The Musician's Journey Podcast

Ragnhild catches up with her previous teacher, Nicholas Jones, for a talk about playing and teaching the cello.

Being a cellist often goes hand in hand with being a cello teacher. Here we talk about how our cello practice and our teaching keep on affecting each other.

We touch on

-key moments of enlightenment in our playing and teaching

-how all students are different from each other

-what 'work-life balance' might mean as a musician

-the fact that our practice never ends

"We need to play what we want to hear."

And don't forget to listen to the Cello Concerto by Lutosławski.

------------------------------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

-----------------------------------------------

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

Ragnhild's Instagram

Make a comment on the episode here

Podcast soundtrack by Ani Amer. Follow his musical journey on Instagram

She is singing and playing a drum with her foot while playing her cello. How did Diletta Fosso's journey in music begin?

The songs featured in this episode are:

7 years (Lukas Graham)

Makeba (Jain)

and

Counting Stars (One Republic)

------------------------------------------------

Diletta on Instagram

Make a comment on the episode here

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

Everybody's story is different - why does someone spend countless hours on making cover videos for Instagram? Why not choose a job with a steady income?

In this episode, Ragnhild talks with Madeleine Ladore -a cellist who has been working on her business only for a few years but who has managed to grow a loyal following.

"People like to hear the music that they like."

Madeleine Ladore has walked the path from deciding to play the cello for a living, to make content for social media platforms, to learn about marketing and video making and how to get your songs into playlists on Spotify...

It's a road that demands consistency and dedication before it starts to pay off, and after about 3 years the ball is definitely rolling.

Madeleine’s homepage

----------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course, get 15% off with the code TMJP at check-out.

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

-----------------------------

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

Make a comment on the episode here

Podcast soundtrack by Ani Amer. Follow his musical journey on Instagram

Have you heard of the music box? Could a nebula in space have anything to do with a composer's research?

In this episode, Ragnhild talks with Wilma Pistorius -a cellist, composer and Alexander Technique teacher who is based in Amsterdam.

As a composer today, how do you make connections?

Wilma talks about her approach to this, being herself on the introverted side and would be happy to spend the evening with a book rather than being out socializing.

Being a composer today involves making oneself visible (and audible, of course!), doing one's own PR, taking initiatives and being proactive, and being able to step in at a short notice.

For the past several years, Wilma has walked her path piece by piece, e-mail by e-mail, concert by concert, insta post by insta post... and the ball is rolling.

--------------------------

Wilma's website

Secret Compartment (toy pianos and music boxes) trailer

Mandarin (two cellos, voice, and (toy) piano)

Wilma’s instagram

Wilma’s Youtube channel

----------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course, get 15% off with the code TMJP at check-out.

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

-----------------------------------------------

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

Make a comment on the episode here

Podcast soundtrack by Ani Amer. Follow his musical journey on Instagram

Kaja Draksler has spent the past several years composing, rehearsing, touring and recording.

Early in 2023 she became a mother and thus a new chapter has begun.

The featured music:

'Trboje' from the album Zürich Concert with Punkt.Vrt.Plastik

'Danas, Jučer Sutra' from the album Out for Stars with Kaja Draksler Octet

'Away!' from the album In Otherness Oneself

Kaja's Website

------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course, get 15% off with the code TMJP at check-out.

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

-----------------------

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

Make a comment on the episode here

Everybody's story is different - why the cello? Where did we start? What were the challenges and how did we overcome them?

In this episode, Ragnhild talks with one of her cello students about learning the cello as an adult.

------------------------------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course. Get 15% off with the code TMJP at check-out.

Are you curious about The Box? Use code CELLO for 30% off your first month.

-----------------------------------------------

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

Ragnhild's Instagram

Make a comment on the episode

Podcast soundtrack by Ani Amer. Follow his musical journey on Instagram

Is there room for more books about composers? Yes. 'Iconic Composers' is not just children friendly, but it sticks out in the way that it features lesser known female composers and composers of different skin colors.

In addition, each of the 50 composers is illustrated by David Lee Csicsko.

Boiling down countless hours of research into 250 words per composer was quite a challenge, but the authors found a useful approach:

"How can we make people excited enough to go and learn even more about them?"

Emi's love for research on composers is contagious. Throughout her research she has come across plenty of biases and censorship. How can she trust a source at all? -is my question.

"It's hard to separate the myth of the person from who the person was, and I'm not sure we ever will be able to. What we can do is to get to the spirit of what they were trying to do."

