(no subject)

[wreath_of_laurels]

 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:

 

1. 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.

2. 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.)

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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?)

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. The metronome is still a lying bastard.

9. 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.

10. 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.