In recent years, researchers in a variety of medical fields have examined the influence that music training has on cognitive functions and overall health. In fact, the growing consensus concerning the benefits music education imparts to students—building stronger comprehension, math, and problems solving skills—has effected public school curriculum standards. Schools all over the country are placing new emphasis on teaching children the basic elements of music as part of the core subjects because of the measurable gains it generates in test scores and overall grade improvements. However, beginner violin students should know that learning to play a string instrument improves other areas as well.

In addition to scholastic gains, learning violin develops a number of personal skills and advantages that contribute to success. If you’ve recently decided to learn to play a string instrument, you’ve made a choice that will benefit you for the rest of your life. Learning to play a string instrument enriches your physical and mental well-being. These areas are positively impacted by music training:

Scholastic Performance

As mentioned, studies have shown clear connections between music education and classroom performance. In a reprint from the book Music and Learning by Chris Brewer, he advocates incorporating music into the classroom, explaining that music aids the learning process because it helps:

· establish a positive learning state

· create a desired atmosphere

· build a sense of anticipation

· change brain wave states

· focus concentration

· increase attention

· improve memory

· facilitate a multisensory learning experience

· release tension

· enhance imagination

Moreover, a recent article in Psychology Today, reported on the findings of several studies. Harvard Medical School Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, PhD, is an expert on music, neuroimaging and brain plasticity. In a statement at a Neuroscience 2013 conference in San Diego, he outlined the new research, explaining that enhanced sensory connections translate into improved comprehension, language, and brain functions. The simple fact that you must engage your physical, mental, and auditory abilities when you’re learning violin stimulates increased cognitive activity.

Social Interaction

Music training also improves your social skills. Even if you are learning to play using a personal instructor or an online course, performing music involves timing, and many different parts working together to create the whole. Beginning violin students who participate in classroom settings absorb these principles almost unconsciously, but every music student incorporates them because they form the foundation of a music education.

Although the violin, and other string instruments sound phenomenal when played solo, the music created by an orchestra, group, or ensemble features a depth of artistry that is impossible to describe. Plus, because it’s so fun to play with other students, learning violin creates plenty of opportunities to enlarge your social circle. As you meet other violinists and musicians who share your passion for music, practice sessions, amateur performances, and other activities will naturally become the result.

Emotional and Mental Well-Being

Many studies have also been conducted about the specific effects of music on your emotions. In particular, how certain types of music effect your mood. However, the majority of beginner violin students choose this string instrument because of personal preference. The ability to play music and create sounds that are pleasing to your specific tastes provides a wonderful outlet for personal expression.

Aside from the way music can alter your mood, having a convenient way to process your thoughts and feelings is an important part of maintaining your own personal well-being. It’s like having your own unique life hack that helps you work through difficult or confusing issues, or having an effective way to create an almost tangible expression of your joy or happiness.

In addition, new research is being conducted concerning the impact music has on memory recovery and retention. A study reported in the Oxford Journal explored music effects on stroke patients, found that “regular self-directed music listening during the early post-stroke stage can enhance cognitive recovery and prevent negative mood.”

Professional Goals

String instrument training also builds a variety of very crucial workplace skills. Beginner violin students who ‘stay the course’ have a leg up on college applications and future job interviews. Approval boards and potential employers look for team players, and learning violin teaches you exactly how to function successfully in a group, either large or small. Plus, the extracurricular activities that surround a music education provide ample opportunities for you to enrich your college applications. Even if you don’t plan on pursuing a career as a professional musician, the skills you develop through years of practice show your ability to concentrate, adapt swiftly to changes, and maintain self-discipline.

Learning violin or another string instrument builds the life skills you need to succeed. Beginning with improved metal capacity, the host of advantages you gain from music training will lay a firm foundation for your future endeavors

1. Latest stories

1) Little-Known Pyotr Stolyarsky’s Contributions to 20th-Century Russian Violin Playing Endure

By Inge Kjemtrup | From the November-December 2021 issue of Strings magazine

Leopold Auer died in 1930, but the name of the Hungarian-born violin teacher is still well known today. In his nearly 50 years of teaching in St. Petersburg and, after the Russian Revolution, the United States, he taught a procession of 20th-century greats, including Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Toscha Seidel, and Efrem Zimbalist. His book Violin Playing as I Teach It is still in print and studied today.

But there is another teacher whose impact on Russian violin playing was nearly as important as Auer’s: Pyotr Stolyarsky, born 150 years ago. Stolyarsky’s pupils included Nathan Milstein (1904–92), David Oistrakh (1908–74) and his son, Igor Oistrakh (1931–2021), Boris Goldstein (1922–87), Elizabeth Gilels (1919–2008), and Budapest Quartet second violinist Josef Roisman (1900–74).

David Oistrakh was his prize pupil, whose talent Stolyarsky recognized and nurtured from when Oistrakh came to him at age five until he left Odessa to begin his stellar career at the age of 18. Oistrakh revered his only teacher throughout his life.

Milstein, however, was less enchanted. “I am always asked about Stolyarsky. I reply that his reputation was exaggerated and that much of it was the result of successful public relations,” he sniffs in his biography, From Russia to the West. 

Why did these two Russian giants of the violin hold such different views of their mutual teacher? What kind of legacy did Stolyarsky, who died in 1944, leave?

Pyotr Solomonovich Stolyarsky was born in 1871 in Lipovets (also spelled Lypovets), a provincial town some 130 miles from Kiev. He first studied violin with his father, a village musician. He went on to study with the Polish violinist Stanisław Barcewicz, and then with Emil Młynarski and Y. Karbulko at the Odessa Imperial Musical Society School. After graduating in 1898, Stolyarsky joined the Odessa Opera House orchestra. He began giving private lessons, and, by 1920, was teaching at the city’s conservatory.

Odessa was founded in 1794 under the patronage of Catherine the Great. “The Pearl of the Black Sea” boasts grand boulevards and expansive buildings, many dating from the 19th century. The famous steps filmed for Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin are a favored site for visitors even today.

