Piano Lesson

It’s my fault. I got us off on a tangent when I started class by asking a question about a new book on figured bass I am trying to work through: Continuo Playing According to Handel: His Figured Bass Exercises (Early Music Series, No. 12). I had a lovely time thinking through the first exercise, which is deciding on the best chord configuration to use when moving from one type of chord to the next. It’s pretty straightforward. Find the shared notes, if any, and plan the next chord so the shared note doesn’t move.

But we did get extra homework out of it. G- seemed to think this was just the thing we needed to practice in conjunction with our scales, so our assignment is to look at all of the combinations of I and V chords and practice them in each key. I hope S-, my fellow student, doesn’t mind. I find this fascinating.

The other interesting thing we did today was to transpose Twinkle Twinkle with an Alberti bass accompaniment from F to C. Though simple, it’s the most complicated transposition we’ve done to date. You have to be able to recognize the type of chord and immediately play it in the new key while also playing the melody by recognizing intervals rather than notes.

Assignments for next week:

• Choose adjacent V chords for each inversion of I. Use the alternate fingering for I6 to V64, leaving 2 on the shared note.
• Scale: F Maj, 2 octave, parallel motion, finish by playing I V I using all three positions.
• Mach p. 291 Buffalo Gals; improvise rhythm in the left hand
• Clementi Allegro
• Robb Phrygian Mode

Cello Practice Log

	Fr 25	Sa 26	Su 27	Mo 28	Tu 29	We 30	Th 31
Scale: E Major	30		30
Etude: Lee #9 and 10		10-9				10-30
Chords: Dotz 36 and Dup 7		7-21
Bach Suite 2	C-12	Ca-18			Cb-30	Ca-30
Saint Saens Concerto		30				30
Martinu Trio
Brahms Sym 1					IV-30
Tchaik R&J				30

Scale: 4 octave with arpeggios in 3 fingerings and thirds in double stops. Focus on shifts in upper two octaves, and bowing “in the groove” (using mirror).

Core elements:

• vibrato motor is back of hand in upper positions
• to maintain arm weight on up bow, think of elbow seeking side of cello
• keep left elbow high(er) to facilitate shift over the shoulders

Notes 2/1

Total practice time: 5.5 hours

I was successful in reaching my goal of practicing at least 30 minutes every day except for Thursday (yesterday), when I canceled my whole life due to illness. Can’t practice when I’m physically unable to. I’ll maintain the same goal for the next week.

I’m still torn between trying to touch on everything each day and allocating a lengthier period of concentrated effort to a few things on the days I do practice them. My least favorite thing to do is to learn difficult (i.e. not sight-readable) new music, easily seen by how rarely I practice orchestra music and Martinu. I need to think a bit more about how to get past that. One of the problems there is that I don’t have external pressure to practice those, either, since I can get through them “well enough” at rehearsal. Then there’s the psychological belief that practice isn’t going to make them “good” anyway, so what’s the point?

What I think I’ll try this week is this: on the days I practice beyond 30 minutes, my second 30 minute block will be allocated evenly to these three pieces. I don’t want to use the first block because my lesson material is more important, and learning mode is not a very good warm-up. I don’t know if 10 minutes on most days will make a dent, but it can’t hurt: it’s more than nothing.

I think that’s plenty of change to implement in one week.

Maintenance note: I adjusted my bridge on 1/29, after noticing in the mirror that the bass-side foot had migrated a few mm closer to the fingerboard than the treble-side foot. It appears to be straight now. I did not notice a significant change in sound, which is generally good.

Orchestra Rehearsal

Tonight was split fairly evenly between Brahms 1st mvmt and our first look at a contemporary piece by Stan Woolner entitled Katherine on my Chest/With you at your Grave.

Brahms practice notes:

• opening, especially arpeggios
• large intervals near beginning of Allegro, and at C
• sextuplets at K are really, really fast at tempo. I suppose practicing the gesture is the way to go there.
• Otherwise, fingerings are done; I just need to run the movement a few times.

