Think about this, cellists: gravity doesn’t need your help when you play your instrument. The force is already with you: use it, with finesse, to maintain the proper relaxed balance on your instrument that will allow you to play well.
You need to work with gravity, says cello instructor Elizabeth Morrow of the University of Texas–Arlington, to establish a sense of balance at every point where there’s contact between your body and something else—the chair, the floor, the bow, the fingerboard. “Over any of these places,” she says, “we need a feeling of equilibrium.”
1. First Step: Relax
The first step, Morrow says, is essentially to stop trying so hard to make your body fight gravity. Borrowing an idea from cellist and teacher Cornelia Watkins, Morrow suggests that before you bring your hands up and around to your cello, imagine that you are a marionette, utterly limp, and a puppeteer is lifting your arms via overhead strings. Feel the natural weight in your hands and arms as they’re “pulled” up.
“That’s the sensation you want when you lift your arm to play,” she says. As you play, that weight may be suspended (manipulated by the deltoid muscles), or it may rest on the string, or work in some combination of the two. Remember, the idea is to rest the bow or finger on the string, not to press.
2. Ease Up on Bow Pressure
Your bow hand should not be exerting its own pressure; Morrow describes it as a lever that transfers the weight of your arm through the bow to the point of contact with the string.
To feel how it works, hold your arm straight out in front of you as if you’re holding a soft-drink can. Now, rotate the imaginary can as if you were turning a doorknob, and notice which parts of your body are working, and which are resting. You’re not lifting your shoulder, and you’re not bearing down on anything. All you’re doing, essentially, is rotating your forearm. That’s exactly the rotational force you use to transfer your arm weight through the bow hold to the contact point with the string.
“At the frog we can direct the weight over the first finger,” Morrow says, “but as the arm draws the bow and moves out further away from the body, we have to increase that rotational force, feeling the suspended weight of the arm, not lifting the arm to create pressure.”
And don’t squeeze—do not use either thumb to create pressure in opposition to the fingers. Otherwise, your right thumb will cause problems in your bowing, and your left thumb will make it harder to get around the fingerboard.
3. Balance the Left Arm
“You have to balance the left arm on the fingerboard in a way that doesn’t require the thumb to press when you hold down the string,” Morrow says. “Imagine a hanger with a hook at the top. It’s pliable but firm. Think of your fingers as the hook of the hanger; we want to hang those fingers from the fingerboard with the arm as a unit, all suspended from the point of contact on the fingerboard.”
By James Reel