The Odessa of Stolyarsky’s era was a multi-ethnic city where speakers of Russian, Greek, Italian, Yiddish, and other languages lived side by side. Jewish residents of the city, who comprised one-third of the population by the 1890s, were able to participate more fully in the larger society than elsewhere in imperial Russia. In The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881, Steven J. Zipperstein traces this to “Odessa’s newness, its multinational character, and, in particular, its remarkable commercial growth.”

Nathan Milstein. Photo courtesy Alban Paris Ringve Music Museum

Music was important from Odessa’s earliest days, and its opera house attracted distinguished performers like Enrico Caruso and an audience made up of all strata of society. The reasons for the popularity of the violin, especially among the Jewish residents, some living in the city’s Moldavanka ghetto, are varied.

Aaron Boyd, director of chamber music and professor of practice in violin at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, points to the well-known success of Auer pupil Mischa Elman (1891–1967): “Mischa Elman in some ways forged the path where Jewish mothers and fathers could look and say, ‘Ah, this is a possible means of escaping the ghetto.’ It was seen as a vehicle for escaping of the crushing poverty, the pogroms, and all the ugliness of anti-Semitism in Russia.”

Some of those eager parents brought their young talents to Stolyarsky. In 1933, he opened a school for gifted young musicians in Odessa, the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. The success of students like Oistrakh must have been the best advertisement for the school.

Advertisement

In 1935, Oistrakh, age 27, and Boris Goldstein, age 13, the two Soviet competitors at the First Henryk Wieniawski International Competition in Warsaw, took second and fourth prizes (the extraordinary French violinist Ginette Neveu won first). Two years later, Oistrakh received the gold medal at the International Eugène Ysaÿe Competition (now the Queen Elisabeth Competition) in Brussels, with Stolyarsky students Elizabeth Gilels, Boris Goldstein, and Mikhail Fichtenholz winning prizes as well. Stolyarsky’s reputation as a formidable pedagogue was sealed.

The Stolyarsky School of Music still exists in Odessa. An overview of the school’s history on its website by Marina Perepelitsa describes the “incredible expectations” of the school, inspired by its founder: “He laid down a rigorous musical audition process that is still used to this day. Before attending the school, exceptional children have to obtain professional music instruction and play at a perfect pitch. If they are accepted to the school, their musical education would provide them with further developmental skills. The end goal was to get any child to captivate a concert hall. While some might say it may be too rigorous for a child, the hard work allowed his students to lead fulfilling and illustrious careers in music.”

“You have to play like a delicious borscht, which has everything—salt, pepper, and garlic.”

Pyotr Stolyarsky

The entrance exam was just as demanding when violinist Mark Peskanov, now based in New York City where he is artistic director of Bargemusic, attended the school in the late Soviet era. He was six years old when he auditioned, and was one of 30 accepted out of a field of 800.

To the students of Peskanov’s era, Stolyarsky was “an icon of sorts.” After a successful exam, it was a great compliment to Peskanov to be told by a teacher who had been an assistant to Stolyarsky, “How I wish the old man could hear you now.”

What was the secret of Stolyarsky’s success as a teacher? Henry Roth, in The Way They Play, talks about “the excellent Stolyarsky system, which, while taking great care to emphasize fundamentals, abstained from boring young pupils with dry exercises. The pedagogue won their good will and interest by introducing them to group and orchestral playing as quickly as possible.”

Milstein recalls Stolyarsky bringing the students together to play in unison, “not only because it was easier for him to control the horde but because it was good for us; by playing together we learned from each other.”

David Oistrakh. Photo courtesy Warner Classics by Ken Veeder

Peskanov remembers the camaraderie and competitions, as “people would stand and play in corridors, even in a violin ensemble.”

Stolyarsky rarely demonstrated for his students, preferring instead to teach by explanation. “He talked a lot and showed practically nothing,” says pianist Nina Kogan, whose mother, Elizabeth Gilels, studied with Stolyarsky (Kogan’s father was the well-known violinist Leonid Kogan). She continues: “But he spoke very figuratively: ‘Move the bow slowly, as if it were a salary that should be spread over a month, and not spent right away.’ 

“‘Why are you standing like a cow? Move!’

“‘You have to play like a delicious borscht, which has everything—salt, pepper, and garlic.’”

Advertisement

Stolyarsky was not one for scales, Kogan explains, but “in 1934, he brought Liza [Gilels] and Misha [Fichtenholz] to St. Petersburg to audition for Heifetz, who immediately demanded scales. And they played! I think this was laid down in the learning process.”

“From the very beginning, he instilled in us the need for perseverance and showed us how to enjoy the pleasures of the creative side of music. His incredible enthusiasm was contagious and we were all affected by it,” said Oistrakh.

But if Oistrakh cherished what he had learned from Stolyarsky, why was Milstein, who went on to study with Leopold Auer in St. Petersburg, so dismissive? 

“When Milstein went to Auer, he was already incredibly accomplished,” says Aaron Boyd, who has extensively studied golden-age violinists. “So there’s no way that Stolyarsky could have been a haphazard, unimportant, or unthinking teacher and yet have produced two geniuses of the level of Milstein and Oistrakh.”

There is also the fact that Odessa, while an important city, was not Moscow or St. Petersburg, the cities where a career in the Soviet Union had to be forged. “Even Oistrakh had to go to Moscow,” says Peskanov.

Indeed, it was Stolyarsky who sent Milstein to Auer in 1916. Stolyarsky’s focus on teaching younger students meant he was feeding into a “cultural pipeline,” as Boyd puts it. But even Auer must have recognized the solid violinist foundation Stolyarsky had created. Milstein writes, “All the boys at Stolyarsky’s school practically prayed by saying ‘Auer, Auer!’ He was our god.” Still, when Milstein first played in Auer’s class in St. Petersburg, Auer turned to the class and said, “How do you like the Black Sea technique?”

Is there a connection between the playing styles of those most famous Stolyarsky students, Oistrakh and Milstein? Boyd doesn’t think so, and says, “The plushness of Oistrakh’s tonal profile is very different from the silvery elegance of Milstein’s more aristocratic and somewhat urbane and a little bit cool presentation. They’re very, very different artists.”

