Last day of January! We are beginning the count down! 
I had a lesson last Monday on memorization and it was so helpful. More on that later perhaps. We narrowed down my rep and I am feeling like this audition is so much more manageable now. Traveling and then being sick really pulled me backwards but friday and today I felt good at the cello like things were going smoothly. Just keep working... !!! Stay focused !!! 
Day 140:   .24 minutes before teaching day
Day 141:   1.34 
Day 142 Did an hour and a half before my lesson... then, lesson, then played my rep for friends G and M! 
Day 143:  26 min. before we left for the airport
Day 144 My niece's wedding in VA! 
Day 145 Traveling 
Day 146:   3 hours
Day 147 Teaching a lot/Sick 
Day 148 Rest Day/Sick
Day 149:  3 hours 

Day 137 :  1.17  Played the full Bach suite over zoom for my sister while she made lunch.
Day 138 :  47 minutes practice, plus played over zoom for my friend L-. We played for each other and talked about certain technical issues and ideas for solutions etc. So fun and helpful! 
Day 139 :   About an hour today. I accomplished so much less than I hoped today. I am disappointed in myself. I am disappointed in my cumulative low numbers the past few days and need to make a better effort to put the time in. Try again tomorrow.  

Wednesday January 12  Day 130! : 2 hours 
131:  1  1/2 hrs 
132:  2 hours  
133:  Teaching all day, didn't make it happen
134:  Rest Day 
135: 2.55 and Bach for SR
136:   1.20

Adult students often tell me how they got off track and need to restart... They might say this with sadness, a guilty face, frustration, or with a voice that says: 'I have no idea how this could happen again!' 
The restart is something we do over and over and over and over... perhaps there a precious few who are habit centered and able to hold onto their own schedule all the time... but most of us have reasons to restart all the time. It might be a restart within 24 hours or less, or after unexpected or planned disruptions.

This week my disruption was the booster shot. I planned for it and got some cello in early before we left for the appointment, but I wasn't ready for feeling as crappy as I did. Now two days later I feel like I need to recover rather than just jump back in now that my arm is no longer painful to move. The restart... I'm not 100% but I don't want to miss a second day completely... more significantly my mind feels like I took a week off. 

I think the thing that is always funny to me with adult students and the restart, is that they seem so baffled by it and not sure how to do it. Its quite simple: Just do it! START! Do anything that gets you back to the instrument. 
Other things that help are restating your reason for playing, your goals, your intentions short term and long term. Then start work intentionally not just flailing around. WORK even for a few minutes on something not just wandering around with the instrument in hand. Perhaps the days of playing around not engaged are more detrimental than the vacation, or disruption itself. 

So! For me: My big goal is to prepare for this DMA Audition. My goals for this week are to memorize as much of p.2 as I can, Perform my Bach suite for someone, do careful work on problem sections, Listen a lot, and Review like crazy. Review Like Crazy is my low key way of reminding myself that I have a lot of material in various states between first layer and polished that all need work and much repetition... Review sounds less threatening than 'perfecting' ,'time', 'work' etc.... My goal for today is: meaningful minutes. Focus on actual work. If I need to stop and rest its okay. If I only do a short amount its okay, but make it count. Restart and get something done! I'd like to come back to memorizing the bowing in p.3 for my review and problem sections in mvnt.3, I'd like to memorize at least 2 measures on p.2 and hopefully the entire last section. I will ask someone to listen to my Bach. I am listening to Bach while I type, and I will listen to all of Finzi. 

Here is last week's practice summary:
Monday   1.43 plus concert for Pete's Birthday! play through of all of Bach suite
Tuesday 1 hour
Wednesday   1   1/2 hrs
Thursday  1.22 plus play through for Nan 
Friday 30 min plus played several movements of Bach for Margaret
Saturday 7am practice before teaching  Wedding, performed Allemande during the prelude 
Sunday  1   1/2? I had a hard time feeling distracted by other unfinished projects so I did 4 minutes cello, 4 minutes other things (dishes et) and then eased into longer cello time... worked on memorizing  a measure at a time which worked well with a short time limit like 4 min. 
Monday 7am practice before booster
Tuesday felt like crap. (and also MY Birthday!)
Today! 