If you, like I do, find research do be rather overwhelming, you might appreciate Emi's take on it:

"I think that distraction is a good thing. I've always followed the distractions because what's the worst that can happen? -That you learn something cool."

I don't know about you, but after my interview with Emi I felt inspired to find a wormhole on the internet and learn something cool.

------------------------------------------------

[00:00] 'Prelude in C Major' by Emi Ferguson, from the album 'Fly the Coop'

[04:12] Meet Emi Ferguson

[13:13] You might not have discovered your favourite composer yet! On the book 'Iconic Composers'

[21:55] How can you trust what you're reading?

[30:37] Emi's love for composers is contagious

[34:52] 'Mignonne' from the album 'Amour Cruel'

[38:10] 'this composer is SICK!' - a WQXR podcast series about composers and syphilis

[45:10] You can be a historian

[52:48] The best job, New York, TedX and sleep

------------------------------------------------

Emi's Homepage

Order a copy of 'Iconic Composers'

Emi's TedX talk - 'Your Ears Deceive You'

------------------------------------------------

Ragnhild's online Cello Course. Get 15% off with the code TMJP at check-out.

Support this podcast via Ko-fi

The Musician's Journey Podcast's playlist on Spotify

The Box: theboxworkshop.com Get 30% off your first month with the code CELLO at check-out.

IG: a_cello_way_of_life_

I don't play the cello every day.

There are in fact few things that I do every day.

When there is a voice in me that says “I should have done this today, and I didn't.” I can observe that this is a thought. It's not some voice of universal truth, or someone I know blaming me for something.

It's a thought in my head.

It's as if my thoughts don't always trust me to do the right thing…!

In fact, my thoughts are the thoughts of a lunatic. They contradict each other and are not coherent and they will throw me from one state of mind to another.

I'm not saying that I'm suffering from a mental illness here, I'm just describing the thoughts how they behave for most of us if we give them some attention.

A thought comes along and pretends that it needs to make me feel inadequate. The thought then goes away at some point without me noticing, and a new thought comes along in order to make me feel better.

If I'm not at all aware of how my thoughts are treating me, I'll be a ball bouncing between the thoughts as they please. I then leave my state of mind at any given time in the hands of my thoughts. Do I want to do that?

Sometimes we have to figure something out, of course. We plan our day, compare insurance companies, prepare a speech, whatever we need to do. But when we have achieved the task at hand, can we still be selective with our thoughts?

Cello playing can be one of those activities that lets the thinking mind step back, and instead allow for a different way of existence; existence through the tactile sensations of playing, through the sounds that we make, and through the things that happens in us when we do this: memories, emotions, images, peace of mind, or perhaps a creative idea?

I think that cello playing can also become another one of those things we have to do, and to think about how to do, and we can play the cello while we are in our mind and our thoughts. We might verbally judge what we are doing: “this is out of tune, this sounds wrong, this is difficult, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, I hope no one can hear me, I need to practice more,” etc. These thoughts can make you decide to quit cello playing altogether, depending on how you treat these thoughts.

So here I'm proposing a change of habitual thinking.

First, have a notebook and a pen with you in your practice and write down the thoughts that come to you during your practice.

Even write down the thoughts that are not related to your practice. We typically think of something we should remember to do later, something we regret doing, a person that is important to you in the moment, whatever it is.

Then, look at what you have written down. Acknowledge them for what they were: thoughts that showed up in your consciousness.

Now, are any of these thoughts useful to you?

Let's take the thought "My playing sounds bad, I don't think I'm improving."

I'd say the thought in itself isn't useless, but it's useless to repeat it without doing anything about it. We can continue this thought by questioning it:

"What exactly do I think sounds bad? Could it be that I'm trying to do too many things at the same time so that I'm unable to focus on one thing properly? How can my cello teacher help me with this?"

Now that we have continued with the thought, we can let the initial thought go, which was "My playing sounds bad, I don't think I'm improving."

What does it mean to let it go?

It means that when we notice that it's coming back, we can say "I recognize this thought and I've already moved on from it" and we can let the thought pass by without spending more energy there.

Ok let's take the thought "I should practice more, I think I should quit cello playing because I don't have time for it."

If this thought is allowed to circulate in you undetected, it will make you feel all kinds of self-sabotaging things such as insufficiency, disappointment, or a diminished self-confidence overall in your everyday life.

I think we can agree that that's pretty useless.