Peskanov says, “On a very deep level, they are very different. Oistrakh stayed and Milstein left. They had different approaches to the violin, but share a certain warmth—the warmth of Odessa on the Black Sea.”

During the Second World War, Stolyarsky and his family were evacuated to Sverdlovsk, in the country’s far east, after turning down Oistrakh’s offer to go to Moscow. In Sverdlovsk he set up a children’s music school, but illness and the death, in 1942, of his wife took their toll. Stolyarsky died in April 1944, in despair, some say, over the news of the Nazi destruction of his Odessa school.

His school was eventually rebuilt by his devoted family members, friends, and former students, not least one David Oistrakh. However, it is the individuality of the extraordinary violinists he taught that may be his greatest legacy.

3)Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler’s ‘Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello’ Expands the Concept of a Solo Album

By David Templeton | From the November-December 2021 issue of Strings magazine

In the early days of the pandemic, with vast expanses of unexpected time suddenly on many people’s hands, some decided to use that time to do something they’d never previously felt the freedom to do. While certain folks caught up on binge-watching TV shows and reading all the latest mystery novels, others devoted themselves to long-planned creative projects, from writing one of those novels themselves to memorizing swaths of classic poetry, from learning to play Beatles tunes on the ukulele to learning to speak another language. One magazine journalist taught himself to tie balloon animals.

New York–based cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, already widely known for pushing boundaries and breaking conventions, decided to spend his quarantine time collaborating with his wife, composer Paola Prestini, on a project they’d often discussed but never quite gotten around to. They set out to make one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time. “This,” says Zeigler, simply, “is the biggest solo cello album I could ever imagine.”

Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello—released in digital format in September 2021, with a planned vinyl release set for January of 2022—features five pieces written by Prestini, all for solo cello: Océano, Eight Takes, Ophelia, Houses of Zodiac, and We Breathe Again. On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical “mad doctor” precision, are presented alongside thematically crucial “interludes”—brief passages of recited poetry, spoken aloud, inventively underscored by new arrangements of music from the soundtrack of the 2017 documentary We Breathe Again, which Prestini also scored, with vocals by the sensational Inuk folksinger Tanya Tagaq. 

The album is a stunner. 

Its melodically experimental soundscapes, paired with the words of poets Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey, and Anaïs Nin, make a clear and extremely successful attempt at blowing the minds of adventurous music lovers. It’s as if Prestini and Zeigler intentionally attempted to do for the cello what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon did for rock ’n’ roll. Seriously, this is the kind of album you’ll want to listen to on vinyl, lying on the carpet with an excellent pair of headphones, merging into the music like pearl divers plunging into the ocean. 

Zeigler, formerly of the Kronos Quartet, resists such appraisals—“That’s a very tall comparison,” he says with a laugh—but does allow that he and Prestini knew they were doing more than just cutting some tracks of cello music. The inclusion of an accompanying video, directed by award-winning filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu, is evidence enough of the couple’s ambitions for the project, but when you add an immersive museum/studio installation combining spoken word, movement, music, and image to explore the human subconscious through mind, body, and nature, it’s pretty clear this was never going to be a recording you simply listen to in the background while folding the clothes.

Simply put, Houses of Zodiac is a trip, both in the colloquial sense and as a metaphor for travel and journeys, pretty much demanding one’s attention, and providing countless rewards to any listeners willing to give it a chance. And for those whose engagement goes beyond the album itself, for those able to view the film or catch one of the upcoming video installations or live performances, those rewards only multiply.

Advertisement

“At first, I just thought this would be a really great solo cello project, but what I should have known at the time was that nothing Paola ever envisions is small-scale,” says Zeigler. “I never originally envisioned dance and ballet, video and everything. We definitely allowed things to grow and expand.”

Zeigler notes that he and Prestini have been married for 15 years. “We’ve been working together in various ways for many, many years, but believe it or not, this is actually our first album together where we’re both equally lead artists on a project,” Zeigler says. “And yes, we’re still married.”

 Over those years, of course, Prestini has written numerous pieces with Zeigler in mind while writing several works for other cellists and other situations. Ophelia was originally written as one of the commissioned pieces for the Irving M. Cline competition in California.

Jeffrey Zeigler. Photo by Marco Valentin

“Océano was a piece she wrote while doing an exploration of stringed instruments while still in college at Juilliard,” Zeigler says. “Houses of Zodiac has existed in a couple of different forms. A lot of these pieces I’ve played over the years, but at the beginning of lockdown, I turned to Paola and I said, ‘You know, we should explore these again. Why don’t we make this a project? Why don’t I dive in really deeply?’”

The timing, as they say, was right.

“Her music is extremely instrumentally challenging,” Zeigler notes, appreciatively, “and thanks to COVID, I had a lot of time for practicing.”

As an album concept, Zeigler and Prestini started talking about it early on in the pandemic, either late March or early April. But Zeigler says he’d been thinking about “delving deeply” into these particular pieces for quite a while. “Houses of Zodiac, in an earlier form—the album features a whole new arrangement—I’ve performed a number of times,” he says. “Ophelia I hadn’t worked on yet, but Océano I had. That is a very instrumentally challenging piece. When you listen to it, it seems very naturally written. But a lot of the double-stops and shifts are very . . . you really have to pay attention. I had a few rough performances of it early on, many years ago. I think I’ve always had a mental hurdle that I had to overcome, so it was wonderful to get a chance and to have the time to really dig in deep on it, on all these pieces, because it finally allowed me to own them.”

Advertisement

Asked if his work on the pieces contributed to any compositional adjustments over the months he and Prestini were preparing to record, Zeigler says no, though he admits there was once a time, on a different piece, when he informed her that a certain note was literally impossible to play. “Basically, I really don’t like it when a performer tells a composer, ‘I can’t play that, that’s too hard, I think you should rewrite it.’ I think a player needs to have a dialogue with a piece, really getting a deep understanding of it, working to learn what the composer is attempting to capture in the music.”

