NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN

When Billy Tobenkin decided to learn the cello from scratch at 25, he ignited a lifelong passion. He shares what turned out to be a bumpy but ultimately deeply fulfilling journey

Billy Tobenkin is now a professional teacher and performer

ALEXA MILLER GALLO

This article is for adult learners who are serious about their new musical passion. And to be clear, I think anyone who starts to learn the cello as an adult is serious. You have overcome the inertia of finding an instrument, finding a teacher and wading into uncharted waters as a rank beginner. You are willing to join a starting line dominated by four-to six-year-olds, all because you have a deep desire to express yourself and make beautiful sounds. You are serious.

As someone who began studying the cello at the age of 25, I’ve often thought of perfectionism as a key ingredient in achieving excellence on the instrument. But first, an admission: however much I might want to be a perfectionist, I’m not one.

It’s just not in my make-up. However, with each step forward in my journey, a voice inside me has been asking the same questions: ‘Would this be easier if you had started as a child? Do you own this technique in the same way that others do?’

Over the years, my anxiety about having started as an adult – even after 14 years of experience and having made cello playing and teaching my profession – has at times compelled me to adopt a perfectionist mindset. For the adult learner, however, this mindset can create more issues than it solves.

That might seem counter-intuitive – after all, learning to play a stringed instrument requires incredible physical precision, and it makes sense that being able to do things flawlessly would open up new levels of expression on the instrument. But, in reality, I have noticed – both in myself and in my students – that a chasm quickly opens up between the mind and the other senses. As your quest progresses, the initial goal of making a beautiful sound slowly falls off the radar because you’re not ‘worthy’ yet. After all, how could you make a beautiful sound without an ideal bow hold? And how could you even try to achieve a beautiful tone when your technique is so limited?

For an adult learner, the fastest way to make progress is to develop a balanced mindset between acquiring skills and linking those skills as early as possible to musical intentions.

I’ve always been the kind of person who tends to fixate on one thing at a time, and right from the start, that proved true with the cello. I initially set a goal of practising for 45 minutes a day, but I often found myself playing for two hours straight without realising how much time had passed. In a way, the first two years or so of my journey were the most exciting. My standards for quality were low and my ears were unrefined enough to allow all manner of string playing sins to pass unnoticed. I simply equated the difficulty of the piece I was working on with how advanced I had become (never mind the sound I made when playing it!).

By my first year in, I was practising for two to three hours a day – but I was voraciously consuming etudes and other musical literature without fully focusing on the technical concepts I was supposed to be learning. If I could survive the piece without coming to a grinding halt, then I decided it was time to move on.

I was so impatient to keep moving forward that I even developed the habit of writing in the fingering of every note I had to play, since my ability to read music was slowing me down. Why learn to read music when I could just jot down a fingering over every single note? As you might imagine, my first student orchestra rehearsal using shared parts with minimal fingerings was a sobering disaster: I spent three hours air‐bowing my way through a Haydn symphony.

Not surprisingly, my particular approach meant that I needed to rebuild my technique constantly. For example, my bow hold would prohibit certain techniques needed for the new repertoire I was learning, or my left hand would be so tense that shifting or vibrating comfortably was completely out of the question. That’s not to say that some of my obsessive personality had not already been triggered. Making sure I had enough rosin on my bow quickly turned into loading up on rosin every five to ten minutes. The first time I performed on a stage, about a year into playing, I hit a chord fortissimo and an embarrassingly large plume of rosin was lit up by the stage lights.

Nevertheless, I made rapid progress, and having already decided a few months in (crazy as it sounds) that I was going to try to make a go of this cello thing, I went back to school to study the instrument and get a musical education. Before my six‐year anniversary, I had completed a second bachelor’s degree: in cello performance.

As I neared graduation, my first real period of perfectionistic thinking began. It was in the quiet weeks after my senior recital.

