This post is a bit off-topic and non-Baroque, and is doubtless old hat for experienced muscians, but might be interesting for fellow adult learners of the cello, especially anyone who’s found themselves stuck after a year or so.
I’ve been learning the cello for 16 months now, and had recently reached one of those irritating blocking points, where I seemed to have stopped improving — and sometimes felt I was getting worse! It was obviously time to do something about the way I was practising.
Last Christmas, Lola got me a copy of Maurice Gendron’s The Art of Playing the Cello. It’s a slim book, but quite forbidding for less-experienced players. However, it looked like a good resource for ideas, and on delving in I found a section on daily practice. Specifically, it explains how to divide up your five hours of daily practice.
Gulp.
Did I mention it was a forbidding book? Five hours a day is doubtless a good target if you’re studying full time, but it’s not something I could manage as a hobbyist, however much I might want to.
But after ignoring the total time he was talking about, I realised there was something there I could borrow and build into my own 60-90 minute dailyish practice sessions. He suggests dividing up the five hours into four 75-minute sections:
- Scales
- A study
- A movement from a concerto
- Recapitulation of whatever what giving trouble in the first three.
Structuring the practice like that, but with smaller time-slices, sounded emininently doable. So over the last week, I’ve switched to:
- 20 minutes working on one scale/arpeggio pair from the ABRSM Grade 3/4 exams, changing which one daily.
- 20 minutes on one of the study pieces that my teacher has asked me to look at. We normally have two or three underway, so I spend one or two sessions a week on each. These shorter, focused sessions seem to help me learn considerably more than the unstructured studying I was doing before; perhaps the warmup playing the scales is helping too.
- 20 minutes on a piece that I plan to change each week, to (a) work on my sight-reading and (b) to play things that I want to play rather than just studies. To keep things easy, I kicked this off with a decidedly non-Baroque piece; the vocal line to the Beatles’ Yesterday, taken from this book. It’s easy to read, and it was fun working out the fingering — some bits were easiest with fifth position, which I rarely use even in studies.
- Whatever time I have left recapitulating or (sometimes) just improvising a bit.
I don’t know whether it’s just me, or just chance, or just where I am in my learning process, but this has turbo-charged things; it feels like I’ve learned more in the last week than in the previous ten. Let’s see how it stands up over the next few months!
Comments 11
Goodness! 5 hours (:o) I wonder if such a rigorous practice regime might iron out not just the technical inaccuracies but any innate love and emotion which could give the music its heart?
Posted 12 Mar 2009 at 9:13 am ¶It does feel like it might, doesn’t it? I don’t get the impression my cello teacher or Lola’s violin teacher practise more than an hour or so a day nowadays, but I wonder how much they played when they were studying. I’ll have to ask at my next lesson.
Posted 12 Mar 2009 at 12:31 pm ¶I used to think the same thing…that sometimes the more I practiced, the worse it sounded. I told this to my teacher and he said..”Is it really getting worse or is your ear getting better?”.
Yes - those studying the instrument full time do practice that much…I’ve asked :) I was pretty astonished when I first heard of practicing that many hours a day but now I see that sometimes you need that much practice to get the impossible passages. That is the case for me, anyway. I’ve been studying the cello as a hobby for about 8 years..and there have been days when I do practice 4 hours. I lose myself in it. It’s a nice feeling :)
Posted 23 Mar 2009 at 9:19 pm ¶I can certainly relate to intonation sounding worse the more you practise — I felt mine was really quite good when I started, and perhaps it was good for a beginner (or perhaps not!). But as I became more relaxed and was able to better hear the noises I was making — and yes, I guess my ear was getting better too — it started sounding worse and worse. Lots of playing scales seems to be helping a lot with that, I normally sound in tune to myself now.
Re: playing for four hours — wow! Perhaps as you gain experience your technique improves enough that you can do that. If I were to do it now I’d not be able to move my arms the next day :-)
I would worry that if I played the same piece for that long it would lose soul, though — rather like a piece of writing loses something the more you polish and rework it, even if it becomes “better” in some technical sense. Still, it’s way too early on my learning journey for me to rush to judgement on that… perhaps the best thing to do is not to practise something when you start feeling tired of it. There’s a particular piece by Vivaldi that I was learning a while back, and I *know* that if I played it more I could get it to sound better — but I’ve played it so much now that recordings of it sound boring. Time to leave that one for a few months, perhaps.