Key to the album’s striking appeal are the spoken-word elements of the interludes, the short, brilliantly delivered vocal performances matched with music that neither overwhelms the spoken text nor disappears behind the poetry. The interludes also serve as commentary, in a way, on the compositions they precede. Océano, for example, is preceded by a snippet from Pablo Neruda, recited by Prestini herself. A piece by Anaïs Nin, which leads into Houses of Zodiac, is read by Maria Popova, best known for her popular blog on the search for meaning in life, Brain Pickings. Shaughnessy and Trethewey read evocative fragments from their own works for Eight Takes and Ophelia.

“Those interludes, and the little pieces of poetry, that’s all part of the project’s natural genesis, because in exploring these new works we realized that all of them were inspired by various writers,” says Zeigler. “So that became a major seed that grew the album.”

Paola Prestini. Photo by Marco Valentin

The underscore for the interludes includes a number of musicians, and, of course, those soul-altering vocals by Tagaq, which become especially prominent in the final piece of the album, an arrangement based on the full We Breathe Again film, the soundtrack of which was never released. “It’s a lot of individuals for a solo cello album,” jokes Zeigler. “It helps when you have such fantastic artists and such fantastic improvisers.”

For such an experimental and definition-blurring project, the recording of the primary pieces was fairly straightforward.

“We wanted it to feel like a traditional classical recording,” Zeigler says. “I played long takes, with very few edits, because we wanted to have as natural a feel as possible.” Prestini’s writing being what it is, he says he did have to be fairly experimental himself. “I had to figure out new bowings and fingerings to play this music sometimes. The thing about having such a long relationship with a particular composer, I got to know her language better—and she of course has been studying my playing for years.”

That language—the language of music—is vividly alive in such projects as Houses of Zodiac, and working on the album, with all of its ancillary pieces, has only deepened the couple’s resolve to continue working together, as well as with others whose voices deserve to be part of the conversation. “It’s personally important and rewarding because the more I collaborate with composers, the more I realize that string players have an odd way of looking at things,” Zeigler says. “We don’t think very linearly. So players and composers have to do this little dance to bring out the best in each other. Over the years, Paola and I have had a lot of conversations about that. Houses of Zodiac is part of what’s come out of that conversation.”

1) The Changing Role of Music Editors in Classical Music

By Sarah Freiberg | From the September-October 2021 issue of Strings magazine

I started thinking about the significance of music editors when I grabbed a copy of cello studies by Jean-Louis Duport (1749–1819) to work on while on vacation recently. As I started to play the first étude, I was stunned by how much it diverged from what I remembered of the much-loved copy I had inherited from a teacher. My vacation copy sported a shocking number of additions, particularly of dynamics, emotive marks, a few note and fingering changes, and lots and lots of slurs that, to me, changed the point of the study—which is to play double-stops smoothly with separate bows. 

The title page held a clue.

The studies were “revised” by Friedrich Grützmacher and edited by Pierre Fournier. Revisions can often stray far from original works, and Grützmacher, a 19th-century cellist-composer, was famous (or, to modern eyes, infamous) for his. Though editorial “improvements” were common practice in his time, Grützmacher could take it to the extreme.

I tend to presume that if something is printed, it is what the composer intended, but, in fact, this is rarely the case. While music printing began in the 1500s, many works circulated in manuscript form well into the 18th century. Famously, Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violinand his Suites for solo cello remained in manuscript form for close to a century before initial publication. Music printed in the Baroque era is famous for its scarcity of markings, particularly dynamics and fingerings. Later performers wanted more information, which 19th-century editors willingly provided—sometimes with a vengeance. And still later, beginning in the 20th century, editors tried to strip away some of the 19th-century additions to try and get back to the original. With multiple editions available of some works with varying degrees of editorial intervention, it is important to understand what you’re looking at (and what you’re looking for) before making your choice.

There are different types of editions that you can choose from, and each can be immensely helpful to a performer. To get as close to the source as possible, you may want to pick a facsimile. This is a reproduction of the earliest manuscript—either in the hand of the composer or copyist, or of the first publication. Not everyone wants to read from manuscripts or early editions, which often use different notation and clefs that take getting used to. 

And they may have errors. 

I edited Francesco Guerini cello sonatas for the Broude Trust’s “Critical Facsimiles” series, in which errors by either composer or publisher were painstakingly corrected. If an accidental had clearly been left out, or a note was obviously a mistaken pitch, I would let the publisher know, and the correct pitch would be found elsewhere in the manuscript, photographed, and inserted seamlessly in the proper place. The corrections were all listed at the end of the volume. I admit to having mixed feelings about altering a piece of history, but the advantage is that now performers needn’t stumble across mistakes and figure out how to fix them.

Advertisement

As the 19th century progressed, editorial enthusiasm to improve and update music continued unabated.

When the Bach Cello Suites received their first publications in Paris in the 1820s, over 100 years after Bach penned them, they were renamed “Sonatas (or Solos).” Heavily edited with tempo markings and dynamics, essentially they were updated for the cellists likely to buy them. There was not another edition until 1866, when Grützmacher tried his hand at it. He’s now remembered for “updating and improving” a Boccherini cello concerto to make it more palatable for the Romantic era, and he did something similar for the cello suites. He thought his revisions would allow hopelessly old-fashioned, otherwise forgotten works to remain in the repertoire—and his Boccherini edition is still performed today. 

Grützmacher’s “performer’s edition” of the Bach Cello Suites is so heavily edited, arranged, and re-harmonized that it is listed under arrangements and transcriptions on the IMSLP website. His objective, as quoted in Bradley James Knobel’s 2006 dissertation on the suites, was “to reflect and to determine what these masters (Schumann and Mendelssohn) might have been thinking, and to set down all they, themselves, could have indicated.” As to Bach, Grützmacher pointed to successful performances of his own edition: “Something that would have been impossible with the bare original in its primitive state.”

