Is it Hard to Learn the Cello?
IN OTHER WORDS, IS IT POSSIBLE TO LEARN THE CELLO AS AN ADULT?
I’ve been asked this question a number of times, usually after I tell someone that I started my cello journey at 25.
The simple, snarky answer would be, “Umm, yes. Yes it’s very hard to learn to play the cello.”
But I think the real question here is not whether it’s hard to learn to play the cello, but what exactly makes learning it so difficult.
I remember asking myself this question before I got started, and even wondering about it during the first couple of years of playing, before I had dug deep enough to uncover the true intricacies of the matter.
I remember someone telling me early on that Gregor Piatigorsky, a famous 20th century virtuoso, called the cello a ‘one-note instrument’ because just to play a single note beautifully took years of work.
While I enjoyed the romance of the sentiment - honing a craft so meticulous that even the most fundamental product requires expertise - I didn’t agree at all.
At that time my brain and my ears were so preoccupied with handling what is now accomplished by subconscious muscle memory that I didn’t even hear what I wasn’t doing.
I was essentially deaf to nuance.
My faculties were on overdrive simply handling the basics. Now I completely agree with Piatigorsky’s statement.
Let’s talk about what makes the cello difficult to learn …
What I would have wanted to read back in the day was an article describing what makes learning the cello so difficult, and it would have been even better if the author had gotten off to a late start as well since then he would have undergone the process with an adult mindset.
I hope this helps you in your journey as a cellist, but please keep in mind that while these aspects of cello playing are difficult, they are achievable through patience and consistency.
This post is not designed to intimidate or discourage, but rather to provide a possible road map so that if and when you feel a plateau in your progress, you can check the map and figure out your current roadblock.
Here are my top four roadblocks to learning the cello:
1. PITCH
This is probably the first thing most people think of, and for good reason.
It is very difficult to play the cello in tune.
If you imagine a guitar or a mandolin, you can see in your mind’s eye those thin, extremely helpful metal frets that run across the fingerboard perpendicular to the strings. These frets tell the player where to find each note physically.
Now take a look at the cello’s fingerboard: barren as the Russian steppes in the dead of winter.
As cellists we have to use a type of three-dimensional muscle memory to remember where each note is located.
We break the fingerboard into hand positions (1st, 2nd, etc), then memorize the exact arm angle and hand shape needed so that our left hand rests in each position with the fingers hovering over the correct notes, ready to play.
What further complicates matters is that just as the frets on a guitar get closer together the higher you go up the neck, such is the case with the cello, which means that every hand position requires a different memorized hand shape.
There are a number of physical guideposts we cellists use to orient ourselves in various positions on the fingerboard, but in general even those guideposts merely act as a memory aid and 3D memorization is still required.
The real ass kicker comes when you realize that - unlike a piano - a cello requires a player to use more than one pitch for the same note name.
Let me explain. On a piano, a C natural is a C natural is a C natural. You press the button and out comes a C, same exact pitch every time. This is because the piano employs a tuning system called equal temperament in which all 12 semitones within a scale are exactly the same distance apart (100 cents).
On a cello, however, we have the freedom to “temper” our notes so that they are as in tune and resonant as possible, and that means that if I have to tune an E natural against my open A string, it will be different (higher in pitch) than if I have to tune the same E natural against my open G string.
This issue is admittedly more of an advanced player’s problem, but it highlights one of my favorite aspects of learning the cello: the better you get, the more complicated the difficulties become, and thus you can spend your whole life learning an instrument without ever finding yourself at the end of the cul-de-sac.
The good news is that touch isn’t the only sense we deploy when we play the cello.
We also use hearing, and in my personal experience, I find that whenever I break through the ceiling and find myself at a new level of cello playing, it is because my ears have opened up in a new way and are able to hear issues that previously went by undetected.
In order to fix a problem on the cello, you have to be able to hear the problem.
Your ears will be able to tell you when a problem has occurred, and only your ears will be able to tell you if the solution you try has solved the problem, whether it’s a matter of pitch or of bow technique.
2. EAR TRAINING
This brings us to the second major area that makes learning the cello difficult: training your ears.
I think it’s helpful to think of your ears as muscles.
Most of us begin our journeys on cello with ears like the 90 pound weakling in the Charles Atlas bodybuilding cartoon.
Through our time on the cello, supplemented with off-cello ear training exercises (highly recommended), our hearing muscles grow in size and definition so that eventually we become sonic bodybuilders, 260 pounds of muscle with 3% body fat.
Some of us are born with perfect pitch -the ability to hear a note and know exactly what note it is by name- and some of us born with excellent relative pitch, which aids tremendously.
These are like the people we know who are born with naturally lean, muscular physiques. Regardless of where your musical hearing is starting at, if you work on it consistently and conscientiously you can become a hearing hulk!
Laying aside pitch recognition (perfect pitch), every element I’m about to list is something that you will be able to acquire through practice.
First, and most importantly, is interval recognition.
