Uri Vardi

My practice retreat week earlier this month took me to Madison, Wisconsin, where I worked with famed cello and Feldenkrais instructor Uri Vardi. Here are some of my notes:

2. View cello playing as a series of degrees of weight and lightness
3. Leaning – whole body concept – everything is leaning
4. “Music is buried in the cello”
5. Don’t impose your music onto the cello – draw it out instead
6. Add degrees of weight by organizing your body to bring out the various layers – listen to your breathing during this
10. Push left foot into floor at tip for strong sound
11. Elbow should always be slightly higher than contact point of first finger and stick
16. Left arm leads the left fingers
17. Draw sound from deep in body – feet far apart helps this
19. Feel weight of both elbows as you play – sinking down
22. Integrate all parts of body:  hands, arms, back, head, shoulders, hips, legs, feet – use the entire arsenal of your body
23. Exercise:  put both forearms on fingerboard to get sensation of leaning – organize whole back for the leaning (a side step is leaning into top ribs of cello) – then put palms on fingerboard, but use the same
technique
25. Go from global feeling of leaning, then into arms, then into smaller areas of the body
28. First, find out how to get the power, then later decide how much of it you want to use

-Sara Stalnaker, PSQ