This represents another type of edition, one in which an editor—who is often a performer—shares expertise and knowledge of a work to guide the musicians and performers who use it. And those fingerings, bowings, and dynamic markings are often welcome additions for students, teachers, and professional and amateur players alike. As one of my colleagues once remarked: “They put in the markings you think ought to be there.” 

However, a performer’s edition can also wander far from the source. Recently, a student brought in a newly purchased edition of the Bach Cello Suites, and I had to inform her that the bowings were totally fabricated from the very first measure of the first suite, having nothing to do with any of the manuscripts or early editions. The Cello Suites have their own tortured history, as Bach’s autograph manuscript is missing—and there have been over 100 editions since 1824.

As the 19th century progressed, editorial enthusiasm to improve and update music continued unabated. This resulted in a movement to peel away those added layers by examining the earliest musical sources. In the first half of the 20th century, publishers such as Edition Peters, G. Henle Verlag, and Bärenreiter began to look to the earliest musical text, or in German, the urtext of a work, to get closer to the composer’s original intent. This process often involves scholarly research, meticulous study of a source—or in some cases many sources—and often a good bit of detective work. The results usually include extensive critical commentary.

Friedrich Wilhelm Grützmacher, portrait: Bergen Public Library, Norway

Editors, such as Douglas Woodfull-Harris at Bärenreiter and Peter Jost at Henle, often spend years working on one publication. Markings have changed over the years, and scholar-editors need to know how to interpret them for players to use. And the works they study may be much more contemporary than you might think. Both Woodfull-Harris and Jost edit works by late-19th- and early 20th-century composers such as Dvořák, Debussy, and Ravel. As Woodfull-Harris related to Laurie Niles in an interview on Violinist.com, he discovered that a mark in Debussy’s cello sonata of a zero (0), which to us means to play an open string, actually meant a left-hand pizzicato to Debussy—a small point with great significance to performers.

Advertisement

Urtext editions have evolved over time. Henle’s earlier urtext editions would have a scholar check all the markings with available sources, noting discrepancies and marking suggested slurs with dotted lines. But Henle would also ask a performer to add fingerings and bowings—which could be at odds with the scholarship on the page. Publishers understand that the music they produce needs to appeal to and be helpful to their buyers—and many players value fingering and bowing suggestions. But other performers may be more interested in historical accuracy, and don’t relish anachronistic markings.

Henle’s solution nowadays is to provide two versions of a work—one with fingerings and bowings, another without—both with thoughtful page turns. 

Scholarship continues to alter how we approach earlier music.

Bärenreiter’s work continues to evolve as well—as shown by their many Bach Cello Suites editions. More sources have come to light since their first, edited by August Wenzinger, first published in 1950. It contains critical commentary as well as fingerings, and is still popular today. Twenty years ago, Woodfull-Harris and Bettina Schwemer presented a “scholarly-critical performing edition,” including facsimiles of all four known manuscripts, the first printed edition, and their own rendering, which shows all the variations among those five sources. The most recent, edited by Andrew Talle, is based on the newest scholarship. Talle has also edited the synoptic facsimile volume, which lines up all four manuscripts and the first edition measure by measure—invaluable for curious cellists.

Scholarship continues to alter how we approach earlier music. Bärenreiter’s urtext publications of the two Brahms cello sonatas represents a fascinating twist in the editing process. Overall editor Clive Brown offers comprehensive and intriguing performance-practice commentary, noting that portamento was much more frequently used by string players during Brahms’ time, meaning that fingerings encouraging slides were much more popular than they are now. In one of two cello parts, cellist Kate Bennett Wadsworth has added fingerings and bowings based on the markings of cellists who performed with the composer, favoring just such slides. The other cello part is without fingerings. 

In early Henle urtext pieces, fingerings and bowings, while not based on sources, were thought to be useful to modern performers. Bennett Wadsworth’s fingerings in Brahms represent the most recent scholarship and may be quite foreign to how we play today. Interestingly, Bennett Wadsworth’s thesis is on Friedrich Grützmacher’s performing editions, and how they help inform the music of his time, including the works of Brahms. 

The role of the editor, and expectations of their work, has clearly changed over time quite significantly. In the 19th century, someone like Grützmacher was updating music to make it relevant to his generation of cellists. Mostly nowadays, we make him out to be the bad guy for altering earlier music so much that it becomes more fantasy than reality. However, most performers, particularly students and amateurs, want guidance from an edition, and 18th-century works have little to go on—few slurs, fewer dynamics, no fingerings. Grützmacher may have been a bit overenthusiastic, but his methods weren’t unusual for his time. Fortunately, modern editions seem driven by far more thorough scholarship, especially in the case of urtext editions, and even those that are performer-driven keep an eye to the composer’s intentions. And sometimes the lucky string player gets both!

4}Play Bach Better by Improving Your Fifths on Violin

By Scott Flavin | From the September-October 2021 issue of Strings magazine

In J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, BWV 1001–1006, the composer’s use of the instrument’s four strings to create a world of multiple voices and complex textures is truly remarkable. Some of the greatest challenges in terms of technique and tuning are to be found in the double-stop writing, most notably in four-note chords. Many of these include the interval of a perfect fifth, especially on the lower two strings, a chord voicing that creates an especially rich and pleasing sonority. By outlining the tonic and fifth of the harmony in the lowest two voices, Bach gives great solidity to the chord voicing. You’ll find four-note chords with the fifths in the bottom two notes in Sonata No. 1 in G minor, Fuga, mm. 58–59 (Ex. 1, below) and Partita No. 2 in D minor, Allemanda, m. 16 (Ex. 2)—this is also the only four-note chord in the entire movement.

Check out more articles from our Rep Prep section

Bach also uses double-stop fifths alone as an expressive device; by omitting the third of the chord, he creates a sense of release (as in Partita No. 3 in E major, Minuet 1, end of the first section at m. 8, Ex. 3), or purity (Sonata No. 2 in A minor, Grave, m. 18, Ex. 4), or even harmonic ambiguity.

