Dotzauer Day 6: Away in a Manger vs Dotzauer

1-4-2018 Wellingborough, UK     It's Easter Sunday, and having decamped from the drowning-in-mud campsite at Grendon, we are at a motorway Hotel. I am using my metal mega mute, and have the television on, to avoid bothering my neighbours. It's a programme about the Easter Story, and bizarrely, the Scottish presenter is singing Away …

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Dotzauer Day 5: On Practising in a Small Camper Van, and On Playing Different Cellos

31-3-2018 Grendon, Northamptonshire   Today's challenge consists chiefly of trying to play a cello in a small VW camper van, perched sideways on the back seat with the music stand jammed up against the back of the front passenger seat, with not quite enough space to use full bows in either direction. The seat is …

Dotzauer Day 4: On Wolf Notes and Phrasing

  30-4-2018 Utrecht   On to the third line of Dotzauer today. It consists of two phrases that rise and fall, both with a crescendo in the middle, so my first issue is what shall I crescendo to? I'm starting piano from the beginning of the last bar of the second line, so I suppose …

Dotzauer Day 3: Exam Results Day

29-3-2018 Utrecht   Having tackled the first line yesterday, today's task is the second line, which, due to a diminuendo in bars 7 and 8 is pretty much like tackling the first line, but in piano instead of forte. The same issues of string crossing, and playing in different parts of the bow, but a …

Dotzauer Day 2

  28-3-2018 Utrecht   Opening the study book today, I feel daunted. It seems a minefield of string crossings, tone consistency problems, bow management issues, and potential disasters with dynamics. They all work together: if the dynamics are right, but I haven't followed the bow placement instructions carefully, then I am not learning to have …

Dotzauer Day 1: On Travelling with a Cello

27-3-2018 Oxford   ‘Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.’ ― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew   So here I am, in the music room of my friends' house in Jericho, Oxford. I'm travelling home today, and there's …

Prologue: An afternoon in Oxford

26-3-2018 Oxford, UK It's late March, and I am in Blackwell's, on the Broad, in Oxford. Strictly speaking, I'm in the Music Shop, but the whole complex from 48- 53 Broad street joins up, behind the White Horse Pub at no. 52, and I am trying to avoid the temptations of the vast book-filled Norrington …