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03/18/2006
The cello is the tenor voice...
The other day I mentioned that I went shopping for cello music. Luckily I already had in mind what I wanted, and in general it was fairly easy to select the music. There was a bit of a trend going, though, in some of the other music. That trend seeming to be, of course, that a cello piece isn't worth playing if the cellist can't exhibit some virtuoso technique. 98% of the time, this means playing really really high. Sometimes I come across a piece of music written almost entirely in treble clef. First I flip to the cover to make sure it's not a violin piece, despite all appearances. Once the cover confirms it's a cello piece, then I wonder if the composer is aware of what exactly a cello is.
A cello has four strings: from high to low, they are A, D, G, and C, starting with the A just below middle C and going down in fifths. When we write out these open strings, they are invariably written in bass clef. That low C is two ledger lines below the staff in bass clef. So, a piece written almost entirely in treble clef will, therefore, be played almost entirely on the A string, sometimes going way the heck up the fingerboard to the point where you run out of fingerboard. Meanwhile, three other strings are just sitting there. It makes me wonder how many songs for tenors (people, that is) are written to make them sound like 6-year-old girls...
Then again, lots of male cellists seem to think of their cellos as being female. (Tenor voice = female?) I guess I shouldn't be slamming weird associations like that, because a few years ago I tried to imagine what my cello would be like as a human being and after a while, ka-blam! A vision! It was a man who turned into the main character of my novel-in-progress. A man who is... a violinist. Go figure.
Anyway!
Lately I've been on a scottish music binge, I guess as a natural extension of my irish music fixation. Actually I think I'm beginning to even prefer the scottish music, though often they're so similar as to be indistinguishable. I've put together a massive list of CDs I would love to get sometime, most of them by people nobody has ever heard of. I'd also like to learn to fiddle! However, since cello fiddle teachers are probably quite hard to come by, I think it would be cool to learn to fiddle on the violin and then transfer what I learn to the cello.
My other idea a while ago was to get my Royal Conservatory ARCT in cello performance by 2015. Mainly this would be something to get me to practice scales and etudes and all that stuff I usually don't bother with (and usually comes back to bite me at some point, such as in this Bartok stuff). In the Royal Conservatory there are 10 grades followed by the ARCT, which can be either in performance or in teaching. The idea is basically, if you have your ARCT, you can play pretty much anything that's written for cello. Last time I was studying with a cello teacher, back in high school, I was generally working on pieces at the grade 9 or 10 level, so to shoot for ARCT by 2015 seems reasonable. Now that I've got my senses back, though, I'm not sure I want to bother with all the exams, the theory, the history, etc.... so we'll see! :-) Playing celtic music just seems a whole lot more fun. We'll see what happens! For now, I have a lot of Bartok to practice. *groan* One more week...
12:45 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this