Hate ’Em or Love ’Em…

None other than the great violin pedagogue Carl Flesch recommended avoiding fifths whenever possible! As he wrote in his book Violin Fingering: Its Theory and Practice:

“Perfect fifths are the problem children of double-stops, for their intonation depends as much upon the quality and tuning of the strings as upon the skill of the player. Whereas impure intonation in all other intervals can be quickly and inconspicuously corrected by shifting one finger, ‘false fifths’ can be rectified only by changing the position of the whole hand or even of the arm, a procedure that can never be successfully concealed. 

“Besides, when strings get out of tune during a performance, the situation is beyond the control of the performer, as far as double-stops in perfect fifths are concerned. No amount of skill will help the player, and all he can do is either to shorten both notes as much as possible, or to omit one note of the fifth. The elimination or alleviation of these difficulties will be among the most important considerations in choosing a correct fingering for double-stops in fifths. Preference should always be given to the first or second finger; only if these are not available should the third finger be used. The fourth finger should be avoided at all costs.”

Advertisement

By contrast, the fine violinist and concertmaster Rodney Friend is an advocate for practicing practically everything in fifths; he believes that by covering two strings with the same finger, a player finds the ideal position of the left hand, a notion he demonstrates to great effect.

…But Tune ’Em!

No matter your personal feeling about fifths, when you encounter them in Bach, you must play them well! It is vital that you play fifths in tune for several reasons:

o Most common scale structures can be viewed as a series of perfect fifths (a precise interval).

o The perfect fifth is the most consonant interval in music (except for unisons and octaves). 

o When any note is played, the interval one perfect fifth higher is audible in the sound of that note, as a prominent note in the overtone series.

o The key of a note and the key of its perfect fifth are closely related.

In order to get more comfortable with the unique technical requirements of fifth double-stops, follow two steps: One, practice fifths outside of repertoire for technique. Two, apply them in context to music.

Step One—Technique

It is important to first understand some basic principles about playing fifths on the violin. As Flesch pointed out, unlike other double-stops, the whole hand and even the arm is used to adjust pitch, so be open to moving the arm and hand in different ways to find good intonation. At first, this may prove to be difficult and feel unfamiliar, but as with shifting, the more you practice, the more you “remember” these new positions; when you do, you begin to build more consistently in-tune fifths. 

It is also important to use more of the pads of the left-hand fingers—this will allow more complete coverage of the two strings with the same finger and give greater flexibility to adjust for pitch than if you were to use the tips of your fingers. To help achieve this, position your left hand somewhat lower in relation to the neck of the violin, which will shift the point of contact of the fingers from the tips to more on the pads. Do practice double-stop fifths with vibrato, as this encourages flexibility in the left hand. 

Advertisement

If you have great trouble tuning a particular fifth, balance the left hand more on one string than the other; experimentation will help you find the proper physical solutions. Moving forward, practice scales in fifth

double-stops with and without vibrato. It can also be helpful to take the example of Rodney Friend and practice melodies in fifths, with vibrato and shifts.

Step Two—Context 

Now that you have found increased facility and consistency in fifth double-stops, you can work on them in repertoire. When you find a chord or double-stop containing a fifth, remember that you may have to move the arm or hand to accommodate good intonation. If there are other fingers in the chord, they must use this possibly altered left-hand position as well. 

In the midst of all these left-hand difficulties, do not neglect the right hand—always practice with a beautiful and rich bow sound, which will encourage the left hand to remain flexible. Once you can play the double-stop or chord with consistent good intonation, it is time to put it in the context of the music. First of all, look at the notes before and after the chord. Much like a position change or shift, you need to find ways of preparing the hand for the in-tune fifth. If you don’t prepare the hand ahead of time, your left hand will be forced to move angularly, creating tension, disrupting the flow of the music, and most likely negatively affecting intonation. After the fifth, repeat the process in reverse, using the notes following it to reclaim the previous hand position. The next step is to note the tempo, dynamics, articulation, character, and harmonic or structural function of the passage as well; this will allow the chord or double-stop to become an integral part of the phrase. 

The Good News

Once you start isolating and tuning fifths and fifth-chords in Bach, you will find many commonalities among them, meaning you won’t have to work so hard to improve all of them! The additional benefit is that you will start hearing the fifth relationships in Bach’s music more clearly, and truly understand that they are at the heart of his music.

5 Strategies for Achieving Successful Fifths

1. This interval is essentially influenced by the shape of the hand, so be willing to adjust your arm and hand position.

2. Make sure you are using the pads of your fingers rather than the tips (somewhat lowering your hand in relation to the fingerboard will help).

3. Flexibility is key, so vibrating in practice can help avoid tension in the left hand.

4. Practice scales and melodies in successive fifths.

5. Find fifths in repertoire and fix them, then practice them in context.

Bach Two Ways: Recent violin recordings of the Sonatas and Partitas reveal striking interpretive differences

What Fuels Violinists’ Lifelong Fascination with the Bach Sonatas and Partitas?

Learn to perfect your practice through expert advice from top string players and educators with the insightful e-book A Practice Primer.

5)Cellist Miranda Wilson on Finding Lifelong Inspiration with Bach

By Miranda Wilson | From the September-October 2021 issue of Strings magazine

Bach’s Cello Suites come into my life at the end of a storm. For the past week, a southerly wind from Antarctica has swept up both islands, bending the pohutukawa trees into submission, ripping sheets of corrugated iron from the roofs, howling between buildings. It’s one of those Wellington days after a storm where mist rises to the tops of the forest-covered hills, where the smell of damp earth and damp ferns makes you feel alert with possibility. My mother and I are in the car, teetering up my cello teacher’s narrow, moss-covered driveway on our way to my weekly lesson. The cello lies diagonally across the backseat in its canvas case, my music satchel stuffed between it and the door to hold it steady up hills and around corners.

My teacher, Judy, is a cellist in the New Zealand Symphony. She lives in a ghostly Victorian house in the oldest part of the city. There are fourteen-foot corniced ceilings, heavy carved doors, and dark book-lined corridors carpeted with Persian rugs—the kind of house where any of the wardrobes might transport you to Narnia.

