you ask so many questions, what answers should i choose

[jazzfish]

Everyone knows the Prelude to the first Bach cello suite. Even if you don't know you know it. Even if you've never heard it before, it sounds familiar. Here's Yo-yo Ma playing it, so you can remember.

I first met the cello suites in, I guess probably seventh grade? There's a bit of the first one, the two Minuets in the third or fourth Suzuki cello book. I thought they were lovely, and fun, which was not a combination that I associated much with the Suzuki music I was playing. My teacher gave me a recording of all six of the suites (I can't remember if it was Casals or Ma) but that was really too much for me to take in.

At some point in high school I got a Dover edition of the sheet music for the suites. I opened it up excitedly to the beginning of the first suite and ... stared at several pages of slurred sixteenth notes jumping across strings like nobody's business. I must have actually tried to play it a couple of times but gave it up as a bad job.

The day before I got married we were in a bookstore in DC with a couple of friends and I picked up Eric Siblin's book on the cello suites. It's neat: structured like the suites, in six parts with each having a bit on, oh, on Bach, and on the cello, and on Pau Casals, the cellist who 'rediscovered' the suites in the early twentieth century, and on Siblin's journey to write the book. Enjoyable. (And I'm now Not Speaking to any of the people I went on that trip with. Huh.)

When I started taking viola lessons, my teacher Tegen was prepping for a performance of all six suites on viola: three concerts, two suites per. I saw the second and third but unfortunately missed the first one. A year or so later she had me learn one of the easier movements, the Bourees from the third suite. It's still lively and gorgeous and just plain fun to play.

So now, a couple of years after that, she's had the bright idea that, as a sideline to the fiddle tunes I've been learning, we can try working straight through the suites. I don't know what this will mean when we get to the later ones: suite 5 uses an odd tuning and suite 6 was originally written for a five-stringed instrument.

For now, though, it's that wall of sixteenth notes from the first Prelude. It's two busy pages of music. After a couple of weeks I can currently, mostly, stumble my way through the first page. Though apparently I forget to breathe while I'm doing it.

I know what I want it to sound like, sometimes, and I know how far from that I am. I listened to a viola recording of it awhile ago, for something to have on while I'm making the place more presentable. I am in awe. Maybe it'll sound something approaching that good, one of these days. Maybe.

Comments

[jessie_c]

So after that you need to practise the other 7 parts :P

[jazzfish]

Huh! My response to that is "very neat, but it's decidedly not the Bach Prelude," which is interesting. It feels like in the process of adding the (lovely) harmonies they've taken away something that I see as fundamental to the music. I've never had that experience before.

If I were going to try something like that, though, I'd be more likely to model it on Zoe Keating. E.g., a live performance of 'Escape Artist'.

[jessie_c]

It's not Bach once he's finished with it, that's for certain.
Possibly you might give Thunderstruck a try?

Is this Plato’s heebie-jeebies?

[nixieq]

Hey. This is what practice is all about. :) Give it time, work hard, and you’ll get there. Maybe it’ll sound amazing, maybe you’ll never feel it’s perfect, but I guarantee that you will improve. <3

Re: Is this Plato’s heebie-jeebies?

[jazzfish]

Thanks, hon. :) There's a thing that I've sort of half-absorbed, around how it's okay to do things because they're enjoyable and how recorded music has ruined amateur performing (because why listen to a performance that's only okay when you can listen to one that's top-notch)... but it hasn't really entirely sunk in yet. Legacy of a childhood of things needing to be Useful, I expect.