Next Level Cellist Musicality Issue

ODE TO JOY
Never hit the last D,
always finish it humbly
and respectfully.
Some 27 years later, I still remember that
moment, and he was so right! The only time
I allow this to happen is when I’m told to do
it by the composer. It’s very important that
you have part of your mind on these tiny
details. The little rules and bits of information
accumulate over time, and hopefully combine
with a good environment of friends and
fellow musicians that you can use to stay
connected to inspiration. The world we’re
living in, with cell phones and computers,
Facebook and other distractions, can get
in the way of focusing on the purity of an
individual phrase. In a way, music is a therapy
to prevent yourself getting carried away by
the world around you.
While in high school in Istanbul I met a
German cellist named Werner Thomas-
Mifune for whom I played the Saint-Saens
concerto. What was supposed to be a
30 minute lesson ended up being almost
2 hours long! He talked about the importance
of the distances between the notes. He made
distinctions between how you would play
a half step versus a whole step. This lesson
moved me so much that I couldn’t even fall
asleep for about a week! That first phrase is
a great example of how half steps and whole
steps create this simple scale down that is
filled with complex feeling and character. The
minute you put this under a microscope and
look at the notes you start to appreciate the
differences between these intervals, you can
begin to feel intimacy with the phrase.
to singing, that ideal we’re always trying to
emulate. The larger the interval, the more
effort is required to sing it, and therefore
the more attention and love we can put into
playing it. It’s a crucial part of phrasing.
If you truly understand the nuance that
comes from these intervals, you can slow
down your perception of the music and
experience this wonderful close-up view.
You start to appreciate what the composer
had to say. You can’t live in this close-up
world all the time, you have to go back to
real time to get a larger picture, but it’s an
essential part of learning and developing
your musical vocabulary. There are tensions
between notes, and if you can even halfway
understand those distances, it will drastically
affect your phrasing.
Another of the incredibly powerful tools we
have as musicians is the manipulation of time.
Time, and the way you use it, expand or
compress it, is essential to mastering classical
music, especially when it’s very detailed and
written out. However you control it and
which sections you focus on create the style
of music you are playing. Classical, Romantic,
Modern, Baroque, all are affected by the way
you take or give time. [Editor’s note: for a
more detailed discussion of time, check out
John Patitucci’s article Groove and Inspiration
in Next Level Bassist.]
My teacher at Curtis, Peter Wiley, really kept
beyond execution, and that’s why it’s so
important that you find inspiration
in your life.
Finally, I believe an invaluable tool for
becoming a great musician is improvisation.
It probably sounds scary if it’s unfamiliar,
but ultimately, improvising and classical
music are both just types of music. It doesn’t
matter what genre you’re playing, in the end
hopefully you’re trying to make music. It all
comes down to the same core. If you can learn
to do that, regardless of what your medium
is (bow, pizzicato, cello, voice, whatever!),
then you’re doing the best you can. As long
as you can move the person that’s hearing
you emotionally, then mission accomplished.
The more easily and more readily you can get
into that zone, the more successful you will
become and the more success you can have.
A WORD ABOUT SOUND
AND EDUCATION
One of my great advantages growing up was
being around two phenomenal bass players,
my father and brother. Why does it matter?
I think it’s very important - the bass is by
definition the foundation of music. It holds
the whole harmony, and that is often a job we
cellists have to perform as well. Even when
you play the melody, if you’re not aware of
where your feet are meant to be grounded,
you will sound like you don’t know where
you’re headed. I think
it’s an essential part
of musicianship, the
sense of direction.
It gives you a good
compass when you are
aware of the bass line.
Consider why the line moves in the directions
it moves, and why the color of one whole step
is used instead of a half step. When you begin
to contemplate why it was written a certain
way, you start to care deeply about the music,
become one with what the composer is trying
to say. Whole steps and half steps are only a
tiny part of the big picture of music - when
you expand to look at other intervals, you
can start to think about how the music relates
Mi - Re - Do (whole steps) followed by a half step to Si and back to Do
my focus on slowing the music down and
finding the meaning. He really drilled me on
left hand and right hand subtleties, like using
a different quality of vibrato on each note,
and playing different notes with different bow
speeds to shape the phrase. There is a limitless
potential on the cello for realizing phrases,
and all the etudes and exercises in the world
can’t come close to the complexity of playing
one phrase of music with meaning. It goes
I had a lot of wonderful
teachers of harmony,
theory, and counterpoint at Curtis. They
all encouraged me to understand (or at least
try to) what was going on harmonically in the
music I was performing or hearing. A good
entry point is Bach’s cello suites, because they
are complex but still have only one or two
lines going at once.
I think it helps a great deal to be familiar
12 SPRING 2014 NEXT LEVEL CELLIST