I am a skinny nine-year-old, all eyes and elbows and teeth. I have grown out of my bright blue corduroy pinafore, which hangs too-short over white tights and white sneakers. Adults keep telling me that I’m going through a phase, using the kind of voice that implies they hope I’ll soon grow out of it. Judy never talks to me that way. Dear, twinkling Judy treats me as though I’m much older than nine. She asks me questions and takes my opinions seriously.

I twist the old-style doorbell, and Judy is there in a trice to usher my mother and me into her music studio. The room is full of antique furniture, because Judy loves old things, and because I love her, so do I. A hundred-year-old upright piano lives against the far wall, gilt candleholders on either side of its music-rack. We sit to play our cellos on heavy round-backed mahogany dining chairs. Three or four cellos stand up in their cases like mummies in sarcophaguses.

“Today,” Judy says in a reverential tone, “I think we might be ready to start Bach.”

So far, my lessons have included scales, arpeggios, and études by Dotzauer and Piatti, because Judy is strict about technique. For repertoire, we’ve worked on the Squire Tarantella, Goltermann’s concertos, and La Cinquantaine. We haven’t yet done anything by the great composers, but I know that great composers exist because my parents are musicians and they’re always taking me to concerts and operas. I can already tell the difference between Mozart and Haydn and the Shoe composers, Shoe-mann and Shoe-bert. I know who Bach is because my dad sings in Bach oratorios several times a year, and my mum plays Bach’s Partita in B-flat over and over on her piano. Sometimes they do recitals together, mostly of songs in German by one of the Shoes.

The author at age 9 with 1/2-size cello. Photo courtesy of Miranda WIlson

“We’ll start with Bach’s First Cello Suite, the one in G major,” says Judy, “but let’s not start with the Prelude, because it’s a bit hard, dear. We’ll start with the two Menuets, and after that the Gigue. When you’ve got those under your fingers, we’ll have a go at the Courante. The Prelude, Allemande, and Sarabande are harder, but we’ll get to them.” Her eighteenth-century Italian cello—a cello as old as Bach!—is already out of its case, and she plucks the strings to check their tuning as I go through the familiar rituals of taking out my bow, applying rosin, and finally lifting the canvas case from my own half-size cello. Sitting by the piano, mother busies herself with a lined school notebook, writing down everything Judy says.

I’m not yet very adept at sight-reading, so Judy demonstrates a few bars of Menuet I on her own cello. Suddenly I understand that this is no pedagogical work, no pretty salon piece for dutiful children. The opening arpeggio sings and dances out of Judy’s cello, and something awakens in my nine-year-old mind that changes music for me forever.

My squeaky little cello is no match for Judy’s glorious tone, but over the course of the hour I manage to stumble through the Menuets, stopping many times to write fingerings and bowings in the score. Judy explains that the Menuets are to be played da capo, that once you’ve played them both you have to repeat Menuet I. “There’s a happy one and a sad one,” she tells me. “The first one’s in G major, and the second in G minor. See how the melodic line goes up at the beginning of Menuet I and down at the beginning of Menuet II? There’s a composer who likes to make contrasts! It’s as if Menuet II is a thundercloud, and the return of Menuet I is like the sun coming out. Do you see?” 

Yes, I see. And I want to know everything I can find out about this Bach, a composer who could have dreamed up such a piece for the cello alone, with no need for cute titles or plinking piano chords. A composer who wrote music for grown-ups.

Outside, the sun hasn’t yet come out, but looks as if it might be thinking about it. As my mother steers the car down the steep slopes and sharp corners of Ngaio Gorge Road, I say “Mummy?”

“Yes, darling?” 

“I think my three favorite things in the world might be eating, sleeping, and playing the cello.” 

My mother looks very, very pleased.

Miranda Wilson teaching at University of Idaho, 2019.

Twenty-one years later, I’m sitting stunned on the tiled floor of my office at the University of Idaho, music scores all around me, my right hand clapped to my temple. I’m seeing stars, like in the cartoons. Outside my window, the leafy neo-Gothic campus is abuzz with the chatter of students moving into dormitories, signing up for clubs, and planning parties. Just a few feet from them, I’m crouched in tears after a hardback volume of Beethoven’s complete string quartets has toppled from the highest level of my bookshelf, hitting me on the head and causing me to fall over. 

Advertisement

No one outside the window has seen the accident, but I’m not just crying because of the blows to my head and my pride. It’s because I think I might be beginning, albeit a little on the early side, some kind of midlife crisis. In hitting my head, the Beethoven score has also hit my mind with an inescapable thought that I might go to my grave without playing everything within its covers. 

Dante Alighieri was only in his forties when he wrote “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself again in a dark wood, because the straightforward pathway was lost.” He knew, having lived half of his three score years and ten, that he might have seen more yesterdays than tomorrows. It seems absurd to think your time’s running out when you’re thirty, but isn’t everyone’s? Because of spending the first half of my twenties in the single-minded pursuit of advanced degrees and the second half in a string quartet, I’ve been locked in a practice room for the entire decade that people usually spend finding themselves. I have experienced none of the rites of passage that people tolerate in twentysomethings, but frown upon in those old enough to know better: hitchhiking around Europe, working on an organic farm, singing karaoke, dyeing my hair an eccentric color, or chaining myself to a tree in the name of environmental activism. Thanks to the life-eating profession of classical music, it’s now too late to try on the lives of the people I might have become and didn’t. It’s time to face up to the life I have now as a cello-playing adult.

Several other volumes besides the Beethoven quartets have fallen too, including the orchestral scores of the cello concertos by Dvořák and Schumann. Despite years of practicing these pieces, I’ve never performed them with a major symphony, or any symphony at all. Wait, hadn’t I thought I’d grow up to be the next Jacqueline du Pré? As a cello-mad teenager, I assumed my hours of practice would automatically confer greatness and fame. Some mysterious process would attract agents, managers, conductors, and recording contracts with very little extra effort from me, since talent ought to be enough, oughtn’t it? 