Therefore, it's important to nip these thoughts in the bud and see them for what they are before they are allowed to live in us like a dark cloud.

"I should practice more." Yes, we should all practice more shouldn't we, we should just practice all day every day or else... Or else what?

Let's face it, we can always practice more.

Go and ask a music student and they will most likely say that they are not practicing enough even though they are practicing all day every day. Go ask a professional musician and they will most likely say that they don't practice enough.

We are completely stuck in a feeling of deficiency. We are never enough, time is never enough, and our music making is never enough.

Here comes the power of thought.

When we are aware of how we think and how our thinking makes us feel, and how these thoughts and feelings keep on perpetuating endlessly, we can call it out and shine a light on it.

And then we can change it.

How absurd is it to think that we are never enough? We are just living and breathing on a flying rock in space until we one day stop breathing.

Of course we're enough. We are sufficient, time is sufficient, and our music making is nothing more or less than what it is.

Our music making is something different from one moment to the next. One day it's a few long open strings where we are immersed in the vibrations of our gorgeous instrument. On another day we are enjoying the technical complexity of a scale.

Our cello playing doesn't need to be anything at all.

It just needs to be something that you enjoy.

This concludes my series of short episodes related to cello playing.

Ragnhild’s Online Cello Course -get 20% off with the code HELLOCELLO at checkout.

The Box -get 30% off your first month with the code CELLO

When you're learning to read sheet music, you're preparing for being able to play classical music.

But what if you're interested in playing your cello in a different setting? Pop, rock, jazz, -many of these other music genres use chords more than the written out music we find in sheet music.

If you want to play along to your favourite pop song, it'll be a lot easier for you if you have knowledge about the chords. That way, you can in most cases look up the song online, find the chords straight away and start playing.

As cellists we often have a bass function, which is fortunate since the bass notes are the only notes written explicitly in the chords.

When you see a Gsus7 chord, for instance, you can ignore everything that is not the root note which is G. The letter of the chord is the root note (the bass note) so if you know where the Gs are on the cello, you can pick your preferred octave and join in on that G.

You'll get far by knowing the placements of the tones in 2 octaves on your cello, and you can play along to any chord while remaining in the 1st position.

When you can comfortably play along to the song with the root notes, you can start to get familiar also with the 5ths of the chords.

A 5th is the interval that the strings of the cello have in relation to each other. When you play 2 open strings at the same time, you hear the interval called a 5th. It comprises 5 tones, for instance C and G.

And chords are built up of the root note, a 3rd above that, and a 5th above the root note.

An easy way to play the 5th of a chord on the cello, is to first place the root note, then place your finger on the exact same place on the string above, meaning the string to your left of the string you're playing the root note on. You can now practice each of the chords only with the bass and the 5th.

In rock music, you can often play the root and the 5th at the same time. Electric guitarists call it a power chord, although it's not strictly speaking a chord, it's just a 5th.

When you play a root and a 5th, you can't hear if the chord is in minor or major. That's because it's the 3rd of the chord that determines that. A 3rd is an interval that comprises 3 tones, for instance C and E.

C and E played together is a major 3rd, and it's a building block in the C major chord.

All I have to do to make it a C minor chord is to lower the 3rd from E to E-flat.

So the next step in getting familiar with the chords is to play the root, the 3rd and the 5th of each chord in the song you want to play along to.

How do you know if the chord is a major or a minor chord?

If there's only a capital letter, such as G or D or E, or if the letter has a b after it, such as Eb or Ab, the chords are in major.

The b means that the root note is E-flat rather than E.

And when there's a small m after the name of the root note of the chord, it's in minor.

I have found it extremely useful to be able to play from chords, as a cellist.

The composers of classical music also used chords, but instead of letting each musician improvise on them, the composer decided which note should be played and when.

When playing together with others, it's a lot more fun when you have an idea of how chords are put together, since you're always playing together in chords and intervals when playing with others.

When a particular beat in the bar sounds terrible, it's helpful to know if it's due to intonation or if it's actually supposed to sound disturbing because it's made up of tritones, which is another interval.

Anyway,

there's a lot more to say here, and I do so in my online course.

Ragnhild’s Online Cello Course -get 20% off with the code HELLOCELLO at checkout.

The Box -get 30% off your first month with the code CELLO

Even smaller towns may have their own local amateur symphony orchestra, or string orchestra. And if you don't have that where you live, there are plenty of different orchestra courses happening one or more times a year in a lot of different places in this so-called Western world.

