THE DEEP END

Billy Tobenkin, who began playing the cello aged 25, explores his own experience of learning Bach’s Prelude in G major after only a few months, and why he believes it is beneficial for adult learners to dive straight into ‘grown-up’ repertoire – offering tips on how to proceed

Billy Tobenkin in his teaching studio

Picking up the cello as an adult can be a bit like living in one of those small frontier towns in the days of the Wild West. There are rules, regulations and even a sheriff (your teacher), but things can often feel a bit more lawless and unstructured than life in the big city. Out here there’s no telling what can happen next, especially when it comes to choosing repertoire.

Having started the cello from scratch at 25, I found myself in such a situation. After a few months of hard work and rapid progress, I asked my teacher if I could start learning the famous Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no.1 in G major BWV1007, to which she agreed.

It was at this point that a strange chasm seemed to open before me. Here I was, working on a bucket-list piece after having started on the instrument only recently. Part of me was, understandably, absolutely thrilled to be working on a real cello masterpiece, but there was another part of me that felt a bit disappointed. I felt that I was likely skipping steps and breaking some unwritten law of what a real player’s journey should look like. I wondered if it was in my best interests as a serious student of the cello to be working on a piece like the Prelude so early on, and I yearned for the structure, rigidity and predictability of the standard syllabus that children enjoy.

Looking back now, I can say that the benefits of learning the Bach Prelude ‘too early’ far outweighed the costs. It was an exhilarating experience, and it stoked the fires of my passion to turn myself into a cellist and a musician.

In the case of adult learners, I believe it’s necessary to reimagine the repertoire and introduce ‘real’ pieces of music at a far earlier point in their journey than is the current standard. However, unlike the slapdash approach I took to conquering repertoire through sheer grit and dogged repetition, I want to propose a hybrid approach of having your cake and eating it too: working on musicality and technique through careful deconstruction of the piece.

The Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript of the Prelude in G major BWV1007

ALEXA MILLER GALLO

IN THE CASE OF ADULT LEARNERS, I BELIEVE IT IS NECESSARY TO REIMAGINE THE REPERTOIRE AND INTRODUCE ‘REAL’ PIECES FAR EARLIER

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES!

In order to understand the benefit of choosing the right repertoire for one’s musical journey, I think it’s important to highlight the major differences between child and adult learners of the cello. With children, there is usually no rush to start them on ‘real’ repertoire during the first year or two. Often, they progress through a number of etude books and student pieces that systematically build their technical foundation. By the time they are playing standard repertoire, they have been ‘eating their vegetables’ for years.

This system works for several reasons. For one, children have plenty of time to take the longer, more thorough route towards technical development. And, more importantly, most are not starting their journey with a burning desire to make a beautiful sound on the cello and a bucket list of dream pieces they hope to play one day. Thus, there is nothing inherently frustrating or unfulfilling about working through pieces that lack musical depth.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that adult learners don’t need to eat their vegetables – they absolutely do. What I’m saying is that the adult learner has musical dietary needs that are different from those of the typical child. We tend to think that, compared with children, adults are at a complete learning disadvantage when in reality they possess a number of strengths. We have fully formed problem-solving capabilities, patience, strong attention to detail and the ability to maintain focus (to name a few). Correctly harnessed, these strengths can lead to incredible results. However, if an adult learner is forced to join a pre-paved track designed for children, these strengths can quickly become stifled. It’s easy to find yourself eight months into your journey, playing one children’s piece after another while the repertoire you love (and that inspired you to play the cello in the first place) seems to fall further and further away over the horizon with each passing week.

For those of us starting the cello (or, indeed, any other bowed stringed instrument) later in life, I believe there are two aspects that we should start working on right away to get the most out of our journey. The first is building a beautiful sound on whatever we are playing from day one, and the second is working on having musical intention behind each bow stroke.

This early focus on sound quality and musicality would be inappropriate for most five-year-olds, but it is precisely what’s needed to help most adults thrive. If you ask a hundred adult learners why they decided to pick up the cello, the answer you’ll keep hearing is that they want to make the sounds that drew them to the instrument in the first place. For adults, sound is everything. And within that umbrella of beautiful sound is being able to express yourself musically.

