A Spine only a Chiropractor Could Love

Photo credit: Jessica Lucia

Upon returning to my cello practice (following what I am euphemistically referring to as my "summer hiatus") I found that my neck and back were getting sore from having to bend around the instrument.  Let me explain.

Picture this: I'm sitting in a chair and the cello is straight up-and-down between my legs.  If the instrument is leaning back against my chest [which it's supposed to], then the scroll (the part at the top with all the tuning pegs) would be shoved right up into my jaw.  To compensate, I'd been stretching my neck and spine over to the right to fit along side it - sometimes even farther if I didn't want a peg in my ear.  Needless to say, it's hard to relax when your posture looks like a derivative of the Marquis de Sade Charm School.

And then a blog post happened...

Fellow blogger, and accomplished cellist, Emily Wright posted several videos of her practice sessions working on Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.  Although she gave a slew of intriguing practice suggestions in the clip[s], the first thing that jumped out at me was the position of the cello.  It wasn't straight up-and-down.  It was angled.  She was straight, but the instrument was tilted slightly.  Wow, what a concept!

Did I try it today?  Yes, I did.  Did it make a difference?  Oh, yes.  Does it mean I also have to adjust the angle of my bowing arm...again?  Yes, but I'll willingly put the extra effort into that if it means not turning my spine into a pretzel.

Perspective

per·spec·tive

 noun \pər-ˈspek-tiv\
: the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and positions.

Perspective can mean a lot of things depending on...well...your perspective.

For instance, someone might look at the picture on the right and simply see Beef Stroganoff with vegetables.  But someone else would see a fun dinner that I made for my wife this evening.  Aww, how cute.

When it comes to the cello, I've found that I often do the same mistakes over and over again, perhaps hoping to plow my way through to correct technique by brute force.  Now don't get me wrong, making mistakes comes with the territory when you're learning any new skill.  But there reaches a point in which you've got so much experience doing something wrong that it ends up harder to do it right.  As Yoda, that fictional sage of our day and age, put it, "You must unlearn what you have learned."

A particular issue that continues to come up is one that I'd written about before in the post entitled Thread the Needle, bowing a string without accidentally playing one of the adjacent ones at the same time.  This is especially troublesome when I am moving from one string to the next and haven't changed the angle of the bow enough.  Often I end up playing the new string adequately, but there's that annoying 2-stringed harmony that's not supposed to be there.

From one perspective, who can blame me?  Down where the bow touches the string, at a true perpendicular angle, the next string is only a few millimeters away.  Changing that angle only a few degrees and you find yourself dangerously close to unintended sounds.  That's far too easy to do when you're focusing on your fingering or, dare I say, looking at the music.

But...what happens when you change your perspective?  Like today, when I decided to stop looking at that infinitesimally small area where the bow and string connect and instead looked at my bowing hand.  Whoa!  Totally different perspective.  The position [in space] of my hand and wrist when I play the G string is drastically different from where it is when I play the D.  We're talking inches apart.

So tomorrow's project is to focus on finding the "middle" of the string - not by peering down the fingerboard and gauging how far off I am, but by making sure my hand goes where it's supposed to and letting that guide the bow.  So simple - all it took was a different way of looking at things.

Grrr!

This was the first time I've got truly angry while practicing.  Sure, I've gotten frustrated before, like the first time I tried slurring notes together.  That took a few days for the concept to work its way from my brain to my fingers.  But today was the first time I got so irritated that I had to put the cello down, because at that point I wasn't going to be getting anything else constructive out of it.

It was the strings that got to me...or rather, my seeming inability to bow one string without inadvertently catching one of the next-door-neighbors.  I can take the accidental harmony for a little while but eventually it just got to the point where I couldn't listen to myself keep doing it.

Fortunately it was near the end of my practice session, so I could excuse myself and get ready for bed.  It does make me wonder, though, how other instrumentalists handle their frustration at things that "should" work, but just don't.

Thread the Needle

One thing you have to get used to when you're bowing your cello is this whole "3 dimensions" thing.  I've mentioned in a previous post that you need to bow at such an angle that you don't accidentally brush against the next string over - harmony is not what I'm looking for.

Another concept that Dr. Charlotte mentioned (with good reason) is that you don't want to let your bow slide up or down on the string as it's moving from side to side.

Eventually, this is a skill that I'd need to have.  For example, moving the bow closer to the bridge makes the sound louder, and closer to the fingerboard quieter.  However, right now I need to be working on fine motor control not volume.

Thus, when I downbow, my wrist needs to travel out at just such an angle that it keeps the bow solely on the intended string, and also as close to a perpendicular angle from the string so it doesn't pull the bow off course.  It's a bit like threading a needle.

Of course, I also continue to work on getting my left hand fingering to work, which is even harder.  At the risk of mixing my metaphors - if bowing is like finding a needle in a haystack, fingering is finding a needle in a stack of needles.

I need to practice.

Check the Starter

Anyone who has driven a car knows that "chug chug" sound when the car takes longer than usual to start.  Whether it be due to cold weather or a drained battery, it just doesn't sound pleasant.  Then when the engine finally roars to life, there's a sense of relief - partly because you can finally get somewhere, and partly so you don't have to listen to the starter motor any longer.

A beginning cellist, like me, also makes unpleasant sounds when starting up.  In my case, it's when I'm bowing.  There's a brief sound, similar to static, when the bow first starts, and before the string begins to vibrate nicely.  It's like there's a stutter before the engine starts.  One cellist's website that I perused considered it a sign of an amateur.

I'm not worried that it's there.  I'm aware of it, and that's good enough for now.  In time, my hand and arm strength will increase, as will my technique.  And then, my bowing will be nice and smooth down the entire length, from frog to tip and back again. My ears will be much happier, too.