The Etude (and more!) Project

I’m slowly getting videos up on youtube from the October recitals.

I just got the audio back from the UNCG recital, so those videos should be up by the end of the week.

These two passages have occupied much of my practice time over the last few days. The first one is from Nordheim’s ‘Clamavi’: 

 

This passage has a few distinct challenges. The first is dealing with the LH pizz. issues. In both cases, bow management is a problem. In the first one, my tendency has been to use too much bow during the grace notes, leaving me with undesirable tone quality for the sustained portion of that note. The other challenge here is to have the 3rd finger set-up to be prepared for the pizzicati as soon as the B-flat sounds. 

The set at the a tempo in the second system is slightly different. Due to the varying rhythms of each beat combined with the shifts in the sustained line, there is a greater level of LH control required. As I’ve been dealing with these passages, I am finding that from 5th position and higher, it is easier for me to maintain vibrato on the sustained notes while also achieving clarity with the pizz. notes if I pluck with my thumb, 1st, or second finger. The physical set-up of the plucking finger being below the sustaining finger means that there is less chance for interference with the sustaining string. I really tried to honor Nordheim’s slur, but it became clear that it was easier to sound good if I changed bow on every beat. 

The second passage is from the Kodaly Sonata, movement II:

This page made me want to quit the first time I played it. Everything I know about comfortable cello fingerings went out the window. Due to the amount of LH pizz., it became more important to choose fingerings that left the necessary fingers available for plucking rather than choosing what I would normally think of as ‘musical’ fingerings. The other main issue is the fact that most of the LH pizz. notes involve multiple strings, so it is really important to only grab one string at a time, and also that it is always the correct string! On top of that, maintaining a level of quality tone production and vibrato consistency becomes almost secondary when sorting out the logistics - nonetheless, those are ultimately the qualities that need to be the best, as at the end of the day, good tone and beautiful vibrato are the main things that audiences hear and react to (aside from intonation, of course).

So, how did I practice these things? I spent a lot of time experimenting with different combinations of fingers until I settled on the realization that I mentioned above (lower pizz. fingers with 3rd finger playing sustained notes). Then, I worked on building good sound and vibrato on any of the pitches with LH pizz., and then slowly added each pizzicato note, paying careful attention to the consistency of the sustained notes. It is really requiring me to be a great multi-tasker! Any time I tilt the mental focus scales too far in one direction, the neglected component sounds, well, neglected.

Both of these passages are going to need time to settle, but I feel good about successfully navigating the challenges, and am now ready to continue turning the pages in these pieces. There is a lot more of the same in both works, and time will only be on my side if I get the logistical work out of the way quickly - that will allow me to have all Summer to let the complexities seem less so, and for the memorization process to start sooner (rather than later).

Well, only practicing 9 of the possible 14 days for this one has certainly taken its toll! Easter gigs ran straight into Opera production week ran straight into rehearsals and performance for other recitals etc etc etc.

On top of all that, today was not a normal cello class day, instead it was group rep class day, and I certainly wasn’t going to play this one for the entire collection of string players/faculty at school! So - one more week on this one.

I actually have worked on this a bit in the last few days, but I feel like I am running out of things to say. For example, tonight I did some double stop work - taking each grouping and boiling them down to 3rds and 8vas. I connected each position in this way for large sections, and then went back and played them as written. This helped considerably, especially in terms of the LH groupings being set during the shift. This isn’t anything new - I’ve been using this method pretty successfully on almost every one of these etudes, so I don’t feel like I have much else to say about it, other than to say that it works!

I am definitely running out of steam on this project, but my goal is to get it together this week, and really master this Servais, since I have the extra week and a semester’s worth of practicing know-how on my side.

I may post intermittently this week due to sheer business, but rest assured that I’ll be practicing!