An interval is the distance between any two notes, and developing interval recognition will help you hear a pitch just before you play it so that your finger lands on the fingerboard exactly in the right spot.
If you know what the interval of a major third sounds like, then when you have to play one on the cello, your inner ear will help guide your brain so that you drop your finger onto the perfect spot.
Without interval recognition playing in tune would become a matter of complete physical memorization of the fingerboard down to the millimeter.
This would be like learning to take your dog on a long neighborhood walk with your eyes closed, memorizing every footstep and hazard instead of simply using the most helpful sense (vision).
Along with intervals, ear training will include learning to recognize types of chords, scales (minor, major, etc.), and chord progressions, which are series of chords often used for harmonic purposes the way a house uses a steel skeleton as a framework for a building.
These elements of ear training will help you understand the construction of the music you are playing, which will help you decipher the message of the music and how to play it.
As cellists we often perform a supportive role (as in a string quartet) in which we lay the foundation for the melody and provide a steady sense of harmony and rhythm so that the melody can float freely above us.
Training your ears well is difficult to do, but it is an incredibly rewarding aspect of learning a string instrument.
With great musical hearing you can be listening to a piece of music for the first time and simultaneously seeing the piece’s structural blue print in your mind’s eye.
It gives you the hearing equivalent to x-ray vision.
3. THE BOW
If you asked me point blank what the most difficult part of learning the cello was, I would tell you it’s the bow.
Using it as effectively and efficiently as possible is the difference between a professional and a virtuoso, between someone who plays the cello and someone you would call a true musician. Yo Yo Ma is a musician who happens to play cello.
I say this because one no longer hears him grappling with technique or being limited by the constraints of the instrument.
I would argue that his bow use is the single largest physical contributing force to the way he sounds.
For those of us beginning our cello journeys, the first difficulty is learning to hold the bow comfortably so that we feel completely in control but our fingers and thumb are supple enough to draw a beautiful, resonant sound and also supple enough to avoid the fatigue that comes from locked, tense muscles.
Echoing the sentiment of the Piatigorsky reference I made earlier, the bow hold is a basic aspect of cello playing that takes years of experimentation and refinement to feel completely comfortable.
I remember wondering if it would ever feel natural to hold the bow.
The good news is that I can now say that if feels completely natural for me, but I also admit that I still actively work on it whenever I’m suspicious that it has become the weak link in the chain once again.
Learning to use the bow well often feels like a game of ping pong, with my focus being volleyed back and forth by the two major forces of freedom and control.
If I had to narrate my bow development in the broadest strokes the past 12 years it might go like this:
First I focus on pulling a decent sound without creating any extra noise (hitting other strings, metallic scratchiness, etc).
This leads to focusing on pulling a “straight bow,” perpendicular to the bridge, on all strings.
Then I try to build a sound that doesn’t diminish every time I get further out towards the tip. Nice, even sound throughout.
Okay, my sound improves but too much freedom and nuance is lost because it sounds like I am ironing out each note with the same focused sound.
So I start changing how much bow I use and also my contact point (near the bridge, near the fingerboard).
As a result the sound gets much more varied, but now I have lost too much core sound at all these various contact points.
So I return again to the concept of drawing out more core.
Which works, but now I’m ironing notes again, so I try introducing airiness on top of the core. Airbrushed core.
Then less bow.
More bow.
Around and around I go, each time dealing more deeply with the basic principles I learned in my first year.
Learning to use the bow is like walking around an enormous paper target with a bullseye; you make concentric circles and continuously return to concepts you first learned, only each time around the circle the concept now means something new to you.
On good days it feels like a beautiful stroll in a circular garden.
On bad days it feels like you’re stuck in an M.C. Escher drawing taking 5 sets of stairs that all lead into the same room, which is upside down.
4. LEARNING TO LEARN EFFICIENTLY
The last aspect that makes the cello hard to learn is also something that is true of most of the tasks and crafts we learn as adults.
For me, what makes cello a pleasure to learn is feeling the joy of making progress and being able to do things I previously couldn’t.
In those moments it feels like I’m unwrapping a present and inside is my true, musical voice.
What makes learning the cello difficult or unpleasant is feeling stuck.
That’s where learning to learn comes into play.
Learning the cello requires us to objectively analyze ourselves and our current difficulties and to try to problem solve in creative ways.
That might mean learning to sing a passage in tune before you continue trying to play it in tune on the cello, or trying to solve a ‘left hand problem’ by improving the way you use the bow.
Or it might mean trying to develop a system for learning new pieces or passages so that you spend tens of hours on them instead of hundreds of hours.
Learning to learn also means remembering to challenge what you think your limits are so that you can surpass them and set new stakes in the ground to work towards.
What makes it tricky is that you can’t hear what you don’t hear, so until you develop your ears and your imagination to their fullest extent, you won’t be able to get the full sonic picture of what you want and what you need in all of its clarity.
Learning to learn efficiently is the process of eventually learning to be your own guide, and of knowing with crystalline accuracy both what you want to hear and what you currently hear.
It’s the road to mastery.
Ready to finally start your cello journey?
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