Woolner notes:

There’s not much here to practice, really. The big challenge is the constant key and meter changes, not so much the notes. At rehearsal we marked in cues and obvious bowings. The other thing I learned was how to mark in cues for the more unusual time signatures, like 5/4 and 11/8. The measures are divided into groups of 2 or 3 notes, with each two note group marked with a slash and each three note group marked with a triangle. So for instance, a 11/8 bar may be marked above as ^|||| or ^^|^, etc. That really helped. The notes may not be difficult, but the harmonic motion is not yet obvious, so heaven help you if you mess up the counting.

Cello Lesson

When my time with T- is done, I believe I will have learned most of what I will learn from the 4 octave E Major scale. Seriously. Today we divided the time roughly evenly between my scale and the Courante from Bach’s 2nd Suite.

The reason I chose E Major is that I played it exclusively for the first year and a half, and frequently rotate to it now, especially when I am learning something new, like these double-stopped thirds. So I feel confident enough to play it without much practice, like, for instance, this week, when I used all of my scale time on the scale passages in the Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy instead of actual scales.

Today we stopped to focus on the shift into 5th position on the A string, then all of the shifts in the 3d and 4th octaves, and finally the sound quality in the fourth octave. Things I need to watch out for:

• Shift with the forearm, not the hand. This came up when T- noticed I was changing the shape of my hand as I shifted upward in thumb position.
• Bring the thumb up as the 2nd finger goes down.
• If I’m going to have problems with intonation, it’s going to be between E and A on I. Almost always it is because the third is not high enough. Need to spend some time retraining my ear.
• Keep the left elbow high in the downward shift from B on II to C on I, to facilitate clearing the shoulder on the next upward shift.
• Think of the back of the hand as the vibrato motor in thumb positions.
• Keep the bow hair flat.
• If the sound cracks, think of it as the signal to relax my grip (not squeeze more tightly!).
• Practice downward old finger shifts occasionally.
• To keep passive weight from the arm through the bow, think of the elbow making a beeline for the cello on up bow. ******* This was my Aha! moment today. This came up when we were discussing the fact that my tone is worse on slow bowing because I am using too much effort (of the wrong kind) to keep the bow slow.
• Keep the bow “in the groove,” especially when very near the bridge in the 4th octave. We spent some time with the mirror, and my bow was not as straight as I thought it was, at all. More mirror time is needed. The string feels slipperier when it is short, with more tendency to skate upward. This can be countered by more passive arm weight – see “beeline”, above.

A hint for practicing the intonation of a shift: play then practice the same shift in different registers to get the sound of the interval well into your ear. I need to spend some time doing focused practice on each transition. Sounds like I could also benefit from playing single notes continuously until they sound exactly the way I want them to sound.

Courante:

After playing through with multiple stops (flubs) and one major slowdown (but much better than I expected to be able to play it yet) we spent some time practicing “slowly for the bowly.” This involved playing the first note on each bow change, held out for the duration of the bow while speaking the rhythm. That’s a challenge. Worked a bit on the energy of the first two notes, but I did that pretty well so not much time on that. And changed the first chord from the standard bottom up to top down.

T- recommends I work this in very small segments, smoothing out technical glitches then directly to performance speed, because, again, it’s the gesture that’s important.

A bonus from the student ahead of me, working on a sicilienne in preparation for his Oberlin audition: bring out the little note.

Voice Lesson

My introductory voice class is over; this was the last lesson. After warm-ups we each presented the song we were assigned last week in a masterclass format. After waiting a few moments to make sure no one else was burning to start, I volunteered to go first. That is generally my preference – no worries that I won’t measure up to whomever went before, and I can better enjoy those who go after, since I’m not worrying about my turn.

I confessed that it had taken me awhile this week to get into this song, and that I thought my resistance was because I didn’t relate to the world view. God Bless the Child was written by Billie Holiday after a fight with her mother over money (according to Wikipedia), and there is a real victim attitude the way I read the words. After spending some time thinking about various people I have known, and realizing that in some ways the “rich relatives” section has personal meaning, I reinterpreted the mood as discouragement and started to make some progress. Plus, I didn’t want to embarrass myself by coming to class unprepared! We shared a laugh over that.

