Music is the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.

— Miles Davis

I remarked to my teacher about the difference I noticed between my strings and the ones on the cellos I’d played in the store. He immediately suggested that I get a set of Jargar Strings for my instrument. Through Amazon I was able to order medium chromesteel A and D strings, and a medium silver wound G and C strings. The strings came from Johnson String Instruments in just a few days.

This morning at my lesson we took the first 10 minutes to replace the Red Labels with the Jargars. The process isn’t difficult, but you do need to be careful not to loosen all the strings at once or the sound post could fall over. David used a pencil to put some graphite in the notches on both the bridge and the nut for all four strings, to aid in their moving through the notches without sticking. For the A and D strings he used a small square of snare drum skin as a protector over the bridge. Those strings are thin enough to act as a knife and will slowly cut into the bridge as they tuned repeatedly. With the snare drum skin moistened slightly we were able to mold them over the top of the bridge. For today, until the harden into place, they are held down with a couple pieces of scotch tape.

We were careful to adjust the fine tuners to the middle of their range so that there would be some play in either direction. We also reversed the pegs for the G and C strings. The C string is the thickest of the four and having it on the peg closest to the nut bends it a fairly severe angel. Exchanging the two strings eases the angle between the nut and peg for the C-string, and uses a relatively smaller string, the G, for the lowest peg. Since I’ve never had to tune using the pegs I won’t have to relearn the positions.

The new strings have a wonderfully spongey feel to them, they are easier to stop and they are easier to play. The Red Label C-string was hard to get going; the Jargar speaks readily and with less effort. While my ear is still learning the nuances of cello sounds and harmonics, I can hear an improvement in the over all tonal quality of my instrument. David also remarked that it sounded better.

The time (ten minutes) and cost ($97) were both good investments, and I now have a complete spare set of strings should something happen to one of my Jargars.

Update: Below is a picture of my peg box with the C and G strings “reversed.” There doesn’t appear to be an untoward side-to-side angle introduced by the switch.

Chorus from “Judas Maccabaeus”

After weeks of nothing but minuets I see hooked bowing everywhere. The dotted-quarter-followed-by-eighth note patterns in this piece are slurred – not hooked. Whoops.

I need to do a better job of arching my hand for the D-string to A-string slurs, to prevent the A-string from vibrating against the pad of one or more of my fingers on the D-string.

Watch my intonation, especially on the 4th finger. I also note that my intonation creeps towards sharp after a shift from 2nd position to 1st.

Hunter’s Chorus

Learn this piece by adding a note. Play the D, then the D plus a G, then the D, plus a G, plus another G, and so on. Play it s-l-o-w-l-y, with no thought toward rhythm at first.

In measure 15 especially use the add-a-note technique to work through the slur.

Watch bowing direction – don’t hook when not necessary

INTONATION.

Minuets

Continue to work on intonation issues, i.e., slow down and focus on hand and finger position. Improve fluidity and performance speed.

General

Make use of the drones to adjust intonation while playing.

The first night of playing I just wanted to make some music. My cello always sounds odd to me after I’ve not played for a couple of weeks – flat and non-vibrant. By the end of an abbreviated practice on Thursday evening I was a little frustrated. Being jet-lagged and tired wasn’t helping me to cope with the roughness in my playing or sound.

Friday night things sounded better, and things started to feel and sound like they had before we left. My focus lately has been on good intonation. When the pieces were simpler I had pretty good tune and stayed in tune throughout the piece. Now that we’ve introduced shifts and rapid string changes I tend to lose my hand shape, making the 4th finger notes flat and the 1st finger notes sharp. There was a lot of “collapsed hand” sound Friday evening.

Over the weekend I managed to get in three practice session, and spent a lot of time reorienting my left hand to the proper position and shape. I am learning to use the harmonics between 4th finger on a higher string and the open string one lower to verify that I am in tune. More and more of the time now I get a good ringing tone, but I still have to focus on my hand shape or I loss the tune on the higher notes.