Not one of my teachers disabused me of these notions. Why did they encourage me to aim high and dream big? Why didn’t anyone say “Look, almost no one succeeds in this profession. You aren’t going to be Yo-Yo Ma. If you persist in this, you will work yourself half to death, you’ll never make money, you won’t get to choose where you live, and most of the time you won’t get to choose the music you play. Why not qualify as a doctor or lawyer so that you can have a good income, live where you want, and buy lots of lovely things?” Whether I’d have listened is anyone’s guess, but it would have been nice if someone had so much as mentioned the realities of the profession.

For a while, I thought I’d spend my whole career in the Tasman Quartet. We had concerts, tours, and a respectable number of competition prizes. We rehearsed ten hours a day, seven days a week, with no days off. I was proud to devote my life to performing in a medium that seemed to bring out the best in composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bartók, Shostakovich. I loved it all, especially Beethoven.

Miranda Wilson with the Tasman String Quartet in Germany 2009.

What had made it so impossible to continue down this path? Mostly, the realization that I could not be in a quartet and simultaneously live a happy life. For years I’d made sacrifice after sacrifice and pretended not to have any human needs, but once I started to think about having a family I couldn’t stop. How could you have kids when you were on the road seven months of the year? Was it fair to ask my new husband to give up his career to stay home? How would I afford it when I barely made enough money to cover my own expenses? 

It took me three months to find the words to tell the quartet I was leaving. I had no teaching job to go to, but I applied for anything and everything. Against the odds, I won a tenure-track professorship in Idaho. With love, and not without pain, I told them I was done. 

String quartet players often compare the group dynamic to a marriage with none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. In the weeks and months after leaving, I mourned the loss of the quartet more than I’d ever mourned a failed romance. I’m still mourning it now, sitting on this dusty floor at my new university in Idaho, where I’ve come in pursuit of a happy life. 

So when am I going to start being happy? 

It’s not that I’m unhappy, exactly. Compared with many of my friends who have doctorates and no jobs, I’ve hit the jackpot. And yet here I am, weeping over a book full of unplayed notes. Weeping because gradually, subtly, one by one, doors have started to close on me. At 30, I’ve aged out of most competitions. I don’t have any gigs. I don’t even have a good cello.

I sniff and wipe my face disgustingly on the sleeve of my T-shirt. And that’s when I notice the last of the fallen scores. It’s the book of facsimiles of the four eighteenth-century manuscript copies of Bach’s Six Cello Suites.

A voice in my head, my own voice, says “You’ve still got Bach.”

It’s been years since I played Bach’s Cello Suites. I learned the first two in childhood, the second two as an undergraduate, and the Fifth for a competition. Aside from some practice-room noodling, I’ve never played the Sixth. I haven’t played anything at all by Bach since being in the quartet, because for a long time I only played string-quartet repertoire and Bach’s lifetime predates the genre.

Bach’s lifetime. It’s funny, I think to myself, that I’ve always pictured Bach as an old man in a wig with a lace ruff and shiny buttons. The famous oil painting by Elias Gottlob Haussmann dates from 1746, by which time he was an establishment figure, the learned Cantor of Leipzig. It occurs to me now that half a lifetime had passed between 1720, the probable year he composed the Cello Suites, and the year he sat for his portrait. Cello-Bach, the younger, thinner, pre-wig version, was in the middle of his own life’s journey when he wrote the Suites in the tiny hamlet of Cöthen in eastern Germany. Cow-Cöthen, they called it. While his job as court Capellmeister was pleasant, it compelled him to live in the middle of nowhere. And there was no use there for two of his most luminous gifts, playing the organ and composing Lutheran sacred music. Instead, his job was to provide secular entertainment, which he did with great style: his Cöthen works include the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Sonatas and Partitas for violin, and of course the Cello Suites.

Advertisement

Miranda Wilson in recital 2018.

Bach lived in Cow-Cöthen, and I live in Mos-Cow, Idaho. “No cows in Moscow!” we gleefully correct visitors who don’t know that it’s pronounced Moss-Co. (This isn’t true. There are lots of cows.) For the first time in my life, I start feeling a kinship with Cello-Bach. We’re of a similar age. We both live in isolated towns because of our jobs. I’m conceited enough to imagine that he and I would be friends. 

The voice in my head is gathering speed. “You could do a Bach project. You could do a marathon concert of Bach’s Cello Suites.”

No I can’t. The Sixth Suite is a monster unless you have a five-string cello, and I barely have a regular four-string one. I’d make a fool of myself.

“No, you wouldn’t,” the voice persists. “You could make a CD too.”

“Nonsense,” I tell the voice. “Who wants yet another recording of one of the best-known, most-recorded pieces in the repertoire?”

The voice acts as if it hasn’t heard. “Let’s set a time limit,” it says. “You have to do it by the time you’re thirty-five.”

That’s ridiculous. Thirty-five will be the year I’m up for tenure, and by then I need to have published a book and loads of articles.

“All right then, forty. That’ll give you time to write some books. And get a new cello. And another one with five strings. Aim high! Dream big!”

Shut up, voice. 

The problem with compelling ideas is that once you’ve had them, you can’t get rid of them. The idea of a Bach marathon stirs up my restlessness, my fear of professional irrelevance, and if I’m truthful, my love of showing off. I’m going to do it. I will relearn the five Suites I already know, master the Sixth, and perform them individually on other recital programs in the next few years so that I’m comfortable with them all.

I feel a huge yes welling up inside me. I scramble to my feet with the Bach facsimiles, the dropped quartet scores forgotten on the floor. I take out my cello, prop the score open at the first page of the First Cello Suite in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, and begin to play.

This is an abridged excerpt from Miranda Wilson’s upcoming book, The Well-Tempered Cello: Life with Bach’s Cello Suites, scheduled to be released by Fairhaven Press October 1, 2021. For more information, or to pre-order, visit fairhavenpress.com.

The complete edition of the Care & Repair of Cellos series gives you a library of video and written instruction that will provide you with extensive knowledge that will help you understand your instrument and, in turn, be a more informed owner and user of stringed instruments and bows.

Share On