Our teacher A- is very fun to work with as a beginner. She seems genuinely delighted with every effort, and is great at finding something individually useful for each student. She told me that my voice has the nice quality of being uniformly clear throughout my register, and asked me what I wanted to improve. I told her that I was still distressed because it has a tendency to crack in the register where this song lies, and that I had tried making it both more nasal and more breathy. Both tactics improved the cracking, but neither was the way I wanted the song to sound. She suggested I try centering the sound in my chest and just “pushing through” the cracking. Wow. Big improvement. It was the first time I’ve experienced that amount of resonance in my chest, and I loved the sounds that came out. You should have heard me in the car on the way home!

We also spent some class time discussing what to do next semester, now that this class has ended. Our options are private lessons, and/or one of three ensembles. She reassured all of us that we were quite ready for ensembles, and that she was totally impressed that we were all able to take a new song away and learn it in a week. Much less hand-holding than she is used to in this class. I think I am going to sign up to sing with a women’s a cappella group which starts next week. More news to follow.

My only regret is that my R-09 malfunctioned (again) and I did not record the singing part of the class. After fiddling with the settings, I have decided that the battery-remaining display is not accurate, and that when it cuts off recording early it needs new batteries. I need to get some rechargeable ones.

Cello Practice Log

	Fr 18	Sa 19	Su 20	Mo 21	Tu 22	We 23	Th 24
Scale: E Major				10
Etude: Lee #9				20			15
Bach 2nd Suite				C-30			C-30
Saint Saens Concerto
Martinu Trio
Brahms Sym 1
Tchaik R&J		30		30
Lee #10					30		15

Total practice time this week: 3.5 hours

Scale: 4 octave with arpeggios in 3 fingerings and thirds in double stops. This week I substituted work on the Tchaikovsky scalar passages for formal scale passages.

Bach, Trio and Orch: Note movement in practice block

Assessment 1/25:

This is the first time in a long while that I have recorded practice times, and it seems to me that I may have missed a couple of practice sessions. I hope so, anyway, because that doesn’t seem like much practice!

One other conclusion I might draw is that when I am busy, I am not making practice a priority. The day gets away from me, and by the end I am thinking “Oh, well, I’ll practice tomorrow.” I also have a bit of an all or nothing mentality, and the idea of practicing for three hours overwhelms me so much I don’t start at all.

So, in the interest of jump starting my practice commitment, for this coming week my goal will to be to practice (cello) 30 minutes each day. Anything else is a bonus – and it doesn’t get me out of tomorrow’s 30 minutes!

Orchestra Rehearsal

Tonight’s rehearsal was physically exhausting. I had received an e-mail from our principal cellist, J-, warning me that he wasn’t going to be at rehearsal this week, so at least I was forewarned. And it was nice to have what should have been my lesson time this afternoon for what I call “cramming” and T- calls “practicing.” It did some good, even though I spent it all on Brahms 1st mvmt and we rehearsed Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy for the first 1.5 hours and Brahms 4th mvmt for the last 0.5 hours. Too, too, too many notes, and too, too, too many accidentals. A real workout, and no, I’m not actually playing all of the notes correctly yet. I say it that way, because I am playing all the note values, one of the first rules of sight-reading. It’s the notes themselves that are somewhat random. However, I played all of the cello excerpts we were asked to demonstrate acceptably, so I was happy. And tired.

Rehearsal notes: Tchaikovsky

• work out the divisi parts on p1 and 3
• fast scale passages to bring up to speed at A, E, F, O, P, T (still need to do fingerings for most of those)
• fast triplet sections at Q, R
• fast section in rhythm before S
• fast scales with slur two bow two bowing at K, L
• exposed chromatic scale fragments in E and O (all the same)
• need to get V1 bowings at Q (in unison)
• need to have bowing decision on cello opening and similar passages

Brahms Symphony #1, 4th mvmt

• fingering for little scales around A
• (review fingering whole movement)
• ask T- about how to bow fast alternating notes at B and C – one string vs. adjacent strings
• need to get V1 bowings for the thematic section at H
• many little fast scale fragments to bring up to speed: before E, mid K, end K and L, late L
• arpeggios at F, mid O
• fingering and rhythm in stringendo after Q

Still a lot of work to be done. I am frankly not optimistic that I can learn all of these notes by March 7th. Instead of scale practice this week I am going to work on the scale fragments in the Tchaikovsky. If I am going to have a chance, it will be through rhythms and repetition.

