Miranda Wilson's Blog - Posts Tagged "cello-practice"
Cello Thought for the Day
Welcome to my Goodreads blog!
As The Strad's review of my book Notes for Cellists
pointed out, "Music history and theory are often taught independently of learning an instrument, granting general understanding but only vague application to the cello." This observation gets to the heart of something I've noticed throughout my teaching career.
Back when I was a student, I was puzzled and disappointed when university music classes made what seemed like an artificial distinction between performance and the "academic" sides of music study such as history and theory. Wouldn't we all be better musicians, I thought, if we found a way to integrate them?
These days I'm a cello professor at the University of Idaho, and I notice that when my own students learn about, say, sonata form in theory class, they don't necessarily know how to apply it to the Bach suite or Haydn concerto they're working on in the practice room. The abstract becomes concrete only when we find a connection between what we know intellectually and what we feel under our fingers.
This is why I encourage cellists to ask questions like: "How does understanding the structure of this movement change the way I shape this phrase?" or "What does knowing about Dvořák's nationalism tell me about how to approach this folk-like melody in his famous cello concerto?"
The magic (or bliss, or joy, or flow, or whatever you want to call it) happens when theory stops being separate from practice and becomes a tool that deepens our musical expression. Your next practice session might be the perfect time to ask: "What do I know about this piece that I haven't yet applied to my playing?"
For more takes on connecting musical knowledge with cello technique, check out Notes for Cellists: A Guide to the Repertoire and my other books on cello music, cello practice, cello pedagogy, and cello performance.
As The Strad's review of my book Notes for Cellistspointed out, "Music history and theory are often taught independently of learning an instrument, granting general understanding but only vague application to the cello." This observation gets to the heart of something I've noticed throughout my teaching career.
Back when I was a student, I was puzzled and disappointed when university music classes made what seemed like an artificial distinction between performance and the "academic" sides of music study such as history and theory. Wouldn't we all be better musicians, I thought, if we found a way to integrate them?
These days I'm a cello professor at the University of Idaho, and I notice that when my own students learn about, say, sonata form in theory class, they don't necessarily know how to apply it to the Bach suite or Haydn concerto they're working on in the practice room. The abstract becomes concrete only when we find a connection between what we know intellectually and what we feel under our fingers.
This is why I encourage cellists to ask questions like: "How does understanding the structure of this movement change the way I shape this phrase?" or "What does knowing about Dvořák's nationalism tell me about how to approach this folk-like melody in his famous cello concerto?"
The magic (or bliss, or joy, or flow, or whatever you want to call it) happens when theory stops being separate from practice and becomes a tool that deepens our musical expression. Your next practice session might be the perfect time to ask: "What do I know about this piece that I haven't yet applied to my playing?"
For more takes on connecting musical knowledge with cello technique, check out Notes for Cellists: A Guide to the Repertoire and my other books on cello music, cello practice, cello pedagogy, and cello performance.
Four Books That Celebrate Pioneering Women in Music
As I've written my own books about cello practice, pedagogy, repertoire, and performance, I've become increasingly aware of the pioneering women who made their way to the top of the music profession—often against tremendous odds. These four books illuminate the stories of remarkable women who made towering contributions to classical music.
Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World brings together the stories of four British composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Doreen Carwithen, and Dorothy Howell. Broad juxtaposes their individual life stories into a moving portrait of how they navigated musical creativity within a male-dominated landscape.
Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives offers a sweeping survey of women pianists. Some, like Clara Schumann, are justly famous. Others, like Marie Jaëll, are unjustly less so, but Tomes's work does a lot to rectify their omission from the history books. Tomes shows us how the piano was both a way for women to express themselves creatively, and a symbol that there is much more to be done. I particularly liked that she included women pianists in the jazz world, which can be even harder to break into than the classical one.
Maud Powell, Pioneer American Violinist: New, Revised Edition, Volume Two tells the amazing story of a nineteenth-century violinist who broke a lot of barriers. Powell not only challenged the received notion that playing the violin was "unladylike," and also proved that American musicians could hold their own on the international stage.