And besides that,

I'll mention that when I was younger I really enjoyed playing along to recordings of orchestral music. It's hard to know when to start playing when you can't see the conductor of course, but apart from that it went pretty well.

Playing in an orchestra is simply amazing.

A good number of people getting together in one room to exchange sound waves with each other. No need to talk, just get lost in the harmonies, the rhythms, the different voices you hear all around you, the bass carrying it all, melodies being brought back into life from the sheet music that might have been written 400 years ago.

It's like a sonic exhibition. It's only happening in that moment and will never happen just like that ever again. There are no screens, no internet, no ads, no pop-up windows, and not much language to deal with except from terms in the sheet music, and depending on how talkative the conductor is.

When you have been practising the cello for some time and you're curious about how you'd fit in in your local orchestra, I'd recommend you get in touch with one of the cellists there and ask to see the cello parts for the current project. Ideally take a photocopy of them so that you can sit at home and see how challenging they are for you, and take them to your teacher and ask for a guided tour.

Maybe you can join the orchestra for the easiest pieces and skip the harder ones?

What you'll need to know before joining, is how to tune your cello, how to read sheet music, possibly in the tenor and treble clefs as well as the bass clef, and you'll need to get acquainted with some of the most common words that describe moods in the music, and techniques on the cello.

Many of these words are common in cello playing in general, and you'll recognize words such as pizzicato and arco, as well as repetition signs and dynamic symbols. But it might be in the orchestra that you first come across con sordino, the fermata sign, or words such as divisi, solo and tutti, to name only a few. The words will often be Italian, they are sometimes in German, sometimes in French, and sometimes in English.

Aside from the terms and symbols in the sheet music, there are some good habits to have as well.

Arrive at the venue ahead of time, so that your cello can acclimatize and you have time to get seated by the time the rehearsal starts.

It's respectful to not play more than the necessary warm-up before the start of the rehearsal. It can be tiring for the brain to hear 20 different tunes being played simultaneously. Most people can't help themselves and they play anyway though.

Always have a pencil on your stand, so that you can write in an instruction from the conductor, or a different bowing from the cello section leader.

I'd recommend you use ear plugs if you can afford the type that is made specifically for musicians. Wind instruments and violins can be hard work on the ear.

When tuning your cello, play as quietly as possible so that everyone can hear themselves. In the orchestra everyone tunes at the same time, you know that familiar sound at the start of a concert you're attending where there's an A being played by the oboe in a symphony orchestra, or a violin in a string orchestra, and then you hear the clash of 5ths and 4ths and woodwind arpeggios.

I loved orchestra so much in my teens, that I recorded this particular sound of everyone tuning together and had it as my mobile phone ringtone for a while.

One trick here as cellists, if you tilt your head to the left so that the tuning peg of the c-string is on your ear, you hear your own cello very well and you can tune quietly.

When we are playing in an orchestra or together with others in general, the most important thing is the rhythm.

We can get obsessed with playing the right tones and in tune, but imagine if everyone on the orchestra had to wait for everyone else to adjust their intonation before moving on to the next beat in the bar… it wouldn't work.

So this is something that you can practice already now at home with the piece you're currently playing, however easy it is. Decide to at least once every practice session play from beginning to end without stopping. Keep your metronome going, and if you stop playing for any reason, just get back in as soon as you can.

It's a challenging exercise, cause we want to correct our mistakes as soon as possible, and going back to the beginning to start again will make us feel that we don't accept mistakes.

However, when playing together with others, the mistake is to not continue. Rather, we have to accept and move on in a split second.

Another thing you can do that will prepare you for orchestra playing is to play your current piece from memory.

Why am I saying that? Surely it's not the norm to play from memory in the orchestra?

No, but when playing with others, you want to know the music so well that you can focus on things in addition to the actual notes.

If you learn the piece you're currently playing from memory, you can play the piece while listening to the sounds you're making, feel your body and your breathing, be extra aware of what your bow arm is doing, be extra aware of how your left hand is feeling, listen to the direction in the music, and so on.

In the orchestra, you need to focus on how you are playing in regard to the rest of the cello section, you listen for the voices in the orchestra that you are accompanying, you're watching the conductor for changes in tempos, moods, and dynamics, and so on.

You can keep these things in mind the next time you play a duo with your teacher.

I hope you found some of this helpful.

Ragnhild’s Online Cello Course -get 20% off with the code HELLOCELLO at checkout.

The Box -get 30% off your first month with the code CELLO