I had a thought again. Apparently a lot has been going on in the sub-conscience in the last 8-months. 

My thought is related to compositional process, pragmatism, performing and the audience experience. I think we all face performance situations where we practice something so very hard, but come the performance, it just does not go well. Or, where some aspect of a piece is unnecessarily difficult, and not for much gain. Some pieces sound harder than they are; some pieces sound easier than they are. 

The second movement of the Cassado Solo Suite is pretty hard, it's a virtuosic Sardana-dance with lots of fast octaves, jumping around, crazy double stopping, multiple voices etc. I love it - the challenge is well worth the work! The last chord is my least favorite, even thought it's by far not the "most difficult" passage in the piece: a D major chord up on the fingerboard, where you can't really easily block but you have to anyway, to get the fifths. There's plenty of time to get up there, so it should work. I hit it every time in practice. And...so far, whenever I've performed the piece, I've missed it. I hate that one chord to the point where I might not program the piece because of it. I've heard other cellists say the same exact thing. So...it occurred to me...what if, I just took that chord down an octave?

Would changing that one chord influence the audience experience in any way? Probably not for the negative (unless there was a cellist in the audience, who, knowing the piece was either biting their nails from nervousness on my behalf or gleefully waiting for me to fall off the fingerboard). Would it change my performing experience? Ummm, yes, absolutely! For infinitely better. And, in the end, would anybody really care? Would Cassado care? 

It's probably obvious what my answers are. BUT - this could, and would be a slippery slope. Once the door has been opened to the idea of changing a passage for convenience, where's the line? I think the answer has to do w a balance, and the composer should always get a veto. The main question for me is the audience experience, and whether or not the creative "edit" would in some way change the essence of the piece. I am a pragmatist - but I don't want to sell out either. So I've tried to do it his way for 15 years. Next time I'm trying it my way - I'm so taking that chord down.  

     

We musicians like to talk about how we are a lot like athletes, in the way we use (and abuse) our bodies. I've heard it said many times, that playing the cello is the same as this sport or that sport, we just use smaller muscle groups. I agree. I am definitely feeling it. If I take breaks from practicing, I don't come back as fast as I used to. I played a run of West Side Story last week and my back is still giving me trouble. My core muscles need a serious overhaul (they never quite recovered from the child bearing business) and I'm working on that. But what about the actual daily routines that I have, besides learning new music? 

For a while now I have been in search of a maintenance routine that would allow me to keep my hands and body conditioned when I am not actively learning a new piece or preparing for a performance (on those occasions I generally have no problems motivating myself to practice). The parameters of that routine are simple: it needs to encourage sensitivity and accuracy while maintaining muscle conditioning, in the shortest possible time (three kids, full time job, no time...)

I have talked with many friends about their routine, some play a Bach Suite every day, some focus on Popper (I heard that a handy way to do this is to rotate each batch of 10 for a week, the way they were written). My teacher Erling Blondal Bengtsson was quite well-known for his routine of playing through a different Bach Suite every day, and on the 7th day all the Piatti Caprices. He said that they really touched on all aspects of cello that one needs. I definitely agree (I just can't do it). I was on the Popper Project for a while (I still have a couple to learn, but it's almost all done!) and playing 3 Popper Etudes a day certainly kept my hands conditioned, maybe a little too well - at times I was hurting so bad I had to take a day or two off from fear of injury. Plus it took a lot of time! More than I have most days, anyway. For the last year I've done my warm-ups (which I do religiously every time I practice), then playing around the circle of fifths, Poppers and Piattis, using the "I wonder what I feel like doing today" organizational method.

Today, I was talking about the issue with my massage therapist. He suggested that instead of flying by the seed of my pants, why not design a program for myself, approaching it like a fitness cross-training routine for cello. This makes so much sense it's a little ridiculous. Of course it should be a rotation of different cello-fitness routines, 2 days of muscle conditioning following by 3-5 days of cardio! Not sure what that exactly means yet, except that Popper is going to be heavily involved, as is Bach. It's easy to think about the left hand, but what about the bow, how does that factor in? Should there be explosiveness training involved, or are different forms of calisthenics enough if rotated with some isometric movement? And what does cardio mean for cello anyway? I think I just found my summer project...         

The two stages of my creative process seem to be pretty solidified by now (for classical performance anyway): the learning process and the performative process. I think that the essential thing here is that I start with a piece that has already been composed, and meticulously notated. The process varies depending on the genre - whether or not it's a musical language I'm already familiar with, or one that I have to learn (this happens a lot in new music...) 

The steps in the learning process are always the same, regardless of genre - of course, depending on the difficulty of the piece, the weighing of the categories can change rather drastically! 
Starting a new piece in so fun, exhilarating, and pretty soon frustrating. I often do a first, quick pass at fingerings and bowings, just to have something to work from, and assume that these will change as the piece matures. The more I learn, the more I understand that studying the piece without my instrument is essential, and the sooner I do it, the better: I need to know about form, harmony, details of performance instructions...but especially harmony! Starting to pay more attention the actual chord analysis on Bach has essentially revolutionized how I practice, and memorize it now -- every time I find something new and my mind is blown all over again.  

My favorite part of the learning process...Drilling. No thinking, just doing and listening, purely physical. Finding the most efficient and elegant way of playing a passage, then solidifying it and making it easy. I love the use of gadgets - metronome, egg timer, tuner, recording devices. 

The most difficult part: artistic choices. The more choices there are, the harder it is for me. Luckily, I have had some very excellent teachers and I know I lot about the history of the different cello styles, so a lot of times I already know the route I'm meant to take. Again, new music is in a different category - I usually hope that by the artistic choices time, I have learned to speak the language of the composer, and I know the dialect that I want to speak.