I’m working on a loose curriculum that I can use to teach the basics of cello improvisation. Huge topic, but simple melodic figures are a good early lesson.

Key ideas are that the harmonic structure provides a foundation (the root of the chord) and a series of important platforms on top of that foundation (the other notes in the chord). So your bass riff or your melody or whatever fills in other notes–passing tones, ornaments, outright dissonances–that move you from platform to platform. The goal is to take advantage of the years of music listening that students have done–the subconscious layers of what music should sound like–and link that subconscious up with a handful of useful conscious ideas.

So I can talk on and on about that as it relates to our repertoire song of the moment, but at some point, students have to just try it out. And I needed a visual. Et voilà:

This is a standard 1-4-5 chord progression with the notes of the chord written out wherever they’re possible to play in first position on the cello. It gives students a visual hook as we play back and forth. The idea isn’t, of course, to play the chords; it’s to keep half an eye on these important tones while making up something melodic.

To be combined with your rigorous scale and arpeggio practice!

From time to time I need some particular bit of music as a cello teaching aid, but I can’t find quite the right thing in my standard exercise books. So I type it up myself. Thought I might post some of these on the blog, in case they’re useful.

Here, then, is a quick walk through triplet subdivision:

This made for a relatively easy way to talk about dotted triplet rhythms, which look scary at first. On top, it’s not too hard to divide a quarter note beat into three even triplets. On the second line, you can split those in half to make triplet sixteenths. Then, at bottom, you glue some of the sixteenths back together to make the dotted rhythm.

So I lined all that up vertically, and have used the resulting visual to good effect. Hope it helps someone else! (Otherwise, I suppose, I’ll at least be able to find this quickly the next time I need it…) You can click on the image for a high-resolution version that is suitable for printing.

Feel free to reuse this, or any music teaching aid on my website, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

And I should credit MuseScore, Inkscape, and Gimp, which I use to make this sort of thing.

With my cello students, there comes a moment when we’ve built a solid base of technique and we’re ready to start talking about putting emotional content into a performance.  If I do my job right, I’ve been modeling that all along.   But there’s a specific moment where we’re ready to start thinking about it verbally and deliberately.

When that happens, one of the first things I reach for is my stack of recorded Bach solo cello Suites.  They’re remarkable pieces, six of them, generally getting more difficult to play as you go along, and each movement a sort of world unto itself.  Most (all?) cellists develop a lifelong love affair with these pieces.

As such, there are myriad recordings of the Suites — a treasure trove for any cellist with an iPod or a CD player.  You can listen to them historically, starting with Pablo Casals’s gruff romanticism, moving to more recent flirtations with period performance — or, maybe hip today, a sort of transparent vocalism.

With Casals, you have to imagine the richness of his tone — the old recordings don’t quite capture it — but you can hear the sweep and drama in how he shapes phrases.  It must have been breathtaking to hear the master perform live.  Then you can proceed through Harrell and Ma (listen to Yo-Yo Ma’s old recording, then his newer one; the difference is incredible, and it teaches even my young students lessons that you can’t put into words about age and wisdom).

Or, if you’re a teacher, you might present the recordings topically.  I start off with two polar opposites.

First, Lynn Harrell is the master of the macrophrase.  He might start a movement softly, then gradually, precisely crescendo to a climactic moment, dozens of measures later; just as carefully, he backs away, ending as gently as he began.  It’s a landscape-scale vision of the suites, and of how to shape a phrase in the grand Romantic tradition.  There’s no clearer example of how music theory corresponds to plot arcs in literature.

Then I put in Anner Bylsma’s recording: the opposite, the master of the microphrase, on a baroque cello.  Bylsma captures tiny currents of emotion, changing his articulations and dynamics to stir drama even within individual notes.  Bach’s complexity more than supports this, and I, with my students, listen to these recordings with a fascinated rapture.

Lastly, I play Yo-Yo Ma’s more recent recording, which he made as the soundtrack for a series of short films on PBS.  For me, this recording captures the best of Harrell and Bylsma, adding a special polish from Ma’s masterful, effortless technique.

There are other wonderful recordings, of course, with their own gems.  Rostropovich has breathtaking moments — I think of the organlike chords at the end of the 2nd Prelude.  (Other cellists don’t dare the attempt and cheat with arpeggios.)  I haven’t yet heard Isserlis — forgive me! — but I hear wonderful things.  “Buy as many as you can,” I tell my students.

It’s a great moment to reach — one of the moments that makes teachers love what they do.  With these recordings — gifts from the masters, now over a couple of generations — I can start asking my students to think deliberately about how they shape phrases, where they find tension or peace in a phrase of music, and how they’re going to pass these same gifts on to their own audiences.