For two decades I’ve kept a year-end routine starting after Thanksgiving, lasting through Christmas, and usually ending shortly after New Year’s Eve. I would take my cello out of the closet, and dust it off. I would practice for a few hours every two days, building up calluses anew. I transcribed Bach Cello Suite 1 in 2016 without any bowing, fingering or phrasing from modern cellists. And I’ve been playing the suite ever since, every December. Just when I no longer had to worry about finger blisters from practice, and when I finally rebuilt my muscle strength, I put my cello back in cold storage. This had not been conducive to the improvement of my skills. But I did enjoy re-learning to play every holiday season.

This year I took my cello out a week before Thanksgiving, and continued to play past the New Year’s Day. It was quite a wonder what a few more weeks allowed me to do. For the first time I got past getting the notes played clearly and mostly in tune. I could stop worrying about moving muscles, and start to feel and find the rhythm that I wanted to hear from my cello.

When I started in 2016, I tried to imitate Yo-Yo Ma. But very quickly I understood that I never would be able to do that. For one, his rendition of the suite was far too fast for me. His long phrasing and smooth notes were unattainable goals for me. I remember looking online for clues on how folks approached Bach, and stumbled upon Tim Janof’s musing about the suites from the Internet Cello Society. That released me from my angst, and allowed me to go about it my own ways.

Once I got past the mechanics this year, I started to rewrite my fingerings and bowings to make these pieces sound the way I wanted. For the first time in my life I mustered the courage to record myself playing. And I was shocked when I listened to and watched these recordings. That notes were not in tune was beside the point – that was expected. The explosive sound of the bow hacking a string to get a note started surprised me. At times that was called for. But most of the times it wasn’t. I also found a new appreciation for the need to sustain certain bass notes beyond what was written in a score.

I’ll be using recordings from 2023 year-end to continue to improve my delivery. I uploaded them to mark my foot-in-the-door moment. If I overlook the occasional noises and the lack of great intonation, I can almost listen to these latest recordings without too much cringing. I think that is a small personal milestone worth celebrating. LOL

I went back to Janof’s notes that I first read in 2016. And now, more pieces of his musings resonate with me. Here are some examples.

… Sarabandes are in a dignified three with an emphasis upon the second beat… Does a sarabande have to be played in three beats per measure, or is it acceptable to play it in six?

Yeah. Dude. Totally how I ended up playing Suite 1 Sarabande. I played it like 6/4 in fact – but largely because I couldn’t bear to listen to my recordings when I played it any faster. With that said, I do feel that even played at Yo-Yo speed, this is still in 6/8.

… The issue of whether to play all repeats is a perennial controversy… There is some dissension amongst cellists, however, who consider other factors, like the overall balance between the two halves of each movement, and the average audience’s attention span.

Tell me about this.

… We “modern” cellists need to consider the amount of vibrato we use in Bach… Vibrato was thought of more as an ornament in Baroque music, along with trills, turns, and mordents… “For a Baroque musician … [it] would have seemed very silly [to use vibrato all the time].

I don’t know about this one though. If I could vibrato even more, like the pros, I very much would like to vibrato more, like the pros. I had to slow down most of these pieces just to not sound totally dead-handed, like in Minuet 2. Baroque musicians be damned. In my book, there is only not-enough-vibrato. Too much vibrato is an issue only the likes of Yo-Yo Ma need worrying about.

… Historians believe that it (ornamentation) was common, and perhaps expected, for musicians in the Baroque era to supply their own ornamentation as they saw fit… Anner Bylsma believes that Bach intentionally paired down the ornaments in the cello suites (after the highly-technical solo violin works)… The cello suites may have been an experiment to see how much he could omit, making the listener fill in the gaps of harmony and counterpoint…

I also believe in marking my own additional ornamentations. Bach’s minimalism for cello suites be damned. But honestly I can’t execute much additional ornamentation yet. Maybe next year.

… Paul Tortelier said that “Searching for the ideal bowings in each passage is a lifelong challenge for every cellist,” [17] which I’m sure he’d extend to fingerings as well… Pablo Casals kept changing his bowings and fingerings too, not wanting to fall into an artistic rut.

Isn’t this the story of my life? I am most unsatisfied with my rendering of Gigue. For the life of me I can’t find bowing and fingering that allow me to play in tune, and sound good. For some reason open strings just don’t work well for most of this piece. And alternative positions are hard to get right. This is one piece I will continue to work on.

… Articulation in the Baroque period was very different… [two-note slurs] involved shortening the second note slightly – separating it, in other words, from the following note… They tended to play notes with more separate bows, instead of slurring them together… chords were executed in a more arpeggiated manner, instead of being “crunched out” triple and quadruple stops… These articulations are consistent with the “spinning out” compositional style, described earlier, since the music “steps” along, instead of flowing seamlessly.

… The dilemma we face as “modern” cellists is that Baroque articulations are not consistent with our modern aesthetic. We have grown accustomed to more smoothly connected musical lines, which is why we tend to slur more notes together. The Baroque articulations can make a modern listener “seasick,” since the music can feel very disjointed and “beat-y.”

I also found that I couldn’t consistently make out “modern” phrases that slurred smoothly and were bookended with clear breath marks. For example, the first 8 bars of Sarabande – I didn’t even know how to sing them and sound right, strictly following the written notes. Or take the Courante. This one is choppy and not amenable to “modern” phrasing – or at least that was how I felt about this piece.

Oh well. There is always next December.