Posted 24 Mar 2009 at 12:33 am ¶Interesting you should mention losing soul on a piece you’ve worked on for a long time. Read my blog on a similar topic…it really is like a love relationship:
http://celloinsanity.blogspot.com/2009/03/its-beautiful-but-i-cant-enjoy-it.html
I have worked on a few pieces over the course of a few years now. I would have never thought I could do that - play a piece that much and still be engaged by it. I guess that is why I love the cello.
Posted 24 Mar 2009 at 4:45 pm ¶Thank you for the link! I can definitely relate to the feeling you have for that prelude — the way I feel about the Vivaldi piece (it’s the allegro that opens RV399, a concerto in C major) is just the same, albeit at a beginner’s level; I only started playing it in December.
I love Emily’s pee-on-the-seat analogy; coming from the other side of the gender divide I had to adapt it slightly (and won’t say to what :-) but it definitely works for me.
Out of interest, how long had you been playing when you started looking at the Bach suites? I’ve had a bit of a go at the first minuet from the first suite, with varying amounts of success, but suspect it might be a while before I can really get going with it.
Posted 25 Mar 2009 at 12:32 am ¶It was about a year into my studies that I started looking at them. I think my very first one was the minuet from the 3rd suite. I suggest looking at them now. I think the Bach Suites are hard for players at any level. It just depends on *what* is hard. When I first started, it was hard to learn the notes. Now, the notes are not hard for me (most of the time) but phrasing is really hard for me. That’s the beauty of the suites…everyone’s experience is different.
Keep working on the Minuet you started. If you’re like me, you’ll still be working on it a few years from now as it will grow with you.
Posted 25 Mar 2009 at 5:36 pm ¶Sounds like I should get started on them again, then. Perhaps a different one, though — I’m tempted by the gigue from the E flat major suite, but that looks a bit too tricky to play at a comfortable speed right now.
Posted 27 Mar 2009 at 11:32 am ¶Hi, Please ignore any book or person that says you need to practise for “x hours per day” - they’re talking garbage. The amount of practice you need to do depends on the goals you have set yourself.
Make sure at the start of every practice session you have an aim in mind for what you want to improve. By the time you finish your practice, even if it is only for a few minutes, you should be able to describe the improvement you’ve made.
So don’t practice scales for 20 mins. Instead practice D major until you can play it fluently at crotchet=160.
Time is really irrelevant, practice towards goals and you will get much more from your time.
Hope that helps - for more tips you might like to visit my site ;)
Posted 07 Apr 2009 at 7:52 pm ¶Thanks for the advice, Mike! I’ll definitely check out your site. To be fair to Gendron, I think he was assuming that his students would want to practise 5 hours a day, and was just trying to say “split it up this way”. An argument for structuring practice rather than for a specific number of hours. Still scary, though.
My own problem is limited time; I can really only practise for an hour at a time, three or four times per week. (The neighbours get a little unhappy if I play past 11pm — old building, poor sound insulation — and work doesn’t leave me with much free time.) OTOH I love your idea of making sure one can describe the improvement from a practice session, and making sure one has definite goals in mind. Certainly just sitting there noodling through scale after scale for 20 minutes won’t gain anyone anything; I work on one particular scale in each session, and certainly the sessions when I’ve had a goal like “I’m going to get the intonation perfect on the C and G strings for D major” have worked out much better than the times when I’ve thought “I’m going to practise this and hopefully it will sound better when I’m done”.
My medium-term goals right now are to improve my (currently poor) sight-reading — hence, spending time on lots of easy new pieces and moving on as soon as I can read them easily, and also playing lots of scales so that I know the keys well enough to not fumble around too much — and to keep stretching myself by working on the study pieces my teacher has set me. Splitting each hour session up into three sections — scales, study, sight-reading — keeps it fresh and varied for me.
BTW, was crotchet=160 a specifically useful target or just a random example?
Posted 08 Apr 2009 at 10:44 pm ¶BTW it’s nice to see someone else using the British “practise for the verb, practice for the noun” spelling. The (admittedly much easier) American “practice/practice” spelling seems to be taking over…
Posted 08 Apr 2009 at 10:48 pm ¶