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May. 18th, 2020 12:51 am I am guilty to say that I haven't played my cello consistently since I was seventeen. Now at 34 and with the quarantine going on, I've been getting stir-crazy so I picked it up and have been consistently practicing between an hour to two a day. As such here's a number of observations that I've made:
- My strings did not forgive me for my neglect. Despite being slightly loosened before going into storage, the A-string spitefully snapped when I tried to tune it and no sooner did I fix that, the D-string gleefully did the same.
- I've actually unlearned a few bad habits that I struggled with before. The shoulder of my bow arm used to get too stiff while playing, causing it to hurt. Also I seem to be a bit better about keeping my left elbow up. (For non-cellists, your left arm is the one that does the fingering and keeping its elbow down is like playing catch with your elbow glued to your hip. Possible but stupid.)
- It took be a couple days to remember what an in tune instrument sounds like. I could feel the ghost of my teacher glaring at me as I resorted to a tuning app.
- When I was seventeen and tootling away on my 7/8 cello, I wondered whether my hands would ever grow big enough to play a full-sized instrument. Now after a couple weeks of playing the same instrument and feeling my fourth finger reaching into the stratosphere to play the correct notes, I come to the following conclusions: (i) no, (ii) no, (iii) ouch, and (iv) hell no.
- The open A-string is still a narcissist. If you give too little attention, it screams at you like a toddler having a temper tantrum. (Seriously, are there any A-string brands that make the open string sound nice?)
- It's cool to note how much stuff I do remember. My bow hold is still correct. I'll be playing some of my old pieces from when I was ten and start smoothly shifting at the right times. Sometimes it seems like I am more in-tune when I am further down the finger board. Bizarre.
- I am still relatively immune to the pain of metallic wires trying to rip into my finger tips and enough of a masochist to keep on playing when it does hurt.
- The metronome is still a lying bastard.
- The pieces I am playing are totally the Royal Conservatory of Music Grade 8 to 10 stuff that I was playing before I stopped and not the Grade 4 stuff from when I was ten. I don't care what the official repertoire book says. It's in cahoots with the metronome.
- I stopped playing due to a number of reasons. Pressure to excel, pressure due to my senior year of high school being only a couple of them. They say 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.' Apparently, they are right.
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