Cello Lesson

T called in sick just before I was due to leave for my lesson today, and honestly, I was relieved. I have been working on Lee #9 very well this week, but he usually doesn’t want to hear the same thing two weeks in a row. So ditto for the double stop thirds in my E Major scale, though those are finally coming along with consistent work on 4th finger scales and shift into thumb position section. Also,  none of my Bach movements are really ready for display, though I had intended to do the Saraband if he wanted Bach. And I haven’t even looked at Saint Saens this week. Time to regroup and plan for next week.

Voice Lesson

Today was our next-to-last class for the semester, and we were each assigned a new piece to learn well enough to present in a master class format next week. It was kind of a boring lesson, as we sang through Poor Wayfaring Stranger together a couple of times, then each of (the 5 of) us read through our new songs individually. BTW, by missing class because of the major traffic snafu last week I missed out on performing my first piece for the class. Darn.

Each song was chosen to be different from our first song. My first song was Greensleeves, my new song is God Bless the Child, by Arthur Herzog Jr. and Billie Holiday. Some of the others knew it, but not me. That turns out to be fine, since part of the point of the new piece is to learn how to learn a new piece.

Here is our “new piece checklist”:

1. Listening to the piece first is not recommended, but if you do listen, listen to at least several different renditions.
2. Play through the piece (if you have instrumental skills) without singing it, OR sight sing the piece.
3. Go through and mark in breaths using two systems:
   1.  Speak the words, and figure out where breaths would naturally fall.
   2. Look at the musical phrases, and decide where breaths would make sense musically.

   Try to choose breath points where they align.

4. What is the song about?
5. Who are you singing to, and why? What is your goal?
6. Consider the style of the music (blues, ballad, etc, and how you might want to sing to reflect that style.
7. Look at changes in the accompaniment for recurring sections. This can give you clues for how to move the piece.
8. Sing through the song on a z, or a pblt, or lu lu, or anything but the words. What is hard?
9. Practice excerpts over a couple of days whenever you have a chance to sing. Driving, washing dishes, showering, etc.
10. When everything feels at the same level of difficulty, add the text.
11. There will be some new difficulties once the text is added; work on those excerpts.

The hope is that by diligently working on the piece this way, you will get to the point that you want to share it with others. Recognizing that singing in public requires a bit of exhibitionism beyond that required to perform on an instrument.

Piano lesson

First lesson in the new piano lab. It wasn’t quite fully functional, because the lab had been disassembled in order to host some of the opening festivities over the weekend, and it is evidently too complicated to be hooked back up by ignorant volunteers. Our lesson was interrupted by the electronics technician who had received an emergency call to reconnect everything.

It was functional enough for our purposes, though. The lab has all new Clavinovas with a large library of computer functions, including lots of fun voices, a built-in metronome, and the ability to quickly record and play back. We used the last function to record one hand, then play back while practicing the other. That could be an awfully nice feature to have when practicing at home, and is giving me second thoughts about purchasing my current rental, a simple upright Kawai. Maybe I should look at the Clavinovas first.

Lesson went pretty well, as I had practiced not much but well for at least two or three days this week <g>. We have settled on the Clementi Sonatina in C for our next class piece, the first time we have worked on the same piece. We also scuttled plans for checking into joining one of the other classes instead of continuing with a semi-private lesson. It sounds like that class will be broken up, with half joining us as a class and the other half joining the class behind us. It will be nice to get the financial break of being in a class again, plus I feel like I don’t have to work quite as hard with more people to bring along at the same pace. I don’t want this piano work to get too intense.

G- is really good at following the lesson plan set out the week before, so each week I am only going to list the assignments for next week:

• F Maj scale in parallel motion, optional more than two octaves, change rhythms
• C, G, D, A, E Maj scales in contrary motion
• Mach p. 289, A, vous dirai-je, Maman?, also tsp to C, faster tempo
• Mach p.290 Two etudes in syncopated rhythm, also LH in parallel 10ths
• Start learning Clementi Allegro

Also, carried over from last week:

• Robb, Phrygian Mode etude
• Etude book #11