slur where you want to

The only good slur is a musical one.

Do you think that will catch on as a quote?

Likely not.

Oh well.

I have officially graduated to Book Two of Dotzauer Grant's Fundamentals of Cello Technique. This series is my primary source of etudes.

I love etudes. (The "why" of that is a whole post in itself, but not the point of this one.) I even love etudes that annoy me.

The last one I worked on from Book One was annoying, which somehow is a fitting end to the book. It shows that I'm not just mindlessly playing them to be able to play the notes and leave it at that. I get into them enough now to have an opinion on individual ones.

This etude (#80) is almost entirely sixteenth notes. There are a few shifts and extensions, and then there are the slurs all over the place. (For non-cellists, playing a slur means playing two or more notes with the bow going in only one direction, as opposed to changing the direction of the bow every time you change the note. It's a neat trick.)

I am used to slurs occurring at the beginning or end of a note grouping or covering an entire note grouping. This was my first mistake. Note groupings help readability, but otherwise, one shouldn't think of them solely as groups and play them as such, even though they (maddeningly) look like groups. Anyway, this etude puts the slurs in the middle of a grouping and across groupings. The immediate problem I had when I first tried this piece was that I either wanted to play separate bows throughout or rearrange the slurs to occur at the beginning and end as I was used to. My bow hand was so adamant about this that it would go in the direction it wanted to go, regardless of what was on the page.

Of course, Ben-the-cello-teacher wasn't going to let me, or my bow hand, do that. Do you remember Ben? Here he is.

Whenever I get stuck or stubborn like this with a bow hand technique, Ben says, "let's work it out on a scale first." Since I always warm up with a scale or two before a practice session, my left hand movements are pretty automatic, so I can focus more on the right hand. It's how I learned slurs in the first place. Ben's idea again.

Funnily enough, this etude runs very like a G scale in notes involved, so that's the one I used. It took slowing the movements down to molasses pace before my right hand caught on to the pattern, and then there was the inevitable, "oh, I get it now!" So in practice sessions, I played the scale a few times at faster and faster speeds, and then without pausing, launched into the etude - getting a running start with the scale and then sliding right into the piece, in other words. The etude was suddenly much more manageable and much less annoying.

Clever fellow, that Ben.