By introducing a piece like the Bach Prelude (or any bucketlist piece) earlier on in the learning process, one can help facilitate this focus on sound and musicianship since it’s more likely that the adult learner will feel mentally and emotionally connected to the piece itself. And when it comes to reimagining the repertoire, I think it’s completely acceptable to learn a small excerpt of an otherwise out-of-reach bucket-list piece. It could be the slower, second theme of your favourite concerto, such as the Dvořák (figure 1), or the gorgeous Meno mosso theme from the final page of Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata (figure 2) – as adults we can extract little portions of our most cherished repertoire to work on with the understanding that we are not aiming to learn an entire piece of music but using a small, inspiring excerpt to build our technique. It’s a bit of a stretch to hope that an adult learner will feel emotionally invested when learning The Happy Farmer – though it is possible.

IT’S A BIT OF A STRETCH TO HOPE THAT AN ADULT LEARNER WILL FEEL EMOTIONALLY INVESTED WHEN LEARNING THE HAPPY FARMER

In my case, working on the Bach Prelude made me feel more motivated to express myself musically because I was playing a real piece of music that seemed to me to have emotional depth and nuance in the notes themselves. The Prelude also happens to be an ideal piece to learn ‘too early’, because while it requires true mastery to play it beautifully, most of the notes are relatively accessible for a newer player if approached in the right manner.

LEARNING THE PRELUDE

Before I dive into how a newer adult learner should approach the Prelude, I’d like to share how I actually did it all those years ago, because it’s a wonderful example of how not to learn such a piece.

After purchasing the sheet music and bringing it to my lesson, I watched as my teacher added a handful of important fingerings and walked me through the opening bars. Upon getting home, I opened the music, set it down on my stand and started trying to play it at a slow tempo following the marked bowings. If I stumbled, I would pick myself up and try to forge ahead until eventually I got to a section that was so difficult I had to stop entirely. Then I would go back to the start of the piece and try to push my way through to the previous stopping point, often stumbling in all the same places. After days of struggling with the usual bowing pattern (three semiquavers on a down bow, followed by five on separate bows), which was sending my bow out to the tip relentlessly, I eventually settled on trying to play the whole piece slurring every four semiquavers. While I enjoyed myself immensely and felt as if I was making progress for all of my effort, I can say without a doubt that I left a huge amount of development on the table.

Here’s how I suggest adult learners approach the Prelude if they feel the piece is a major step up for them in terms of technical difficulty (see figure 3). They should start by (a) reimagining the semiquavers as crotchets and setting a metronome to q= 40. They then try the first two notes of the piece on separate bow strokes, starting on a down bow (b). The goal is to pull a beautiful, rich open G string with a sticky, tugging contact, taking care not to allow the sound to skid out. At the end of that stroke, they’ll go for a smooth string-crossing on the bow change and a beautiful, rich open D string. Everything should be legatissimo. Once that is comfortable, the next two notes are added, continuing with separate bow strokes. The learner slowly works up towards playing the first bar of the piece with a rich sound. To speed up the tempo, the metronome is cranked up by around five beats per minute at a time while the player still aims for a beautiful, legato sound and ensures that the bow stroke remains essentially unchanged. The only difference is that with each tempo increase, less bow is used on each stroke, which makes the notes happen more quickly.

IT’S IMPERATIVE FOR AN ADULT LEARNER TO DEVELOP A RICH SOUND AND CONFIDENT BOW ARM FROM THE START

It’s imperative for an adult learner to develop a rich sound and a free, confident bow arm from the start. Once the metronome marking has doubled from its original setting, the tempo should be fast enough for the player to start hearing the larger phrasing between each eight-note pattern and they can start trying to phrase towards and away from the most important note in each eight-note group.

