist showed up. Because we knew we were going to read through the Arthur Foote piano quartet later, we decided to play his first piano trio. It is a gorgeous piece that we've played before (except for the ending of the last movement is somewhat weird) and it was lovely to play it again. My rhythm practice is paying off as I felt steady throughout, even during parts where the piano part was all over the keyboard. We had time to play part of the first movement of Lalo's first piano trio (another gorgeous piece with lots of lovely cello solos, but alas, I was still on the piano), but we played it rather poorly (took it too fast for our state of consciousness) and fortunately our violist showed up. We only got through part of the 2nd movement of the Foote piano quartet - but oh it is gorgeous - when our 2nd violinist arrived. We will definitely have to play through all of the piano quartet another time.

I finally got to play cello! We switched to string quartets (I doubled with the other cellist), but the first one was weird. I can't even remember who the composer was; it was a modern piece with all of the weird harmonies and timing. We had to give up on the first movement - it was in 5/4 but the cello part had measures with 7 notes for 3 beats and other weird combinations. We couldn't figure out where the first beat of the measure was. The second and third movements were weird too but at least we think we managed to stay together. At least we ended at the same time (one definition of victory)!

The second quartet we played was by a Brazilian composer, Alberto Nepomuceno; we played his first string quartet. It was supposed to have been influenced by Brahms and Mendelssohn but with Brazilian melodies. It was hard to hear the influences. Good thing I had a partner playing the same thing. Then we got tired of very unfamiliar music and ended with the Mendelssohn Op.44 No.2 quartet - I think we may have played it once a while ago - and it was nice to be back in more familiar territory. After that we were exhausted.