After the Maho Bay workshop I came home with ideas about teaching the cello better. Swim coaching has taught me a lot about teaching with a lot more orderly approach than what I learned studying cello. Because I was a performance and not an "ed." major, my major focus was not learning how to be a good teacher. I think I’ve always been pretty good because some of my teachers were very good. One especially was a very curious and enthusiastic problem solver. He gave me extra long lessons and was a great cheer leader in addition to everything else. But somehow I always tried to do everything at once. I’d just make my own decision for the day about how to practice—the "what to practice" was never a problem—but I didn’t have an approach, a more codified way to move ahead. I’d have general instructions like, you should know your recital a month ahead of time so you can just run it. Well…okay, so how do you get to that point a month ahead of time? How do you plan? Swim coaches come up with plans for kids to be prepared to succeed, not just prepared to find out what happens. There is always a bit of test driving to find out what happens, but there didn’t need to be so much guesswork for me. If I felt I failed, that I had done less than I could, I just felt defeated. I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know how to fix what I thought was just a general mess. How sad.

So–I am coming up with a practice triangle for my students. First thing is, when you warm up, you always go back to posture—how you sit, where are your feet, where is your head, how is your arm position–lots of feeling, lots of paying attention and focus on that most basic thing, your setup. This is the equivalent of TI focus on balance…hang the head and other basic focal points.

The other two areas will be: technical and musical. You can’t really separate them, but you can have the technical without much music coming out. So at lessons and at our next studio class we’ll talk through…technical focal points…what might be some? Right notes. Right rhythms. Which notes? What positions? Bow and left and technique like specific types of bowstrokes  and vibrato…fast technique vs. slow…passage work fixing. Then the musical focal points…tone, dynamics, phrasing. All of these are tied to technique. With technique you can’t control them. So maybe technique is streamline and music is propulsion. Not sure about that but these are new thoughts so I’ll let them percolate.

And of course there is lots for me to put into the cello for myself thanks to my swimming and coaching education. One big one is—we aren’t just mind, we are body and spirit, too. And if you want to do well with the whole unit you have to use the whole unit. As a kid I was approaching the cello only with my head. I was so busy analyzing, trying to keep from drowning—trying to float—that I couldn’t enjoy it. It was surviving recitals and auditions. Most concerts I like but for half of those I was busy thinking I was a fake. Balance.

I don’t know if Essential Tremor came to me on it’s own or if I helped create it. I taxed my nervous system, for sure, with all of this performance stuff. My practice was not streamlined. My playing wasn’t streamlined. Butter struggle. I had a lot of technical ability but didn’t trust it, probably didn’t know how to engage it and what to trust it to do. Engage your core…what is streamline for? What does it let you do? Now trust it. Sounds familiar. Streamline.

Then performance. Chosing a dang focal point. I was so scattered that my body felt, at times, like it was just flying apart. I’ve subbed with the National Symphony, played concerts at the Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, the National Cathedral…I’ve played principal cello for lots of things…withstood, not usually enjoyed, recitals both solo and chamber, debuted new works…but absolutely failed at major auditions. I just couldn’t produce when I needed to. Now, as I’ve learned to love being in a body instead of mistrusting it, I can see what might have been possible. What was possible. And now, strangely, it doesn’t matter any more. Not for the cello. I’ve found where I like being, for the most part, in my body, mind and spirit…so now I guess I can add propulsion not just to the cello playing that I do, in situations I like, but to my whole life. There is movement ahead instead of trying to contain myself so that nothing bad happens. And yes, I attribute this in very large part to taking on swimming ten years ago. That’s when I "found" Terry. That’s when I went back to my childhood and always love of being in the water and decided to see where I could go. Propulsion.

Music, art, swimming. I loved them all as a kid. Now I can love them all again. I guess we struggle for a reason, no matter what we chose in life. And then we learn that there was ways of being where we can not have to struggle so much. We still have to work. Balance, streamline, propulsion don’t happen without an effort (or two, of five hundred) on our part. But that’s okay. I like the reward of this effort. That’s what I hope my cello students learn. And it’s not just for cello. It’s for everything.