Teaching rhythm and bowing to beginners

Teaching & Playing

WENDY MAX

Private teacher; string tutor at children’s holiday courses across the UK; reti red teacher of the junior departments of the

Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Tower Hamlets Strings Project, London

EXERCISES

RHYTHM FOR BEGINNERS

Teaching rhythm using words is far more effective than trying to explain complicated ideas about quavers (e), semiquavers (S) and dots. Make flash cards for different notes and patterns, tell your students the name of each one, and use syllables to show how they sound.

To begin, clap the rhythms together; then, over the weeks, teach them to tap the crotchet (J) pulse on their knees as they say the syllables out loud:

You can make any combination of these, and also try some more complicated rhythms:

Another effective way to teach rhythm reading is to make up words to go with different note patterns:

For patterns that use rests, articulate each one by saying ‘rest’ out loud. Rests are very important but beginners often want to leave them out.

PLAYING GAMES

Many children don’t want to do things that seem to be hard work, but they do like to have fun. For children aged four to ten, I turn everything into a game. This gives them an excellent incentive to learn — especially if they can win prizes. When you are teaching groups that know the basic rhythms, try these:

• Hot Potato. Pass an object, or ‘hot potato’, around the group, with some music playing. Pause the music and pull out a flash card. Whoever is holding the potato when the music stops has to clap the rhythm on the card out loud.

•BORN London, UK

•STUDIED WITH Sheila Nelson, Adrian Thorne •

•TEACHES Children aged 4-11, on holiday courses and privately

• Bingo. Give each child a card with four rhythms written on it, then clap different rhythms out loud. You can select these randomly using your own corresponding flash cards. The first child to have all the rhythms on their card clapped out loud has to shout ‘Bingo!’ to win a prize. (I have a sweetie box on my piano.) An example bingo card might be:

BOWING

When your students have learnt how to read, say and tap basic rhythms, you can teach them how to play them with the bow:

•Start with the bow on the floor. Tell them to pick it up with the right hand, at the balance point. (They can find this by holding the bow and balancing it with their thumb between the stick and the bow hair.) This is easier and more stable than holding it at the frog.

•Tell them that they need to leave room for a Smartie between their neighbouring fingers, or that their fingers are not friends.

•Check that the thumb is relaxed. They can pretend they’re holding something like a chocolate eclair that will fall apart and make a mess if they squeeze it, press too hard or hold it too tight.

Some children struggle with bow hold to begin with because they’ve only just learnt how to hold a pencil. They spend five days a week in school learning to write, and only one day a week with the cello teacher learning how to hold a bow in a completely different way. To help them get used to it, show them how to practise moving it as though it’s a windscreen wiper, or a rocket flying up into the sky. (Make sure they don’t let go!)

Try not to go on about bow hold for too long. If you do, they will lose enthusiasm and then you will lose them. It’s not worth fighting too hard until they’re a bit older and they suddenly want to do the things that you say. That is the moment to correct them. Instead, let them find out how to make a good sound: ask them to play tiny rhythmic movements in the middle of the bow, on one open string at a time. The hardest part is crossing from one string to the next, so don’t do that too soon.

Try ‘breakfast bowing’: decide together what you would like to have for breakfast, then clap the word rhythms together:

Now they can bow each rhythm on every string, while singing, and/or with an accompaniment. If the bow skates over the top of the string to start with, ask them to: play with the wood pushed down so that it nearly touches the hair. Show them that you can make the same horrible, gritty noise; then say, ‘The way not to make a horrible gritty noise is to pull and push the bow much faster, like this. turn the cello around so that the strings are facing towards them, then bow the back of the cello as ‘loudly’ as they can. They usually do this wonderfully. Then ask them to play very quietly and to tell you what they did differently. When they turn the cello around again they very often make a better sound.

Suzuki teachers tend to ask children to begin with a very small amount of bow and only to increase this as they get better. I find that this can make bowing quite stiff, so I prefer to do the opposite. If you get them to start with enormous, uncontrolled bows, it will give them freedom and a wonderful sound that can be refined later.

You mustn’t feel disheartened about children who can’t hold the bow. At four years old, almost no one has a good bow hold; most take a year or two, or even more, to hold it properly. In many cases it is physically impossible for them to do what you want them to. Some children will be able to do these things straight away but others will take much longer.

REPERTOIRE

Letter charts, like Sheila Nelson’s Marching Men, are a good way to make beginners feel that they are better than they really are. They really love to play this with the piano accompaniment.

It is also very good for their bowing and rhythm:

For more advanced players, a good piece for bowing is Nelsons Ringing Bell, which can later be used to practise bowing variations. Its piano accompaniment was written for parents who can’t play the piano. Black figures are on the A string, green on the D string:

Other books that I would recommend are Nelson’s The Essential String Method and Right From the Start, Adam Carse’s The Fiddler’s Nursery, and, when they are a bit more advanced, W.H. Squire’s Petits Morceaux and Michael Rose’s A Sketchbook for Cello.

If you can get your students enthusiastic about playing these tunes, you only have to say to them, ‘Don’t go on past this part of the book’ and then you can be almost certain that they’ll learn two more pages.

IN THEIR PRACTICE

If small children can do ten minutes’ practice three times a week, that is wonderful. I give my students tick charts so that they can record what they’ve done, and I ask their parents to come to their private lessons to take notes. Some parents (very few!) are diligent and help their children to work on these ideas through the week; others are enthusiastic but get the child to do something completely different from what I’ve asked; and others always say they have been too busy to do anything at all. I don’t mind too much what happens, as long as the children can play well enough to enjoy performing in our group concerts with their friends. We have one group lesson each week and these sessions are very good for encouraging them to practise, because when they see what the others are doing, they understand what they have to do too.

Nine times out of ten the most successful students have a committed parent behind them. It is important to encourage all parents to cooperate with their children in whatever it is that they want to do, because everyone is different. If you can get the parents to have as much fun as the children do, progress will be wonderful, even if the bow hold isn’t exactly right.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

I teach any child who wants to learn and I don’t have a selection process. The most important thing is to keep these children keen and enthusiastic, until they are mature enough to want to be involved with the more technical aspects of cello playing.

For each lesson, to keep levels of enthusiasm up, choose something the child is going to like and will want to do. It is a good idea to have lots of things planned, so that if something’s not working you can just whizz on to the next thing. For example, recently I was teaching a little boy of four, who did not want to do what I wanted him to do with the bow. His mother started to tell him off, but I said, ‘Look, let’s do something else,’ and I gave him some rhythm games instead. After that he was as keen as mustard and soon he was doing what I had originally wanted him to do right away.

If you have to teach a big class of children, get them to sing something simple and then to play what they’ve sung. Once they know the sound of what they’re trying to do, they will understand what they need to achieve on the instrument. If it’s something fun and they really want to do it, they will be motivated to find a way. Just be careful not to introduce the left-hand fingers too early: the moment the brain goes into the left hand, it often leaves the right hand completely and the bow comes right up over the fingerboard.

The best piece of teaching advice I have ever been given is that if you tell a child they are good, they almost always get better. Other than that, I don’t believe in methods: there’s an awful lot of psychology involved in teaching four-year-olds. Everyone is different and you have to do it by feel.

INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING

FURTHER MATERIALS

My book, Accidentally on Purpose, gives an introduction to teaching beginner cellists. For a free music download, visitwww.wendymax.com

Sheila Nelson’s Tetratunes melody charts allow beginners to play basic tunes before they can read notes.

Next month Double bassist Christine Hoock on line and phrase