Letter from Max

Max Dimoff sent an interesting reply to the 12/7 post concerning something included in his warm-ups. I will post this now (with Max’s permission) because I’ve been under the weather recently. Besides, I have this week off from the CSO.

Max writes:

Anyway, I felt compelled to explain the fingering the way I play it (and collect my reward!). The footnote is actually from Simandl. I do not take that too literally though. My fourth finger is always over the string and but at best mostly firm on the string. I release the fourth finger, although still keeping it over the note, when playing the third and sixth degrees of the scales. I do this because I prefer to avoid true extensions whenever possible. As for the second degree I do use the third finger. In warming up this morning I was thinking about your questions and analyzing my motions. The way I keep the fourth finger down is by sort of rolling to the outside of the pad and collapsing the first joint. The second joint on the fourth finger is therefore at a rather high angle. The third finger collapses at the second joint when reaching across the string unless I raise my elbow.

I know this is a rather distorted position but that is how I do it. It always comes immediately back to a good fundamental position. For the purposes of a warm-up this really works the abductor digiti minimi in the left hand. (The big muscle extending from the fourth finger). It also promotes a certain flexibility in my hand position which I feel is essential.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

Some Lame Notes

The Trout Quintet bass part isn’t the most challenging thing ever written for double bass. The passage I always need to look at is the d minor variation. The ‘A’ major arpeggio has always posed a bit of a challenge. It is never nice to play that note out of tune or to end the phrase with an awful squawk.

Over the years I have often been obsessed with arpeggios and their fingerings – I have an unfinished book on the subject buried beneath piles of other projects that will probably never be completed either. Anyhow, here are a few different fingerings for that arpeggio.

And here are the fingerings for the variation I used at the concert on Sunday.

The astute observer might have noticed that an obvious fingering choice was not presented. Namely:

or any other of that ilk, meaning those using the ‘A’ harmonic on the ‘D’ string.

And so I come to the secret (perhaps diabolical) reason for this post. I have always had disdain for the ‘A’ harmonic substituting for the closed note. To me it usually comes across as some sort of copout – the crutch used to prop up an inadequate technique.

The Trout Quintet doesn’t come up very often, so the aforementioned harmonic isn’t on my list of the worst offenders. Here are a couple:

Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, #9


where the dulcet, flutelike tone of the harmonic in the middle of the line sounds out of place, dare I say even a bit comic.

Bach, Bouree from the 3rd cello suite (in the G major edition)

where similarly, the apex of the phrase suddenly changes color, demonstrating the player lacks the technique (or courage) to reach the high note.


I know my views are probably in the extreme. Perhaps my dedication to arpeggios makes me unduly biased against this one note, but there you have it. And now I brace myself for the slings and arrows of the harmonic apologists.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all. Thanks for the many interesting comments on the Welcome Satan post. The amount of interest initially took me by surprise.

The subject of Pops, programming and populism is probably worthy of a blog all its own, but that isn’t what I set out to do here and I imagine after a time I would find writing about playing pops concerts as tiresome and demoralizing as playing them. I am sure the issue will come up again the way things seem to be heading at the CSO. For now I will leave my opinions in the comments sidebar.

So, on to ‘more important’ things.

After time off – I spent a week out of town – there is always the unpleasant task of getting back into shape. After longer periods away (2 or more weeks) I tend not to have much concentration when I start practicing again. At such times I usually pull out an old book of bass parts from Bach cantatas and read through it, or at least try to. I think Hoffmeister publishes that book. I don’t know if it is still in print. Also, there may be more volumes.

If I’m motivated to get in shape quickly I use a set of finger exercises – mindless but effective. Lately, I’ve been doing some variation of these every day.

Starting with each pair of fingers. Next I do it again with separate bows. After that I repeat it on the other strings.



Next, I take each two note pair and go across the strings. This is the first group. I do this for each of the two note patterns.



Going on, I do a series of patterns using 1-2-4, slurred, then with separate bows and on each string in turn.



Finally, I take those patterns and spread them over two strings. This is the first group. This first line has 3 notes on one string and 1 on the next. The second line is 2 and 2. The third line is 1 and three. I do this for each of the 1-2-4 patterns.



Going through the whole thing takes half an hour, forty minutes and gives a good workout.

When I get time to finish it up I will try and make a PDF of the whole thing (it’s 4 or 5 pages) and post it here.

Sermon on the Mount

After hearing about them for quite a while, I finally got a look at the famous Max Dimoff warm-ups – I’ve also seen them referred to as the Cleveland warm-ups – an interesting collection of this that and the other. My eye went immediately to the Simandl Gradus ad Parnassum excerpts (Gradus ad Parnassum is Latin for ‘Steps to Mount Parnassus’, or some such thing) due to their similarity to some passages in the Bruckner sixth symphony I had recently been working on.

The passage from Gradus begins


Below the section is the admonition to ‘keep 4th firmly on the string throughout…’ I assume this means the 4th finger – whether this comes from Simandl or not I don’t know, having never studied Gradus.

Nevertheless, I assume the fingering to look something like this

This was something of a revelation, since I had no experience with these kinds of cross-string fingerings using the third and fourth fingers. For me, fingering the minor seventh across three strings was more in tune using 2 – 4, saving the 3 – 4 fingering for the 4th on adjacent strings. The advantage was twofold in that the longer 2nd finger was better to manage the stretch, and the first finger was freer to prepare for the next note.

This also created a kind of horizontal position

So far so good, but the next passages looked like this

Assuming no open strings – since the exercise modulates through all twelve keys – I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out how to keep the 4th finger down throughout. Anyone in possession of how to do this will receive rich rewards (or at least praise) if they email me a solution.

Having wasted many good hours trying to devise good fingerings for the similar Bruckner passages, I felt it might be fruitful to concoct my own exercise and see what would result. I began in a key that made open strings out of the question and came up with

The object was to begin with the Gradus inspired fingering and continue the pattern.

In descending, I noticed that shifting to the 4th finger produced better results than shifting to 3.

This


was better than

The problem with this fingering is that the repeated note changes strings. This can be addressed by beginning on the 4th string

The player should determine which produces the better sounding fingering.

Of course, my first inclination for fingering such a passage would be something like

After practicing various ways to do this, I end up gravitating toward the familiar. Still, there is always something to be gained by trying a new approach, many ways to climb a mountain, even when it is a mole-hill.