Creating sound from the imagination

IAGOBA FANLO Professor of cello at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón and Alfonso X El Sabio University in Spain

IAGOBA FANLO

BORN Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain

STUDIED WITH David Strange, Wolfgang Boettcher, Lynn Harrell, Philippe Muller

TEACHES Students aged 12+, privately and in conservatoire

Musicians, like athletes, have to work to improve their performance. Olympic runners don’t just run and pray that they’ll get better. They have strict training programmes to improve every movement that they make. It is the same with playing an instrument: we won’t improve significantly if we play without structure, focus and routine. Every movement has an effect on how we sound, so we need to drill the movements that we make daily. To do this, I work in a six-step loop:

1. Imagine the sound that you want to create on your instrument

2. Practise daily to develop the tools that you need to turn your imagination into reality

3. Apply these tools to your repertoire, to help you realise your musical vision

4. Once you have combined steps 1–3, perform your pieces to an audience

5. Evaluate your performance and the effectiveness of your approach in steps 1–3

6. Evaluate others’ performances, to develop your musical imagination and personality

If you engage in these six steps in a continuous cycle, you will develop an accomplished technique that will help you to bring character and imagination into everything you play.

EXERCISES

In step 2, to develop the technique necessary to turn your musical vision into a reality, you can work on three aspects of left-hand technique and three aspects of right-hand technique as part of a daily routine.

SOUND PRODUCTION It is important to assess your sound quality continually, not least because good intonation will only follow once you produce a sound that you enjoy. Work on this using scales and arpeggios in different keys:

Imagine the sound that you would like to make, then experiment to find the combination of bow speed, weight and contact point that you need in order to produce this sound on your instrument

Practise reproducing this sound consistently even when playing with different numbers of notes to a bow. Begin with whole bows in slurred twos, fours, eights and so on, then move on to varied uneven bow distributions (a down bow of three notes followed by a down bow of four notes, for example)

Experiment with different sound colours. Evaluate your sound and adapt your technique as necessary

BOW CHANGES Your sound quality should not be affected when you change bow. To make sure that you do not lose your desired tone colour during each bow change, be careful to maintain a consistent bow speed and sound:

Play a full down bow. At the tip, stop to position your arm to play an up bow, then catch the string with the bow hair as though you are going to play a pizzicato with the bow. Continue into the up bow

• Repeat this motion on the up bow, stopping the bow at the heel to move it into position to play the next down bow

• Practise this in different parts of the bow, at different contact points between the bridge and the fingerboard

• Gradually decrease the amount of time between bow changes.

STRING-CROSSINGS

To practise maintaining your sound when crossing strings, work on scales and arpeggios alongside exercises 1, 2 and 3:

As you approach each string-crossing, anticipate the angle of bow, elbow and forearm that you will need to play on the new string. Think about the elbow when you move to a higher string and about the forearm when you move to a lower string Stop the bow on the new string before you continue Practise these movements on up and down bows across all strings.

LEFT-HAND ACTION AND ACCURACY

Next focus on finger action and precision in exercise 4:

Recreate the sound in your mind slowly and precisely Use a metronome to make sure that you are playing with a regular, rhythmic finger action Use gravity and the weight of your fingers to place down each note, without pushing. The thumb should be flexible and free Gradually build up your metronome speed. Once you have reached the fastest speed you can manage, return to a slow speed Practise this exercise in multiple finger combinations, in any position and on any string.

To improve left- and right-hand coordination, practise this exercise again with as many different bowing patterns as you can.

Anticipate every movement with your body before you make it.

LEFT-HAND POSITION AND SHIFTS

To find a good position for your left hand, practise 3rds, 6ths and octaves, as well as exercise 5. Be careful not to press down hard on the fingerboard or pinch the instrument neck. To improve your shifts, practise exercise 6 on every string, releasing the fingers and arm to shift with clarity and fluidity. You will be able to find many more useful exercises and ideas in the following method books:

Aldo Pais: Violoncello Technique (For the Left Hand)

Kazimierz Wiłkomirski: Exercises for the Left Hand: Cello Solo

Mikhail Bukinik: New Shifting Studies; Virtuoso Arpeggio Studies

Janós Starker: An Organized Method of String Playing: Violoncello Exercises for the Left Hand

VIBRATO

Finally, work on playing long notes with a wide arm vibrato:

With your metronome at q= 50, make four slow left-hand rocking vibrato movements per beat. Build up to six, eight, ten and twelve. Repeat on every finger

Return to exercise 4 to practise playing a continuous, consistent and even vibrato that passes smoothly from note to note.

IN YOUR PRACTICE

If you work on the technical tools in this article every day, always listening to make sure that you are translating the sound in your imagination into reality, you will be able to use them to create the timbres and musical shapes that you want to produce in your repertoire. Once you can do this, play to an audience to discover what is ready and what is not quite there yet. This will help you to develop your self-perception and tell you what you need to practise next. Ask your listeners for honest feedback, think about what you can do better, and attend other people’s performances to do the same for them. Take some of that information back into your own playing as you start the whole process again. The more you rerun this loop, the more you will learn and your playing will blossom.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

In lessons I tell my students that I don’t care about mistakes.Instead I want to see how well they can play two notes together.After that, it is my job to help them play the rest of their notes at that same level. An important part of this process is to encourage them to visualise every sound that they make before they make it, and to play on stage as often as possible. If I have students who cannot yet play something well, normally I will set them less difficult music to perform so that they can learn to feel confident in front of an audience. They can then take that confidence with them when they move on to a more challenging piece. I think we learn more from our successes than we do from our failures.

INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING

FURTHER MATERIALS

Zen in the Art of Archery: Training the Mind and Body to Become One by philosopher Eugen Herrigel is a fantastic book about how to achieve physical aims by engaging the imagination.

In her book Mental Training for Musicians, Renate Klöppel discusses how, once we can produce a technique or sound in our mind, we can reproduce it again and again on our instruments.

NEXT MONTH Violinist Marcos Vinicius Miranda on collé