OH !!! AND!!! I HAVE AN AUDITION NOW! MARCH 5!!!! HERE WE GO!  ITS FOR REAL NOW.

Today my neighbor turns 80 and he asked for a cello concert! So I am going to play all of Bach 6 for him. His concert will be my first performance of the entire suite. I am nervous and excited. Performing is part of memorizing for me, and I need to play this piece a lot to get comfortable with its demanding technique and to get closer to memorizing it! 
Here is my plan for today:
Stretch
Do Neikrug Exercise sliding finger stretching exercise
Do Bunting bowing exercise
Do a drone session
15 minutes work then play through for Sarabande, Gavotte I, Gigue
5 minutes work then play for rest of Bach
30 minutes Finzi
Concert 

Gene asked me what my morning was looking like. I replied that had written a practice plan. "Want to see it?" I asked and handed him the paper. He scrutinized it and then said. "If this was my to do list that I had to accomplish today I would have no idea what to do. Roman numeral three... phrygian? raised three?" 


One of the things I do with students is play through something with them (most recently it was a duet we were learning) and then set a timer for 3 minutes and have them practice without me interjecting and then we play it again. We do this a few times. Its a low brain power teaching plan for me, but it is also an intentional strategy to get them to understand that even a few minutes of practicing (on the hot seat in front of me) can improve their playing and their fun not abstractly for perfection but for the experience of playing something. It also lets me see how they are practicing and if they are solving problems or just repeating, and what they hear as problems... So today on my practice sheet I gave myself this practice method for Bach. It works well with something you might have learned fairly well but need to perfect/clean up/pay more attention to/need renewed interest for.

In my 13 minutes of practicing before playing through Gigue I started with the obviously out of tune double stops which led me to thinking about how much I am blocking or rolling them, how they are moving. I found a few bowings that weren't working and fixed those, and I changed a fingering.  I practiced m.13-15 with double stops focusing on my hand position and shifting in and out of it (for cleaning up the intonation). I also started wondering about how the second half fit with the first half in my style approach to the bowing and I have some questions...  Then I played through... I immediately noticed the things I had practiced, and also those questions that need clear answers. 

I think that frameworks/tasks for practice are really important. Sometimes we need those specific tasks in advance: fix the bowing. work on the double stops. analyze the style. But sometimes we just need a doable framework for practicing that allows us to drop in and find those things... 

In my second session of practicing I wrote in some of my decisions about the chords and their flow and worked on that more. Drawing out the sound with the bow: that physical feeling of drawing out versus attacking or hitting the chord... I noticed this time that m. 5-8 correlate to m. 13-15 and made my approach more similar. I decided that my approach is generally cohesive in the bowing but I need to keep my minds attention throughout similar...  Tried to tune the leap down to the c#... and played through again. 
 
One of the most difficult things with students is when they practice something and it doesn't stick. What I tell them is that we don't know how long certain things take to learn... a day, a week, a hundred times... and also that we can come back and ask why? did I miss something in my technique that could fix this problem? (Sometimes I know what that is for my students and sometimes I don't... hence, more study with a PHD!)

I think I'll move on to another movement and come back to some of those issues tomorrow. 

 Well the Christmas plan sort of worked... I took more time off and on certain days I followed my plan and got small productive things done. I even performed the prelude and Allemande of Bach for postlude at a church service. Now it is Christmas Vacation week and I am so grateful to have one full week of not teaching. Students continue to let me know they are available for lessons and I am having to intentionally say no each time. Thats hard, because I could also use the money, but I need this time for me- to recover (from travel, holiday, student recital, busy Fall) and to practice! 