THE FIRST TIME I PERFORMED ON STAGE, I HIT A CHORD FORTISSIMO AND AN EMBARRASSINGLY LARGE PLUME OF ROSIN WAS LIT UP BY THE STAGE LIGHTS

I had played what for me at the time was a monster programme, which included the first movement of the Dvořák Concerto, the entire Rachmaninoff Sonata, half of Bach’s Third Suite and a fiendishly difficult two‐movement sonata for cello and piano that a composer friend wrote for me. Honestly, I had played as well as I could have hoped. I should have been elated, but as I drove home that day in a grey suit drenched in sweat from all my efforts, I knew the truth. Musically, I had expressed myself fully. I had given everything I had inside. But the technique (not to mention pitch) wasn’t there, and so the victory was bittersweet. As a result, I decided to focus on technique for its own sake and to ‘catch up’ with all of the excellent players who had started as children. Looking back, I realise that this was the beginning of a very clear shift in how I practised and performed.

Billy (right) in the cello section at music college

SCORE PHOTOGRAPH BILLY TOBENKIN. ORCHESTRA PHOTOGRAPH BRITTEN FAY

My focus shifted from sensory perception towards a cerebral concept I had created of what ‘perfect’ might look like. One result of this new cerebral approach was an erosion of musicality.

Looking back at old video clips of my playing, I find that it’s not the highlight reel of steady evolution that one might expect.

There are videos of me playing four years in, which to me seem more convincing musically than videos of me playing seven years in. While the latter show obvious advances in some of my technique, what is also on display is a rigidity in my musicianship that was not there before. Gone is the freer, less technical, drunk karaoke style of emoting that I had deployed four years in. At that point, technical ignorance had been bliss and I had simply tried to sing in my head and hoped my hands would follow. Often (very often) they didn’t, but looking back, I realise that my later self-imposed period of ‘serious’, perfectionistic desire for technical command was diminishing my overall ability to enter the music emotionally and express myself through the instrument. I was now just thinking too much.

Some very detailed fingering from the early days

Billy playing with the Cattus Quartet

ROBIEE ZIEGLER

I also found that this overly cerebral approach was robbing me of the chance to learn from myself. It wasn’t until I was able to study for a period of months with a world-class teacher that I relearnt the importance of letting my body tell me what was actually comfortable and balanced. Until that point, I was using my big adult brain to think of the perfect left-arm approach to the fingerboard and then arranging my limb according to my theory. My teacher showed me a simple exercise of resting myleft arm at my side and then swinging it, easy and carefree, into playing position. Lo and behold, my elbow was in a new place, my arm was in a slightly different orientation to the fingerboard, and my arm was finally balanced. Swinging my arm thoughtlessly had allowed my body to show me the answer to which I was trying to think my way.

LE ARNING TO HOLD THE BOW IS OFTEN THE HARDEST INITIAL CHALLENGE FOR AN ADULT BEGINNER. ONE TECHNIQUE I USE AS A TE ACHER IS WHAT I CALL THE ‘BARBARIC GRIP’

PRACTICE MENTALITY

In terms of practice volume, I topped out at four to five hours a day. I generally had a very structured approach in terms of what I planned to work on, but where I often fell short was how I solved problems. Even while earning my bachelor’s in cello performance, my typical solution was to try something over and over until it became somewhat comfortable and reliable.

As evidenced by the practice journal I devotedly kept for five years straight, in which I only marked start and end times, my equation was simple: more practice hours equals more success.

This mentality was also one of the reasons I could practise four to five hours a day, seven days a week: it required relatively little mental energy compared with employing truly effective practice techniques. The toll it took on my body was a different matter.

During this period, I often ended up much more physically tense after a practice session. In the forefront of my mind would be the incredible precision that top performers have on display as they play. My job was to close the gap between me and them.

So before I had even sat down to play, I was gearing myself up for some kind of Herculean effort that was then going to be stuffed into little physical motions in which the difference between right and wrong, in tune and sharp or flat, is a matter of millimetres. Unfortunately, this extra effort usually expressed itself through various muscle groups trying to hold my body still. The result was more and more physical tension, including thighs and a torso that felt cemented into place and a left elbow that looked fine enough but was being held in place as if I were bracing for impact.