Guilhermina Suggia: Cellist is particularly special to me, since playing the cello is my principal occupation. Anita Mercier chronicles the remarkable Portuguese cellist who wouldn't let anything—including the privilege afforded to male cellists, including her sometime partner Pablo Casals—stop her from pursuing a career as a cellist, which at the time was an even more unusual choice for a woman than violinist. That wasn't all: Mercier's painstaking research shows that Suggia, unlike male musicians who relied on the support of a helpmeet spouse or a team of employees, took full administrative charge of her career and finances. This might be the reason she made significantly fewer recordings than male cellists of her generation, but enough survive for us to understand her awe-inspiring artistry.
Reading these books has been deeply motivating for my own work. While I didn't set out with explicitly feminist goals when writing Teaching Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass, I was struck by how most books by women cello pedagogues focused on teaching children and beginners. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I felt proud to have been one of relatively few women to have written specifically for advanced players in my first book, Cello Practice, Cello Performance.
Similarly, when writing The Well-Tempered Cello: Life With Bach's Cello Suites, I found myself thinking often about Anna Magdalena Bach and how our understanding of Bach would be fundamentally different without her careful copying and preservation of his scores. As I navigated my own journey into motherhood, I was moved by her dual role as musician and mother.
These pioneering women directly influenced my latest book, Notes for Cellists: A Guide to the Repertoire, where I made a conscious effort to include compositions by women composers from Fanny Hensel to Dorothy Rudd Moore to the indomitable Ethel Smyth herself.
Behind every present-day woman musician are the women who fought to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to create lasting art. Their stories deserve to be celebrated. I'm conscious that I stand on their shoulders, and I hope that emerging generations of women musicians will stand on mine.
Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World brings together the stories of four British composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Doreen Carwithen, and Dorothy Howell. Broad juxtaposes their individual life stories into a moving portrait of how they navigated musical creativity within a male-dominated landscape.
Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives offers a sweeping survey of women pianists. Some, like Clara Schumann, are justly famous. Others, like Marie Jaëll, are unjustly less so, but Tomes's work does a lot to rectify their omission from the history books. Tomes shows us how the piano was both a way for women to express themselves creatively, and a symbol that there is much more to be done. I particularly liked that she included women pianists in the jazz world, which can be even harder to break into than the classical one.
Maud Powell, Pioneer American Violinist: New, Revised Edition, Volume Two tells the amazing story of a nineteenth-century violinist who broke a lot of barriers. Powell not only challenged the received notion that playing the violin was "unladylike," and also proved that American musicians could hold their own on the international stage.
Guilhermina Suggia: Cellist is particularly special to me, since playing the cello is my principal occupation. Anita Mercier chronicles the remarkable Portuguese cellist who wouldn't let anything—including the privilege afforded to male cellists, including her sometime partner Pablo Casals—stop her from pursuing a career as a cellist, which at the time was an even more unusual choice for a woman than violinist. That wasn't all: Mercier's painstaking research shows that Suggia, unlike male musicians who relied on the support of a helpmeet spouse or a team of employees, took full administrative charge of her career and finances. This might be the reason she made significantly fewer recordings than male cellists of her generation, but enough survive for us to understand her awe-inspiring artistry.
Reading these books has been deeply motivating for my own work. While I didn't set out with explicitly feminist goals when writing Teaching Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass, I was struck by how most books by women cello pedagogues focused on teaching children and beginners. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I felt proud to have been one of relatively few women to have written specifically for advanced players in my first book, Cello Practice, Cello Performance.
Similarly, when writing The Well-Tempered Cello: Life With Bach's Cello Suites, I found myself thinking often about Anna Magdalena Bach and how our understanding of Bach would be fundamentally different without her careful copying and preservation of his scores. As I navigated my own journey into motherhood, I was moved by her dual role as musician and mother.
These pioneering women directly influenced my latest book, Notes for Cellists: A Guide to the Repertoire, where I made a conscious effort to include compositions by women composers from Fanny Hensel to Dorothy Rudd Moore to the indomitable Ethel Smyth herself.Behind every present-day woman musician are the women who fought to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to create lasting art. Their stories deserve to be celebrated. I'm conscious that I stand on their shoulders, and I hope that emerging generations of women musicians will stand on mine.