Monday 12/27    2 hours mostly on movement two. Also cleaned up/clarified the bowings in Gigue 
Tuesday 12/28    2  1/2 hours Cleaned up/clarified the bowings in the two Gavottes... fun comparing my version with the two versions I am learning from... fun to compare their bowings and fingerings and decide what I want to do... I'm not sure I am making solid WHY/Cohesive decisions but I am learning a lot... 
​Wednesday 12/29     2 hours Very productive today! pinky and third started hurting after yesterday. I got through today okay, avoiding just two spots that aggravated it. It hurts so deciding to not push for more time today. 
Thursday 12/30    1 and 1/2 hours.   My first attempt I quit in four minutes and came back many hours later... I just kept trying and got some time in.
Friday New Years Eve!    2 hours.  I spent a lot of the day just trying to come back and put in time. It wasn't that productive, in the end I did a lot of playing through... 
Saturday   REST
Sunday 1/2    2 hours. Told myself First, I'd make hot chocolate, then I'd stretch, then I couldn't get up until I'd done thirty minutes and I had 45 very productive minutes on Bach! 15 min. work, then play through... Did 1 1/2 hours on Bach, then half hour on Finzi. 

​Super proud of this week! 12 hours! 

Dec. 1 was the deadline for prescreen videos. Wednesday. On Monday I set up the video on the computer and got it done. It was hard. I think I got about 85 % of what I could do. My motto for the day was: 'My Best Is Good Enough'. Today I will give it my best and video it and it is good enough. I wore a warm hat in the video. It was cold. I kept turning the heater off so it wouldn't make noise. I expected to feel excited, relieved when I was done. Instead I felt drained. Exhausted. I told myself I could take Tuesday and Wednesday completely off. That felt good! I had time to do some things I haven't in a long time. Thursday I even made cookies! I can't remember when I made cookies last... a year? Dec.1 was the lowest I have been in a long time... sigh. The pre-screen video came after being with family for Thanksgiving, traveling, grieving... and took so much emotional energy.

When I realized how drained I was on Monday I tried to take care of myself, rest, relax... but I couldn't stop the train. Thursday Dec.2 was better, and I improved... Saturday I went to Florida to visit my brother and family. I took my music to work on during the flights and waiting in airports, but I only touched it for a few minutes. I'm back now and I am just not motivated at all. Part of it is not knowing if I will be given an audition. Part of it is just being burned out. Wanting to do Christmas things, and home stuff... and grieving. Today I tried to pick out an ornament I could give everyone that said something about Mom and I started crying really hard and feeling panicky. I wasn't sure I could get from there to teaching later in the day, but somehow I did... There is an underlying layer of sadness under happy times, and laughing, and loving, and teaching, and cello. 

Another feeling I had after the audition was the sense that my confidence had been dissolved... that the process of preparing showed so clearly my faults... and with thinking about schools came thinking about other cellists... and feeling like I had little to offer and so much to learn... that I wasn't good enough, that I couldn't get there... and how on earth will I prepare an audition... I felt completely demoralized. But I got it in. The only chance I have of getting accepted is applying so here we go. "If you don't aim at something you will hit nothing." 
​
I have an idea of what I might need to do to prepare an audition now, but the size of that task is so big I feel totally unable to move forward. I think I need some time off... and I need to keep it mini for awhile... not stop, just back way way off... Stay with it but tiny, productive steps...  
Here are tiny steps I can take between now and Christmas which will be useful:
Play through the cadenza
Practice my sixths pages
Practice thumb position 
Finger the rest of mvnt. III
Play Bach for people! 
Listen to Bach
Memorize a measure of something 
Practice hard spots
So from now until Christmas I will do one useful, thoughtful thing with my rep. every day. 
Ah, I like that plan. We'll see after that! 

Saturdays practice was in the evening instead of AM and it went really well... Gene even commented that things seemed to be working well... more efficient sounding... 
Here are some of the things I have been thinking about:
x over playing, and the limit of the instrument
x resonance and drones, tuning, ring
x foundations
x preserving physical energy
x base thumb joint
x relaxed wrist
I just sat down to practice and I felt sleepy, arms and hands stiff, disengaged. I made some tea, and I am going to do some yoga and try again. 

Practice Intention for Saturday...Day 77:
7AM Take a Walk
Do yoga or feldenkrais
7:45AM Drones with Bach Prelude, Thumb Position spots
Sixths
Do memory cards
9AM Metronome with Finzi
Work on a memorization spot
-teach-
PM:
Review application materials 30 min.
Hard spots Fazil Say 
Play through Allemande slow and out of rhythm, just lining things up