Once the player feels relatively comfortable playing the opening bars of the Prelude with single bow strokes at different tempos, they should return the metronome to approximately 55bpm and start working on the passage with two notes to a bow (still playing the semiquavers as crotchets). This simple adjustment for someone early in their cello journey will make those same bars feel like a completely different piece of music, with a whole new set of three-dimensional relationships between the two arms. One could also work towards four notes slurred, keeping in mind that a longer number of slurred notes would necessitate a faster starting tempo on the metronome.

Instead of running the gamut of all the conceivable bowing patterns one could superimpose upon the Prelude, as a teacher I would likely stop at four notes per bow and maybe at most venture into the commonly used bowing pattern mentioned above (three semiquavers on a down bow, followed by five on separate bows). The reason for this constraint is that instead of turning the Prelude into an exhaustive project in bow hand dexterity, I want to focus on beauty of sound and injecting musical intent into each bow stroke. If those two aspects are really to be the focal point, then it’s important that the adult learner is not overwhelmed with too many technical challenges at once. In my experience as a learner, I found that the more I had to focus on multiple technical challenges, the less I was able to listen for tone and focus on sculpting a musical line with the bow.

Another suggestion would be to conquer a small number of bars at a time. Returning to my original efforts on the Prelude as a beginner who had never practised a musical instrument before, I remember feeling that it would be a waste of time to focus only on a few bars (or even a few lines) of music in one practice session. As a result, I always tried to process more bars of music than I was truly prepared to do, and inevitably I would let a number of issues slide because I felt rushed to give attention to each bar of music. It felt like I was building a skyscraper with wet cement – nothing felt solidified, and so the further I got into a piece during a practice run, the worse my results would be in terms of tone, accuracy and coordination between the two hands.

By deconstructing Bach’s G major Prelude into nutritious bites that are digestible, adult learners can indeed have their cake and eat it, working on a bucket-list piece while building a rock-solid technical foundation for their musical journey.

DEVELOPING THE RIGHT MINDSET

ALEXA MILLER GALLO

Harnessing the right mindset can sometimes be as important as receiving the right cello instruction. Whenever I first approached a piece of repertoire that seemed to be a stretch technically, I liked to think of myself as a house painter and my first attempt at learning the piece as a primer coat. Let’s say I worked on the Bach Prelude for three months with my teacher before moving on to another piece. I would count those three months as one giant primer coat, and before I returned to add my first coat of real paint, I was going to let everything dry out for a long period of months.

I SHOULD MENTION THE BOOST IN MOTIVATION AND PASSION I FELT WHENEVER I WAS ALLOWED TO LEARN ONE OF MY BUCKET-LIST PIECES

Thinking in this manner takes a lot of pressure off, in terms of the adult learner judging their efforts overly critically against the recordings of the piece which they already know and love. Of course, they want to do their best and be proud of their work, but in a situation like the one I’m describing, the end product of their efforts is not always representative of how much they have actually progressed and developed. I should point out that this approach to learning the repertoire will be very challenging if the learner tends to be a perfectionist. But on the other hand, allowing a stifling, uncontrolled amount of perfectionism to permeate one’s cello efforts as an adult learner is a recipe for frustration and abandonment of the journey altogether.

Another aspect of mindset that I should mention concerns the incredible boost in motivation and passion I felt for practising whenever I was allowed to learn one of my bucket-list pieces (even when doing so was a major stretch technically). Most adult learners are busy people. They are balancing work, family obligations and other hobbies and activities. To add something like the cello can be a challenge because it requires consistent effort to make progress. For many adults, there are days when 15 to 30 minutes of practice is all that will fit into their schedule. Getting to work on a masterpiece (even in deconstructed form) could be the incentive needed to walk over to the cello, sit down and squeeze out those 30 minutes of quality work instead of thinking, ‘What’s the point, anyway? I’ll just do it on a day when I have more time.’

When it comes to adult learners of the cello, I believe that the sky’s the limit in terms of how much progress can be made. However, in order to thrive, they need to work on pieces that foster their passion for making music and their enjoyment of the sound they are making. Doing so will help them make playing the cello a permanent part of who they are and what they do.