Category Archives: Breval Cello Sonata No.1

I am only practising for 15 minutes, three or four days a week right now, with a half hour lesson with Emily weekly. I wondered at first whether it was even worth picking it up again until I could devote more time to it. But for one thing, what is 'more time' and where do I get this mythical substance? It's all relative, and I can make excuses until the end of the world about having enough time to do this 'properly'.

And I desperately needed to have something to do for me, just me. Especially as I quit my job the other week to stay home with Elliot full time. Elaine Fine mentioned this in a comment awhile back, after Elliot was first born, that I would be grateful for something of my own. She was very, very right. 

Even though sometimes those 15 minutes aren't even 15 together minutes, I'm managing to get work done. Emily helped by devising very short, very focussed goals each week: one scale, working on two difficult measures 10 times in succession, Breval first section play through, one shift to get a three-octave C scale in the works. Shockingly, I feel like my practice habits are better now than when I would spend an hour or so rambling through things, flitting from one piece to the next, getting frustrated, spending too long just playing and not enough time working on issues. I don't have time for faffing around now.

That do something 10 times instruction is interesting. I realised I never really played anything 10 times in a row much. At about the sixth repetition my mind starts thinking: 'Surely that was enough. You can't possibly need to do this again.' Around the eighth my mind wanders entirely: 'Chicken for dinner? Or maybe if I go to the shop I can get some of that fish…' By the ninth and tenth times I am being strict again, and the notes are no longer notes but just muscle memory and I can get to the meat of the problem. Or if the mechanics of the notes was the problem, it's very often nearly solved. Ten times works for relatively simple things, I suspect that number goes up when we're talking Haydn concertos or something. 

One step at a time there girl. 

Yesterday I had my first lesson since Elliot was born. It wasn't a regular lesson though, it was a Skype lesson with Emily Wright of Stark Raving Cello blog. We decided to test out this idea of a long distance lesson, and I think it worked pretty well for us. There are some drawbacks: Emily can't grab my arm to demonstrate a bowing issue, or feel if my left hand is tense. I don't think you could start from scratch this way, but for someone who has taken many a music lesson before it's quite good. For me, I didn't have to search out someone who was willing to come to me, and put up with an adult student with limited practice time. I knew I would get on with Emily and I like her approach, so for me this is the best of all possible worlds. 

We worked on the Breval, and Emily identified a bowing issue that has been hanging me up for awhile. Too much speed, too much bow. You've got to be kidding right? Every amateur orchestra director ever tells you 'More bow! Stop being afraid! Get in there!' and I did the classic thing of applying that to everything but not really realising that instruction was probably to the desk behind me squeaking along using two inches of bow for everything. I finally got the pivot motion with my bow hold moving around my thumb – I watched pros do this all the time but could not for the life of me sort out how to replicate it. My pinky on my bow hold is tense as well.

I felt energised after that lesson, which is down to the loveliness of Emily, because I just as easily could have felt stuck about the work ahead. But I am excited to get back on the cello horse again. Slow slow bows of Breval, here I come.

Yesterday I had the best practice session I've had since I was pregnant. Instead of banging my head against the wall with a Bach Suite I had been working on before, I stepped back a bit and pulled out the Breval Sonata.

I closed my mind to all the thoughts of boringboringboring, you're going backwards, you will never get any better, etc etc etc and just played slowly through the first section of the first movement. I slowed down the triplet runs, and cleaned up the accents to avoid the falling down stairs feeling, and indeed, sound, when I would get going with the wrong emphasis. 

When I was studying flute, I remember one of my recurring issues was swallowing notes, clipping staccato ones too short, or not holding a note for its full value. Not in a way that made it wrong, strictly, but would make it easy to rush a little bit. Revealing the impatience in my nature I suspect!

Anyway, as with all personal tendencies, they transcend instruments. The easy dotted crotchet quaver rhythm going into the triplet runs where was the problem lay – I was clipping those quavers too short in my impatience and anxiety to get the runs over with. The accents on the beginning of each triplet is what keeps it anchored, and entering into it that millisecond too early was pulling me off balance, by the second set of triplets it was already sounding unstable. 

I slowed everything down and restarted every time I cut that initial quaver short, and sure enough, the triplet runs were immediately smoother and easier. And the true test, Christopher came into the room and said, 'Oh that's sounding like music now, not like I Am Playing A Scale Run'.