Four years ago this month I walked into a music store on my lunch hour to buy a birthday card for my niece and walked out having rented a cello. I had never played an instrument. I was 48 years old, I worked in an insurance office, and I had no explanation for it then and have only a slightly better one now: I had spent my whole life being competent at things, and I wanted, very badly, to be terrible at something and to be allowed to keep doing it anyway.

This page is a record of that. If you are a grown-up thinking about taking up an instrument, it is mostly for you. If you are a real cellist, please be gentle, and skip the practice diary.

From the practice diary

My teacher made me keep one. Here are some entries. I have left out the ones that are just the word "intonation" underlined three times.

What I'm working on

The Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major. Every cellist plays it and every cellist plays it better than I do, including, I suspect, some who have not started yet. It is a single unbroken line of sixteenth notes, arpeggios rolling up and down across the strings, with no tune to hide behind: every note is exposed. I am playing it slowly. My teacher's word is "stately." My word is "slowly." The goal for Christmas is to play it for my family at something like the right tempo, and for them to recognize it without being told.

A Vivaldi cello concerto, the first movement only, with my teacher playing the orchestra part on the piano. Vivaldi wrote a great many of them and they are not, I am told, very hard, which is why so many students play them and why I feel every single mistake as a personal failing. The fast passages sound wonderful at half speed. At full speed they sound like a cello falling down the stairs. We are working on it.

Scales. Two octaves, all the keys I can reach, every day, before anything else. When I was 48 I thought scales were what you did before you got to the music. Now I understand they are the music, taken apart so you can see how it works.

The community orchestra

I play in the cello section of our town's community orchestra, which is about sixty people who rehearse in a high school band room on Monday nights and give three concerts a year. There are eight of us in the cellos. I am no longer in the last chair. I am in the second-to-last chair, which I earned, and which I am prouder of than my promotion to office manager.

Fall Concert: Sunday, November 14, 1999, 3:00 pm, at the high school auditorium. The program is Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, with a Rossini overture to start and something shorter that the conductor has not told us yet. Admission is free; there is a basket at the door for the music fund. About the Beethoven: yes, that one, the da-da-da-DUM. It is the most famous piece of music in the world and I had no idea until this September how hard it is. The cellos and basses carry the third movement; there is a passage there that our section has now rehearsed more times than I have rehearsed anything in my life, and last Monday we got through it together, at tempo, and the conductor said "Yes. That." and moved on, which from him is a standing ovation. Come. Sit on the left so you can see the cellos. I will be the one concentrating very hard.

The rented cello, and then the real one

For two and a half years I played a rented student cello, plywood, with a finish like a kitchen table, for $35 a month. It was a perfectly good instrument for a beginner, and I recommend renting: you do not know, when you start, whether you will keep going, and a cello is not a small thing to have leaning in the corner reproaching you. I named it Gus. I cried a little when I returned it, which the young man at the counter handled beautifully.

In April 1998, with my teacher along to play them (I could not yet trust my own ears), I bought my own: a used cello from a small shop in the city, made in a European workshop sometime in the 1970s, with a scratch on the lower bout and a sound like a warm room. It cost about what a decent used car costs, and I thought about it for two months. My husband, who has never once complained about the noise, said: "You are fifty. Buy the cello." I did. I have not named this one. It seems too serious for that.

Advice on buying: take your teacher, try many, and play the same simple thing on each one so you are comparing cellos and not your own nerves. A good bow matters more than you think. Buy a hard case if you will ever carry it in a car. And measure your car first.

Advice for adult beginners

1. Get a teacher. A real one, weekly. Books and videos cannot see your bow hand. My teacher is a young woman half my age who plays in a professional quartet and teaches to pay the rent, and she has never once made me feel foolish, which is a form of genius. Ask at a music store or a college music department.
2. Twenty minutes a day. Every day. Not two hours on Sunday. The cello is learned by the body, not the head, and the body learns in small daily doses. On days when I truly cannot, I take the cello out of its case and play open strings for five minutes so that the day is not a zero.
3. Be kind to yourself. You are going to sound bad for a long time. This is not a sign that you lack talent; it is what learning the cello is. Children sound bad for years and nobody minds because they are children. Give yourself the same allowance. You have earned it by being a grown-up about everything else.
4. Rent first. See above.
5. Play with other people as soon as you possibly can, before you think you are ready. A community orchestra, a church group, a friend with a piano. Sitting in a section and being carried by it teaches you things no lesson can, and it is the reason to do this at all.
6. Nobody is watching. Truly. The people at the next stand are worried about their own part. The audience is thinking about dinner. The only person who can hear all your mistakes is you, and you are allowed to forgive them.

Rosin, strings and other rituals

I did not expect the housekeeping to be one of the pleasures, but it is.

Rosin is pine resin, in a little cake, and you draw the bow hair across it so the hair will grip the strings. Without it the bow slides silently, which is a wonderful trick for scaring a beginner. Too little and the tone is thin; too much and the sound is scratchy and there is white dust all over the top of the cello. I rosin lightly, four or five strokes, before each practice, and I wipe the rosin dust off the strings and the top with a soft cloth afterward, every time, because it hardens and is miserable to get off later. Cello rosin is softer and stickier than violin rosin; do not borrow your niece's.

Strings. Mine are steel-core, which are the usual choice for students and for orchestra playing because they stay in tune and speak clearly. I change them once a year, in August, before the orchestra season, one at a time so the bridge does not fall over (ask me how I know). Old strings go dull and false so gradually that you do not notice until the new ones go on and the cello suddenly sounds like itself again. Keep the old A string in the case as a spare; the A is the one that breaks.

Tuning every single time, with an electronic tuner because my ear is still learning, and then by ear against the tuner so that it keeps learning. Loosen the bow after playing so the stick does not warp. Humidity: the cello lives in the front room away from the radiator, with a little humidifier in the case in winter, because wood cracks when it dries. It is, I have come to realize, a pet. A large, expensive, wooden pet that hums when you hold it properly.

Friends and neighbors: Opera for Beginners · Carter Piano Studio · Bluebird Guitar Repair & Setup · Poems from the Attic
The Vienna neighborhood · GeoCities.us home


If you are an adult beginner too, please write and tell me: [email protected]. It helps to know there are others.

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Last updated September 24, 1999. © 1999 Helen W. The cat has still not come back into the room.