Today I dealt with 2 of the list items from the previous entry:

• LH grouping preparation
• Taking care of errant shifts

For the LH groupings, I inserted a rest before every position/grouping change to allow myself a moment to get my fingers arranged in the next grouping. Once I did that, I shifted to the new position, played those notes, and repeated the process. There is something that feels very cleansing about this kind of practicing - it’s so organized that when the hand is already in the new shape, the shift distance feels somewhat secondary. Because of all of the thirds work that I’ve done this semester, both on my own and in Popper 9, being in any given grouping feels wrong when it is not on the right note (in a diatonic setting). Anyway, after doing that slow work in all of the sixteenth note sections, I went back and played them all again, this time eliminating the rests, and focusing on changing the grouping during the position change. Everything felt more secure this time, and I began to get a glimpse at the kind of fluidity that is necessary to pull off this piece.

The constantly missed shifts were just a matter of taking more care in my practicing of those few spots. I found that many of them were actually solved in the previous activity, and the ones that weren’t all had fairly straightforward solutions. As it turned out, each of these shifts had a shared note/finger with the previous position, so I just needed to latch on to that spatial factor and things settled into place very nicely!

Well, I am really surprised that I managed to practice this at all today. Apparently April is turning out to be the busiest month of the year for me - I’ve had some kind of playing commitment every day since Friday, and it continues through Sunday of this week.

Anyway - tonight was all about going slow. I reviewed the entire thing, paying special attention to what wasn’t working. I didn’t actually fix anything tonight, but I did make a list! Here’s what needs attention:

• RH preparation for the 3 or 4 really long slurs - they are out of context in terms of the general bow change rhythm, and I keep running out of bow on those ones.
• LH grouping preparation - I need to spend some time setting up the new grouping and then shifting. Not every position/grouping change needs it, but it is such good work for me to do, that I will probably go through and practice every single one of them tomorrow.
• There are a few shifts that I’m tending to miss - the first one is in the second line of the whole piece - C —-> F. I keep wanting to go to E, since that is generally where you go in this one when shifting from C. The whole thing is so triad-based that when there is a shift that goes outside of that structure, it tends to feel and sound kind of surprising. The other place is at the end of the noodly bit after the minor ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider.’ The shifts go from 3rd finger to 2nd finger, and I keep over shifting. Some simple octaves work on those shifts should solve that.
• Then there are the actual octaves. They are certainly better today, but they are still a general failure when the metronome is on. I just need to spend some time really drilling them - playing broken octaves in tempo in a variety of rhythms ought to do the trick.

This passage didn’t take any really creative solutions, as the basic thumb position patterns are just more of the same. It’s a little obnoxious having to work all the way up the G-string at the beginning, but ultimately this coda is much easier than the rest of the Caprice.

Now, I can move on to the real work with this one, and start polishing things up, being more specific about intonation, working on memory, and dealing with the stamina required to get through the whole thing.

I revisited the process of going through with a pencil, sans cello for this section. Once again, it was very helpful! Just going through and sorting out the grouping and position changes as well as the places where the patterns change was so helpful when I actually played through it the first time. This section is very similar to its sister section (in minor), but has a few minor changes that would have been confusing to sight-read had I not first gone through it mentally.

This section helped me to utilize another technique that I’ve picked up during the course of this project - once again using the downbeat notes to organize myself in a way that should set up memorization of this passage really well.

In my practicing I basically just played through it a few times, making sure that the fingerings and groupings that I planned out were working. There were a few shifts that needed sorting out, mainly because they are different than in the minor sections. The descent from E-C# was giving me trouble tonight - I think that I did too good of a job programming the #-C shift found in the earlier section! I did some scale note connections, as well as some back and forth thirds in the appropriate groupings to solve this particular errant shift.

Tomorrow brings the coda, and then I’ll have worked through everything and can commence my memorization and polishing process.

I’m doubling up today due to a gig-filled Easter weekend. Hopefully I’ll still have a functioning brain and body after what is sure to be a long and mind-numbing opera rehearsal tonight.

