Daily Archives: June 15, 2009

In Which She Muses About The End of The Cello Year

Friday night I had my second to last cello lesson of the year. (Not the calendar year, the school year. Yes? Yes.) On the way there I was thinking that it would be nice to just play music. The last few lessons have been really focused on the polishing of technique and they were great, but I wasn’t certain I was in the mood for it this time.

(My brain also absented itself as I drove there and took me the way to orchestra instead. I found myself on Donegani wondering what I was doing. Was ten minutes late as a result.)

Anyhow, got there, set up, my teacher asked me what we were doing and I said we’d been putting the final touches on Grenadiers and we’d started prepping Gavotte. She said we’d warm up with the Gavotte prep exercises, so we worked on them, focusing on the minute readjustment of the left elbow necessary to stay in tune, and the release of the first finger guiding the bow to wrap around the string in order to avoid audible string crossings. Then we started playing the C section of Gavotte, then moved to play the whole piece. (Although I played through the A and B sections for fun I hadn’t worked them, and evidently I have been playing it much too quickly.) And then we were turning the page and looking at Bourrée, which I hadn’t played in, well, a decade, and we worked on similar issues with the addition of one of my banes, maintaining constant bow weight and not doing tiny accents on every new note when I change bow direction. She played with me during both pieces, either doubling my line or playing the cello accompaniment, and we played the whole piece I hadn’t prepped, which explained the lack of solid shifting halfway through. I really enjoyed it.

She said I’d handled the things we were addressing well, and I said I was glad, seeing as how I hadn’t prepped the Bourrée. She may have forgotten, or mixed me up with another student. Or maybe she was just determined to get me to the end of book 2 before we took our summer break. Whatever the reason, I said that I was glad we’d done what we did; I’d been hoping we wouldn’t drill the final phrasing bits of Grenadiers, and was thinking how nice it would be to just play music. She told me to just ask whenever I felt like that; she knows how things get, and she cheerfully accommodates students when they need that kind of lesson. I got it without asking, sort of, and still got to work on technique stuff. The last couple of lessons have been very technical and stop-and-start affairs focusing on single phrases, and sometimes I really get into those. This past lesson wasn’t one of those nights, though, so everything worked out just fine.

And so here we are, working on the end of the Suzuki book 2 review. I have my schedule of what pieces to review on what day of the week over the break, and my photocopy of handwritten prep exercises for book 3, and instruction to start messing about with it this summer. It feels like it has arrived somewhat suddenly, although we’ve been working on it since Thanksgiving interspersed with recital stuff and orchestra stuff. Everything I work on ties in somehow, and lots of what I’m working on in the technical sense is universally applicable.

When I think about the mental list of things I wanted to accomplish through lessons (becoming more familiar with the geography of the finger board, a more solid foundation in theory, improved intonation, a better bow hold, more efficient left hand movement, accurate thumb position, a better vibrato) we’ve done so much work on most of them. I no longer panic when a conductor uses most solfège terms (although I still can’t keep dièse and bémol and bécarre straight, and when someone starts using movable solfège terms I panic because why can’t we all just agree that do is C, why does it have to shift to indicate the tonic of whatever key you’re in?), my bow grip no longer causes cramps or locking of joints, my left hand can fly all over the place, and I know where notes are in different places with more certainty than ever before. I still trip a lot, and over- or under-shoot shifts, and my wrist keeps trying to reassert its reign over my right arm and lift the damn bow instead of leaving it on the string, but in general, I can tell that my technique has refined by leaps and bounds over the past eight months. And I’m filled with a smug kind of glee to think that I will only get better, and better, and better.

I am so glad that I decided to do this, and so very thankful that my teacher and I seem to fit one another’s teaching/learning styles. She charges so little and waves her hand at me when I say that we go overtime pretty much every lesson; apart from the buying of the new cello thing (which is two-thirds covered by the pending sale of the 4/4) this is very affordable financially, and time-wise is worth it. The discipline and reward are good for me in many different ways.

Sunday Roundup

Here’s part two of the weekend.

The nap I took on Saturday afternoon, while blissful and necessary at the time, fudged my sleep schedule enough so that I was wide awake at midnight. Still, we awoke relatively stress-free on Sunday, and packed the car in the gorgeous sunshine to take a trip to Rowan Tree Farm, AKA the Coalition Stronghold, to help Janice build the chicken coop for her two dozen rapidly growing baby chicks. Who really don’t qualify as chicks any longer, but they’re not quite chickens yet, so we started calling them baby chickens. The boy called the coop a birdhouse all day, and when we stopped correcting him he actually called it a chicken house.

We got there just before ten. It was a fabulously gorgeous day and I wish I hadn’t been so drained by the four previous days’ events. I had a really tough time trailing after the boy, who wanted to be everywhere. Wandering around after him wasn’t so bad, really; it was trying to explain to him that I couldn’t play with him the way he wanted me to that was the difficult part. Add to that the fact that he didn’t nap, which he never does when we’re there, and we had a few unhappy moments as the day progressed. He desperately wanted to help build the henhouse, but HRH and Jan were carrying around cinder blocks, bags of gravel, 4 x 8′ pieces of plywood and 2x4s, and power tools were being used, so keeping him out of the way was a challenge. Thank goodness for Carter, the resident husky/collie mix, who loves people and loves to play. His leg is out of his cast/splint and while he limps when he walks, he runs at top speed like there’s nothing wrong (other than sometimes leaving a step with the bad leg out of the gallop entirely). Once we’d explained to the boy that the dog loved to play best by running at a person and slaloming out of the way at the last minute, made necessary after the boy tried to dodge and ended up stepping into the dog’s flight path (which resulted in the child being tossed into the air and rolling a few times in the long grass) Sparky spent a lot of the day running at/away from the dog through shoulder-height grass, giggling. If they weren’t running together they were sitting on the ground in the shade, giving one another kisses and hugs, or hiding form one another in the tall grass. He did get to help a bit with the building process, handing HRH screws when needed, and pretending to saw wood or use the screwdrivers from his set of toy tools which he had brought along. There was a lot of movement in and out of the house between the great outdoors and all its attractions, and the first season of the Muppet Show on DVD and the few toys he’d brought.

At the end of the day we had to eat and run, as it was coming up on nine o’clock. The hours of daylight had yielded a very solid henhouse with a roof and a window that basically only needed the door hung and the insulation put in, plus the panelling installed to cover the insulation (because chickens are chickens, and see nothing wrong with eating insulation), plus a couple more finishing touches. The boy discovered that he loves rye bread, and a certain pita chip made by someone at the local farmers’ market flavoured with thyme. He actually asked if he could be buckled into the car with a blanket, so we knew he was exhausted and thinking of going home, despite telling me earlier that he never wanted to leave t! and Janice’s house. Before we left they presented us with a lovely gift of a framed photograph, taken by t! the last summer at their housewarming, of the three of us walking through the back fields toward the pond. The boy was presented with a silver five-dollar coin, and told that it was treasure. As he was very tired and unfocused, HRH and I were more excited about it than he was.

We buckled him in and away we went into the night. When we stopped for gas we covered him up with the requested blanket, and he was asleep before we hit the highway. I dozed a lot of the way myself. We slid him into bed around ten-thirty, and he was tired enough not to whine or delay or ask someone to cuddle him for a bit. Washing the collected grime off him can wait till tonight.

In retrospect, it might have made more sense for HRH to head out there alone. But that would have deprived the boy of romping with the dog, seeing the baby chickens, and I wouldn’t have seen t! and Jan, which I so rarely get to do these days. And I did get to spend a lot of time outside on a glorious day.