On Intonation, Stop Bows, and Playing Fast Passages At Tempo

1. I have found that my biggest concern in prepping anything I play is intonation.

1. It doesn’t seem to matter if the passage is difficult or not for me; in my own playing, the number of out-of-tune notes in first position matches the number that are out of tune in the high registers.

2. With the exception of quarter/third tones, my hand frames are the same standard hand frames I have practiced during my cello career.

3. In “tonal” music, a note is chromatic, scalar, or part of an arpeggio. Those are the only options, and I’ve played those a lot.

4. Even if I’ve played in 1st position a million times, I’ve played at the end of the fingerboard 990,000 times, right? The experience gap during the early years where I didn’t play everywhere is increasingly small.

5. Therefore, for myself, since I have relatively the same experience playing every note, and yet any note can be out of tune, I have to practice each note the same to feel comfortable.
   

2. Speed is not a concern for me *unless* the passage is non-cellistic.

1. "Non-cellistic" is usually the result of the right side’s discomfort (not the left), e.g. terrible string crossings or awkward slurs.

2. I find the longer I build the base of stop bows for my left hand, the easier a passage is to speed up.

3. In slurs, my left hand dis-organizes. To combat the dis-organization I find that 3x the number of stop bows I would have done makes it feel as comfortable as separate bows would have been.

4. So it is actually a tripling of stop bows (so the left hand is fully on autopilot) that gives me the brain space to focus on the right side and play those passages at speed.

5. And therefore, those passages do receive more time than the other passages.

6. Otherwise, if the passage is “cellistic" I’ve played fast chromatic, scalar, and arpeggio passages before, and I trust myself to speed up the passage at the very end.