My second practice today sounded much better compared to Thursday evening’s work. One more practice tomorrow evening before my lesson on Tuesday. I fear I haven’t accomplished much in the way of new technique or new passages since my last lesson, but I am pleased that I haven’t lost any ground given my time away.

Visualization was not something I did as a beginning student, however, it took several years for me to fully develop this ability, and to see its results in my physical techniques. As a beginning cellist I have tried to visualize as a way to improve difficult techniques or to find a way through challenging passages. Since the physicalness of bowing and stopping the strings is still relatively new, accurate visualization is difficult.

Currently we are on a two-week trip to Germany and, since it doesn’t readily fit in the overhead compartments, my cello is at home. While it would be a huge extravagance, trips like these make me wish for a collapsable electronic cello that I could take on a plane without purchasing an extra seat for it.

Without my cello here I am forced to practice mentally through visualization. In karate most of the visualization work was done sitting quieting with my body relaxed. I rarely moved my arms or legs – the activity was all in my head. What I’ve been doing this week has involved some movement, specifically the fingers of my left hand. Using my right forearm as the fingerboard I’ve been slowly playing through the various pieces I’m currently working on. Playing open strings is surprisingly hard, but that is countered by absolute perfect intonation. My arm cello is always perfectly in tune.

Much of the time when I play my cello my focus is such that I don’t consciously think about every little movement. Instead I have some mental cues that help me remember what is coming next. Sometimes these cues are bowing based and sometimes they come from fingerings, and sometimes they come from the piece itself. Playing without a cello exposes a whole new layer of understanding to the piece. I don’t have the bowing to cue me, and unless I hum or whistle the melody I don’t have the music to prompt me either.

Already I have discovered a couple of passages that I simply cannot remember but that I know how to play. Whether this means I’ve successfully made those passages part of my muscle memory, or whether it means I really don’t know the piece but can play it when prompted by the physical activity it entails I do not know.

I will be interested to find out what shape my minuets are in in 10 days time when I next pick up a cello. I know that things will have regressed a little but my hope is that some time spent in virtual practice will keep most things current for me.

Minuet in C

The only trouble spot left in this piece is the string-change slur in the second section, the part that goes C – slur – B, A – slur – G. Getting my fingers down on the D-string ahead of the bow on the D-string is still proving to be difficult. When I play through that phrase slowly it works, but as soon as I speed things up, I get squeaks and squawks.

Minuet Nº 2

I really like this piece and enjoy playing it. I need to speed it up a bit and I need to watch the length of the longer notes. I tend to truncate them. Also, I tend to truncate the first note of a hooked bowing pair, something my teacher assures me every beginning string student does.

Minuet Nº 1

That the opening measure of this minuet is the same as for Minuet in C both makes it easy to play and hard to play. I have to focus on the second measure to continue on correctly. In learning this piece I discovered modulation. The first two lines are written in C Major, the middle two lines are in G Major, and the last two lines return to C Major. I discovered this by remarking to Sibylle that I was curious about why there were some F#s in the piece and some F naturals. She pointed out that the first two lines (the first section of the piece) end with a C, and that the first two lines of the second section not only contain the only F#s in the piece, they end in G. The last two lines of the second section have no F#s and end in C again.

Rather than change the key signature for the two lines in the middle from C to G, the editor just added the accidentals to show the F#s required by G Major. Understanding now why a piece might have accidentals on notes in one section but not in another adds a whole new dimension to the music. Not only can there by a pattern with the notes, there can be a pattern with the key.

Minuet Nº 3

This is the first piece that I’ve been able to whistle or hum at first glance, what is known as audiation. I’m not sure I’ll be able to repeat that feat with the next piece, but it was certainly cool to do it with this one. The piece itself uses 2nd position and portato bowing and my current nemesis, string-change slurs.

By pulling out the 2nd position measure and practicing them as a mini-etude I’ve been able to incorporate that into my playing fairly quickly. My intonation suffers a bit on the 2nd position A and E when I don’t get my 2nd finger squarely on the the corresponding G or D, but I am getting better and the shifts.

