Let’s start the ball rolling with controversy: a devil’s advocate has been waiting in the wings in my part of the teaching world for long enough. It comes down to this: learning to play a string instrument in the early stages is much harder than approaching any other of the families of instruments.
Counting the main reasons to support my motion to the Music Teacher house of experts, it seems straightforward:
- No other family of instruments (bar voice) challenges the learner to make their own notes from the outset.
- No other family of instruments requires the immediate grasp of self-pitching from the first moment of creating notes.
- No other family of instruments necessitates the completely focused co-ordination of left-hand finger placement with right-hand bow direction.
- No other family of instruments has the delayed gratification of actually making something like music long after the decision to take up the instrument.
- No other family of instruments requires that baffling combination of firm control with sensitive handling. You can so easily break a string instrument with a momentary loss of concentration – something that group teachers will know all too well – and learning the balance between not clutching your instrument so hard that you seize up, but, equally, not being too floppy, losing control and dropping it, takes a lot of practice.
The case for cellists
I suppose that if I were to expand the argument in favour of cellists, I would add this: it’s incredibly demanding to ask small learners to manage the sheer bulk of a cello, even if it’s a tiny one; and the strength needed to hold down a cello string, while also applying enough pressure on the bow to produce any kind of sound, is more than we are asking from small violinists. Then there is the added factor of distance: the fingerboard is so much longer than the violin’s, meaning greater margin for error.
So, what is it that might inspire a young person to take up the cello? In my experience, it’s usually parental intervention. In my case, ‘Oh, you’re the one that’s going to play the cello’ was said to me so many times by the time I was nine, I started to believe that it was my destiny; although, in truth, it was something to do with my cellist mother thinking that my fingers looked more fit for the cello than my older sister’s slender 'violin fingers'. Actually, I wanted to play the cello because it was the nearest I could get to singing; no-one would ever pay to hear my voice, so this seemed the best compromise.
Since I started teaching myself (something like 40 years ago now) I’ve been struck by the stories I’ve heard from my pupils about why they wanted to play. A former pupil, who has now been in the profession herself for 30 years, told me that her parents bought her a cello when they saw her sitting on the floor underneath the chair where her older sister was playing the recorder: ‘I was trying to catch the notes as they fell out’.
There’s something of the love affair about many people’s responses to the cello. Quite randomly, strangers will stop me on the street if I’m carrying my cello, and tell me how much they love the sound it makes, and how a close relative is brought to mind by the deep pitch and velvety sounds. But, of course, there’s a long distance between perception and reality; and what often happens with learners in the pre-Grade 3 stage is that they become quickly discouraged when they find that it’s really hard to produce a note at all, never mind one that anyone would like to listen to.
Bump in the road
In the last 10 years it has become increasingly apparent to me that learners will mostly ascend the Grade1/2 ladder with relative ease, once they have understood some basic principles; in particular, postural stability. And they will generally accept the fact that yes, this string thing is harder than playing the recorder. However, there is starting to be an increasingly familiar bump in the educational road at the point when you invite the learner to shift out of first position; because, suddenly, there is much more intellectual investment and determination required. More consistent/regular practice is another given.
What has become very apparent to me is that in the now technologically walled-in world, where instant gratification is available at the press of a button, the need to commit fully to mastering an instrument is becoming not just onerous, but otiose.
At this point, one could ask the question, ‘What is different about these cello challenges from any other string instrument?’ To which I would reply: the violins always get the tune… so even when you are encouraging your burgeoning cello pupil to get onboard with a string group or orchestra, they may well find themselves bumping boringly along the bottom line of an uninspiring and generic arrangement.
Field research
Last year I ran a musical experiment in Achill Island, Ireland, where I have a home. I invited a few traditional players from the local area to try playing with a classical violinist, a classical pianist and me. The experiment was based on very simple elements: the traditional players would select the tunes, the classical players would work out ways of supporting the harmonies…and we would perform them.
The new strand here was the cello. Although the fiddle is an integral part of Irish traditional music, the cello has rarely had a life in that world, so it intrigued me to see what sounds could be produced, what new harmonic ideas could be invented; and what inspiration that might lead to for learner cellists who, up to now, could not see the point of why they were learning. The approach had to be aural because the traditional musicians didn’t read notation, and that gave me further food for thought about how to draw a reluctant learner down the track, if the burden of learning notation at the same time as countering all the other challenges seemed to be tipping the balance.
The outcome was remarkably successful: the classical musicians learnt a lot about how to spin melodies/harmonies out of thin air; and the audience to whom we performed loved the new depths of sound produced by using a cello within the harmonic texture.
Back at camp
The domino effect of all this was that in my work as a freelance cello consultant to ABRSM for their 2024 syllabus, I started to research and source some indigenous folk tunes that had never seen the light of day on a syllabus. 'The Minstrel Boy' was my first thought: a beautiful melody, a strong sentiment, but so perfectly aligned for the cello – even a very small one. A sensitive arrangement by that master of the art David Blackwell turned it into a little gem: nothing beats a good tune in the perfect setting.
Once that ball had bounced, I started to think about tunes that stick in the mind, that people feel they know even when they don’t. This is how 'Funny Song' by Thomas Hewitt-Jones popped into my head. I don’t belong to the TikTok community, but I have heard 'Funny Song' more times in the last two years than any other single melody. So, bringing this piece into the cello firmament seemed like the most obvious way of being truly relevant, rather than simply tipping my hat at something trendy for the sake of pleasing the market.
I’m quietly intrigued to see how ‘Funny Song’ at Grade 2 will run; but the point is that if you have started to learn an instrument that takes a lot of effort to make meaningful progress with in the early stages, then you have to provide musical fodder that will excite, enliven and interest the pupils. Gone are the days when you can simply tell them to practise easy Italian sonatas for the elementary cellist and expect them to come joyfully and productively to their lessons.
Look for the hook
So, I suppose I need to round up the argument from where I started: the string family is much the hardest group of instruments to learn ab initio; the cello is harder still because of the size and strength elements – I don’t play/teach the bass, so I can only assume that for junior bassists it’s even worse. The crucial, and determining, factor is that repertoire choices and opening up the possibilities of the sound from the instrument are what can turn a reluctant learner into a real aficionado.
We are in the darkest of times within the music education world in so many ways, but by finding new pathways, new teaching mechanisms, and aspiring to new musical idioms and energy, there is hope. It doesn’t all have to revolve around tunes we learnt ourselves. Nor do we have to embarrass ourselves with poor imitations of current pop hits/idioms: relevance is much more to do with the hook in a tune than its derivation or origins.
For anyone who uses the ABRSM syllabus as their framework of progression, it will not have escaped their attention that the technical requirements for strings appear to be heavier in quantity and harder in standard than the piano equivalents. In my opinion, that’s because the technical requirements for strings are tied to the technical demands for the pieces at each grade level – and, believe me, a great deal of thought has gone into that issue of parity. In all honesty, an aspiring string player is going to have to address, and conquer, the demands of shifting and learning the geography of the fingerboard; so they definitely need to learn those inter-connected technical requirements.
I don’t believe that we have to dumb down, nor to resort to the ‘three chords’ solution so beloved of contemporary musical pressure groups. Great tunes and a bit of innovation – putting the tune in the bass line – could just make all the difference in inspiring another generation of cellists to reach for the best possible member of the string family.