This was my review session, and I’ve now covered 4 of the 6 sections that I’ve split this caprice into. I felt really good about the way in which I am mentally and physically anticipating all of the grouping changes in this one - and there are a lot of grouping changes! I also feel like I made a lot of progress in terms of remembering how the patterns work, which direction to shift and when, etc. In the 1st and 4th sections (which are the same), the biggest thing for me to remember is when the LH thumb moves, and when it stays put. All of the groupings that are rooted on A, C, and E have the thumb stay put, while the B, D#, and F# patterns all require the thumb to drop down a half-step. For me, the easy way to remember this was to think in terms of triads - all of the patterns that belong to the A minor triad have a stationary thumb, while all of the B major triad patterns do not. For whatever reason, remembering this very basic idea allowed me to play through the whole section from memory - I’ll take it! The little ‘coda’ that concludes this section is still eluding me a little bit, but I think that I’ll have it by tomorrow.

Section 3, the one with all of the horrible octaves, is pretty close to memorized as well. This is not surprising to me given how repetitive it is. I still cannot keep it together at the same tempo as I can for the rest of it, so the marriage of those two sections will be an important goal for this next week.

Section 2 is probably the most straightforward, but is also causing me a great deal of memory trouble. I think that because the harmonic rhythm is different in this section, I haven’t yet set up a good mental narrative for what is going on. I understand it on paper, but in practice, I’m having a tough time keeping track of where I am. This should also get better as the week progresses, and I get more consecutive practice sessions in.

The final two sections switch to A major, and they include another traversal of the Itsy Bitsy Spider motif and the following sixteenth note section, and finally a coda which is full of new figurations.

Why? This section makes me feel like Servais was just mean! For whatever reason, this octaves passage feels so much harder than anything that happened in Popper 13 - maybe it’s because the Popper felt so melodic. This just feels evil! I suppose I wouldn’t mind if I only had to do it once, but this passage repeats 4 times, and then is followed by broken octaves and then more material that is similar to the beginning.

The nice thing about this passage is actually the repetitiveness though. Despite the relative degree of awkward that this material contains, it’s the same exact intervals each time, so that definitely knocks the overall difficulty level down a notch.

In terms of what I practiced, I don’t feel like I was super inventive or creative, simply because there isn’t anything in this section that requires creativity to learn it. I will certainly need to address pacing and speed the next time I get to this part, as my octaves are always prone to suffer from approximate intonation when they go by at a fast rate. Essentially, I just went through the whole section slowly, and fixing whatever shifting/positional errors occurred through back and forth shifts and/or double stopping to secure the thumb position groupings.

Tomorrow’s section is an exact repeat of the first section, so I plan on reviewing all of the work I’ve done so far, and maybe beginning to make a move towards the metronome, just to assess how much work really is left to do!

I tried a completely different approach today. Rather than try to figure everything out at the instrument, I chose to sit down with a pencil and work out fingerings before playing a note of this section. Going about things in this manner felt hugely different compared to what I did yesterday! Forcing myself to work through it mentally before playing any of it made the playing part so much easier. I made me organize my LH thoughts ahead of time, and as I played it for the first time, I already felt like I knew what was coming up. How nice!

The opening section - which sounds exactly like the ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ - was very straightforward. My work on thirds throughout this project is making these kinds of passages very sight-readable. It’s great!

The rest of it looked and felt a little disorganized before I left out all of the noodly notes and just played the downbeat of every measure. Suddenly not only was the organization very clear, but so was the way in in terms of memorization. I didn’t do any active memorization, but I used solfege (in C major for this section) to understand what was going on. It’s just a few descending diatonic patterns, followed by 2 larger descending broken thirds patterns. The rest is just filler - sometimes diatonic, sometimes not.

This one sucks. It is long (5 pages), and most of it looks like this page. I changed many of the fingerings already, specifically in the descending figures. I organized it such that I always play 3-1-Q on the A-string, and 3-1-Q on the D-string. While this looks like it would be really straightforward, it’s not. In all of these figures, The octave shape only lasts for one sixteenth note, and the thumb then has to drop a half step lower, followed by a grouping shift for the D-string. At first, this was very disorienting, but after spending about 30 minutes with it today, I began to get used to it. The nice thing is that each time a position change is required, the note that the thumb shifts to was just played 2 notes earlier.