As a final consequence of the extra physical tension and focus on perfect execution, my efforts became more tentative, both physically and musically. It might seem odd that putting in more physical effort would cause me to sound more timid in my approach, but because this extra effort was primarily expressed as holding myself still in unnecessary ways, the energy was actually drawing me into myself. It was as if I were in a car, depressing the brake and the accelerator pedal simultaneously.

With a small sliver of my mind steering the vehicle towards my sonic goals, I was trying to perform with natural motions, but also adding physical tension to brace myself during each effort.

As an alternative to logging more hours on the instrument, I have learnt to employ more and more mental practice, which for me is essentially a three-dimensional mental rehearsal process in which you practise hearing the notes, feeling the two hands working together and ideally solving coordination issues in the mind’s eye. The inclusion of mental practice has been a major turning point in my ability to practise efficiently.

I noticed that if I tried to rehearse mentally a passage that was giving me trouble, often I could not picture everything clearly.So what chance did my fingers have of succeeding if my brain couldn’t send clear signals?

Learning to hold the bow is often the hardest initial challenge for an adult beginner. And for one who’s a bit of a perfectionist, the dilemma of developing the perfect bow hold can quickly dominate your mental bandwidth to the point that there’s no room to focus on pulling a beautiful ribbon of sound.

One technique I like to use with adult learners is what I call the barbaric grip. I call it barbaric in a playful reaction to my own experience of initially seeing the bow hold as an infinitely refined, incredibly confusing web of guidelines and principles.

Billy teaching an adult cello student

ALEXA MILLER GALLO

Essentially, it eliminates the fingers and thumb and allows you to focus on transferring arm weight into the string. This way you can learn to make a rich resonant sound on the open strings. Once you have learnt to make a beautiful sound via arm weight with a ‘barbaric’ yet relaxed hand, the challenge is then to resume a standard bow hold and use your ears to recreate that open, resonant sound, only now with that same arm weight travelling through your fingers and thumb. By stripping away some technique, I can make room for an otherwise overwhelmed adult student actually to hear and alter the sound they are currently making.

HOW WE SET EXPECTATIONS

All in all, I would say that my journey to this point has been immensely rewarding and often enjoyable. Many of my happiest moments, when I’ve felt most alive, have been while performing chamber music with others whose excellence on their instruments has drawn new levels of artistic ability out of me. I would never hide the fact that I have battled through countless periods of frustration when I’ve felt a plateau in my progress. These periods could be as short as a few weeks or as long as a handful of months. But I’ve always had the conviction that nothing is impossible if I can find the right information and put in the right kind of work. And having worked through so many low points, I’m aware of how satisfying it feels to break through a technical boundary and be able to express myself in more nuanced ways. To this day, the biggest challenge for me as someone who started as an adult is giving myself permission to search for my own solutions and to experiment on my own with the tools I have acquired from all of my past teachers.

In my teaching, I try to strike a balance between the two approaches to learning that I see in adult learners. The majority of them approach the cello in a way that is opposite to the way that I did, and whenever I hear a student tell me that they don’t mind spending weeks and even months on each etude so that they can really master it, I see a huge red flag. It is, of course, imperative for adults to learn the exacting physical technique of cello playing. Equally important, however, is learning to connect this budding technique to musical intentions in a freer, less cerebral way. Many adults don’t feel worthy of trying to make music early on in their journeys. So as the weeks turn to months and the list of important technical aspects only seems to grow and grow, they park musical expression for the foreseeable future and suddenly a hollowness starts to form in the core of their passion.

I have a feeling that there are more ‘serious’ adult learners of the cello than we tend to think there are. I’m not saying that all adult learners secretly want to become professional players, nor that there’s anything wrong with just wanting to learn to play without setting high technical goals. However, I do believe that many adults are limiting themselves with a fear-based, perfectionist mindset that is convincing them not to spend as much effort and time on playing as they might otherwise want to. They believe they missed the boat since the ideal learning trajectory starts in childhood. They fear the embarrassment of committing to their new craft shamelessly and wholeheartedly but ultimately failing to make the beautiful sounds that drew them to the cello in the first place. These adults are selling themselves short and would be shocked at where they could end up if they just dived in.