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.

Use the Force, Luke

Luke: I feel the force!

Ben Kenobi: But you cannot control it.

The above scene from The Empire Strikes Back* sums up what I hear when I use the cello bow.

When I first started bowing, far too often I found myself grazing a second string, typically the A or G with the D.  Being able to play two strings at the same time is a good skill, but not when you're trying only hit one.

To better my technique, I gave the left-hand a rest and began making long drawn-out bow strokes on the open strings - perhaps a dozen or more on each one.  Back and forth, back and forth.

A curious by-product of this sometimes-tedious process was that I began to hear - to really hear - the tone quality of my bowing.  True, there were some moments that emulated fingernails on the blackboard.  But on the opposite side of the spectrum, there were brief moments that actually sounded pleasurable to the ear.  I could feel something right coming out of the cello.

And I was reminded that at this stage I couldn't make the instrument sound like that - it was just hitting those resonant spots at an ideal pressure, speed and angle of the bow because I was spanning the entire gamut.  Sure, I was recognizing it, like feeling the force, but it wasn't at my command.  I suppose even the worst lumberjack in the world hits the spot on the log that he was aiming for every once in a while.  Some day I will be able to draw tone out of my cello every time.  Until then, I have much practicing ahead of me.

* Copyright 1980, 20th Century Fox

By Jove, I Think He's Got It

I had my first lesson on Monday and I was surprised at how uncomfortable it was for my thumb, holding the bow.  Coming into things, I'd known it was something that I didn't want to learn incorrectly (and then have to unlearn later) so I'd specifically worked only on pizz. and trying to line my left-hand fingers up right.  Thus, when I had my first lesson, Dr Charlotte (my teacher) set me straight on correct bow-holding.  It wasn't all that comfy but I chalked it up to insufficient hand strength.

This week, it came to me.  A very, VERY slight adjustment in my thumb position, with the side of my thumb edging just slightly along the stick not only kept the tip of my thumb where it was supposed to be, but it was loads more comfortable and my control over the bow increased.  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Now I just need to keep reminding myself to not left my thumb knuckle bend backwards.

Parenthetically, it's worth noting that it will probably be a while before my next lesson.  Charlotte was VERY pregnant for my lesson on Monday, and at the end we joked about whether we'd see each other this weekend at church.  She had a healthy baby boy on Wednesday.  Having not talked to her since then, there remains some speculation as to exactly when she started having contractions - it might have been right after I left.  Who knew that trying to cram some musical technique into somebody like me would be so stressful?

Day Two - Easy and Hard

I've now had two practice sessions with my cello.  Some things are actually pretty easy.  For instance, if you want to play the F# (F sharp) that's on the fourth line of the bass clef, all you have to do is press your left hand ring finger against the D string (in the right position, mind you) and pluck (or bow) with your right hand.  So simple.

What's not so easy thus far is when you want to play that F#, then play the open D string, and then back to the F#.  The "open" D of course means that you need to remove all your fingers from the string to play it.  Then you have to put your third finger back in exactly the same place on the fingerboard - without looking - which is the trick.

Student celli (or cellos, whatever you want to call them) have these nifty white stripes on the fingerboard where your fingers are supposed to press to make certain notes - very helpful, since a finger that's off by a few millimeters can make the note off-pitch.  Granted, it's hard to put your fingers exactly on the white stripes if you're not looking at them and instead looking at, you know, the sheet of music you're trying to play.

One day, I assume, my fingers will simply "know" what shape they're to be in.  But not today.  Today I find myself cringing when the F# sounds more like an F minus.

Still, after only 2 sessions, I'm actually surprised that I can make "music" already.  Ok, I admit that I'm still amongst the likes of Jingle Bells, Old MacDonald Had A Farm, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but hey - it's progressive.

My New Baby

It's a new year, and with it a new beginning, or rather a new renewal.  Here you can see the picture of my new student cello.  It's a rental - I don't own it.  But that doesn't mean that I'm not looking forward to what we can do together.

When I gave up the cello, I was a child.  Now, almost 3 decades later, I have a different perspective of what good music can be.  And I have no illusions about what it will take for me to become a "cellist".  It will take years - and more hours of practice that I can yet conceive from where I'm sitting right here and now.

But that doesn't matter.  Right now, for today, everything is new and fresh and I'm feeling a swell of anticipation of what can happen.  I'm sure as I begin to figure out what I'm doing, I'll be hitting some notes that will make my musical sensibilities cringe.  That's ok.  You have to start somewhere.

A martial art instructor of mine once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) "you only know how good you can be once you quit".  I hope to never know.

~Gabriel