My hope is that because this one does not at all conform to traditional patterns, it should be pretty easy to memorize - especially so because it took a lot of thought and focus to come up with a good fingering. I feel very invested in the choices that I have made thus far, so I think that will help this stuff stick.

The main challenge that I can foresee is keeping track of where I am, while playing at a reasonably fast tempo. It reminds me a lot of Popper 12, in that it could be very easy to be approximate in this one given the frequency of the position changes. Only time will tell, and ultimately it will be down to me applying all of the lessons that I’ve learned over the course of this project (this is the last one, by the way).

Also, here is a link to an article about Servais, since I imagine that his is not a familiar name to most: http://www.cello.org/heaven/bios/servais/serv01.htm

I spent most of yesterday forcing this piece into my head - I did most of it with the music open, adding one measure at a time, until it all just stuck.

As always, this process is never efficient, nor is it ideal, but that’s where I ended up. I took a lot of breaks to allow the material to settle a bit, and in the end I felt pretty good about where things ended up, memory-wise.

The biggest problem for me when using this memorization process is that it makes me way too left hand focused. This isn’t anything new to me, but I continue to not learn this lesson…

The performance in class went just fine, but everyone commented on bow things - most of which I already knew about, but nonetheless it was good for me to hear these things.

So, why study Piatti #2?

• extended multi-voiced passages,
• the specific bow challenges that exist in the string crossing sections,
• maintaining a sense of continuity in the upper voice/melody in the string crossing sections,
• chromatic, sometimes non grouping-based thumb position passages.

Easter gigs + a great visit from the in-laws = 5 days since my last post. yikes!

I’ll be playing this one in class tomorrow come hell or high water, so I focused on memorization tonight. I’m once again having to use the forced/shove into my brain form given the time constraints, but it’s working pretty well so far. The chorale sections are still in good shape, and the string crossing stuff is staying put faster than I expected. I worked up through the second chorale statement, leaving the final string crossing and chorale for tomorrow.

I’m not too excited that this one has boiled down to this process, because I’m sure that I could have done more to refine the intonation throughout as well as the cleanliness of the RH work, but time is not on my side! I have no doubt that similar to the first Duport that I played, tomorrow;s performance will be a great test of my survival mode playing.

I made great strides today in memorizing all of the chorale sections. What was important for me was to set up internal dialogues to make sure that I knew exactly how and where each of them diverge from being identical - especially in the thumb position portions. All three of them climb up in roughly the same way, but none of them ends up being the same, and I was developing a never ending loop habit that I needed to stop asap.

In terms of the string crossing sections, I continued to work on hearing the upper voice’s phrasing as clearly as possible in addition to further refining the string crossing mechanisms in my R. Arm. When I go slowly, it’s no problem at all to have the right joint initiating the string crossings, but when I speed up even a little this aspect still breaks down. That tells me that I just need to spend another session working it slowly, and I should have it in a few days.

I’m still concerned about memorizing the string crossing sections, but I’m finding that short snippets are appearing in my noodling-around morning warm-up. This means that some of this material is starting to seep into my brain and my arms, and that can only be a good thing!

Clark’s nap actually allowed for my full 45 minutes today! Woohoo!

Today’s goal was to review the whole etude, and to identify any sections or generalities that needed attention.

In the chorale sections, I continued to deconstruct my double-stop vibrato, and in the string crossing sections, I continued working in chords and double-stops to finalize my fingering choices.

I played some of this at my lesson today, and now have a clear idea of the direction that I need to head in. One of my tasks for the week is to identify exactly which shapes are not working in the chorale sections (and by not working, I mean which ones are currently precluding me from vibrating at the 16th note level, at quarter = 60), and to explore my knuckle flexibility for those specific shapes.

In the string crossings, I was (surprise, surprise) rushing a bit and compressing the rhythms in a way which was not allowing my LH or the music to breathe. So, my new task there is to focus on the natural ebb and flow of the embedded melody, and to make sure that the pacing of the small notes supports the phrasing of the melody voice. I also need to get more specific about what part of my bow hand/arm is executing which string crossings. Almost all of them involve an arm motion for the move from the long note to the small ones, followed by a finger or wrist motion for the small notes.