Cello Lesson, February 5, 2010

This was a rough week for practice as I had some medical problems and lost 2 days. Also, my eyesight has been affected by the HBOT and it is beginning to affect mid range vision. Noticed it while attempting to play the middle 8 scales and couldn't read the fingerings. Schroeder #38 was also hard to read. No problems with the Bach gigue as the music was larger.

Lesson: just played the first page of the gigue to get B's input. Didn't play too horribly. Slurred areas need to be smoother. Second note in my copy is solo C; B said to make a chord: C G E C as it is written in her copy. Will write that in.

The boot strap section (my favorite) needs to be more smoothly slurred. Use the flycasting technique, move the bow a lot but it is not on the string much (this is in the 3 downbeat notes).

Very embarrassing to find out that I was not slurring the string crossing, mid page. Will work on that.

Rest of the lesson was spent in sight reading (which I really like to do); was a fun lesson and I left feeling a little better about my playing than the last couple of lessons.

For next lesson, February 12th, will go on to Schroeder #39. The musical type is small but it appears to be very repetitious so maybe I won't have too many vision problems with it. Watched YouTube of this; I will play about 10 times slower. Had problems seeing the music this evening, so I will hopefully do better playing during the day with more light.

Will also start on second page of the gigue. I've been listening to Yo Yo Ma's recordings of the Third Cello Suite to get a sense of how it should sound. I used the same type of bowings B drew in for the first page of the gigue; hopefully these are accurate.