Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Further to my last

Continuing my experiment with Silly Putty, I think what I showed in yesterday's post is too much. Today I used just a pea-sized pellet and flattened it quite thin, probably to less than a millimeter thick. That gave me a patch of about 2 x 2.5 cm, which I placed in the concave part of the frog, covering the eye but not extending up or over the stick. It's much less noticeable (to my fingers) and still performs well.

Just got home from trio rehearsal, our second coached session on the first mvmt of Hummel Op. 12. I think we made good progress, stopping at the end of the exposition today. I had only a few mental glitches switching between bass and "trouble" clef (treble clef transposed down an octave), but we played under tempo much of the time. Still, that was a nice reward for hard work.

My most frustrating moment came when the coach (C-) asked me to start a note in motion before catching the string, instead of from the string, as I was. I spent a long time eradicating the bad habit of starting notes from the air, something 'cellists often do because of the need to get that big mass of string vibrating. This was a little different, of course, and after the light bulb lit I could do it.

I still remember the first time T2- asked me to do something a different way after I had worked so hard getting it right the way she had requested the previous week. My first glimmer that there is more than one right way to do something. Something very complicated for a rule-bound first-born like me to comprehend!

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