Like the previous minuet, Nº 1, this piece modulates keys. And it adds a neat preparatory hand shift. The second section starts with a 2nd position E on the A-string and to prepare for that the second ending of the first section shifts to 2nd position. As does the first ending of the second section. It reminds me of footwork in sparring – the right footwork makes the technique that follows easy to perform.

The added layers of understanding and complexity are what make playing cello so much fun. For every new thing I learn or start to understand there are 5 or 10 more nuances to take in, and each of those have layers, and so on. Playing cello is the most dimensional thing I’ve ever done, and I love it.

4/4 is the easiest for me to play. I just get it. BUM-bum-bum-bum BUM-bum-bum-bum. It works. 2/4 work as well as it is just 4/4 time with an accent on the 3rd beat: Bum-bum Bum-bum. 3/4 time used to throw me for a loop when I was toying around with learning piano. I know it’s a waltz, I can visualize the waltz in my head, but sticking to that rhythm didn’t make sense. Learning to play a bowed instrument only added complexity to this rhythm, but I’ve finally “gotten” it. Bum-bum-bum, Bum-bum-bum, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

The tail end of volume 1 and the start of volume 2 of Suzuki is littered with Minuets, so I’ve been getting lots of 3/4 time practice. May Time introduces 6/8 time, which is not just 3/4 times 2.

I’ve been using words with one or two syllables to learn rhythmic patterns. Cats and kitties, and big fat cats have helped me to learn half, quarter, and dotted half notes in all the time signatures I’ve had thus far. Unfortunately they don’t work for 6/8 time. You just have to count: 1-2-3-4-5-6, 1-2-3-4-5-6. Or 1-2-3-1-2-3, 1-2-3. Fortunately I’ve had enough practice breaking down new pieces into small parts to be able to sort out the rhythm of May Time relatively quickly.

I still need to work on the overall smoothness and sound of the piece, there are some string-change slurs that never quite sound right to me that I need to work on.

Another of his books, House, describes the process a New England family goes through as they build a new house. Or rather, have it built for them. They hire a small but capable firm to handle the construction and the book is as much about the builders as it is about the family and the process involved.

On one chapter Kidder describes what it takes to build a staircase. The human brain is an amazing thing, capable of rapidly learning the parameters of a situation and adapting to them.When any of us start up a flight of stairs our brain almost instantly measures the rise, or height change between the steps. Once this distance is known to our brains it automatically lifts our feet just high enough to clear the next step. If any step is higher than its neighbors we’ll trip on it every time we pass it, as the tolerance allowed by our brain is so exact that even a small variance will matter.

It always fascinated me that my brain could function like that, especially without any conscious thought on my part. Now that I am playing cello I am aware of a similar process taking place as I learn where to stop the strings to produce proper intonation for the notes in the music I am playing. At first I had two thin pieces of tape on the fingerboard as visual markers of where my first and fourth fingers should go, but now not only do I not need those visual cues, I don’t even need to look at my hand to properly place it, my brain knows where my fingers should go.

The pieces I’m now working on in Suzuki book 2 involve 2nd position. My hand has to move from the known first position to a new spot, quickly and accurately. At first I was worried that I’d need a new piece of tape on the fingerboard as a marker to correctly position my hand but, the same part of my brain that can measure the rise on a staircase automatically after just a single step, apparently can learn how far to shift my hand for 2nd position in just a couple of hours of practice. Sure, the first few attempts were clumsy and a bit slow, but after only a few minutes of trying I was able to more or less accurately shift my hand between 1st and 2nd position and back again without looking.

At the recital the other morning I was amazed to watch a young man, perhaps 14 years old, play the second Bach Suite (the D minor) fluently and beautifully. Watching how quickly he was able to move from position to position on the fingerboard left me wondering when I’ll be able to play like that, or even if I’ll learn to play like that. Being able, last night, after a couple days practice to play through Minuet Nº 1 with it’s 2nd position sections made me realize that, yes, I will learn to move my hand quickly and accurately, and that some day (sooner rather than later) I’ll be playing Bach Suites.

1. Minuet in C (Suzuki book 1) from Mark Nichols on Vimeo.

2. Long, Long Ago in C (variation, Suzuki book 2) from Mark Nichols on Vimeo.