Chapter 20

As far as the timeline, the next sequence of events would play out as such: 

Starting with the first event, which would come up in about a month:

The annual community orchestra concert for all the pieces the Chinese community orchestra had practiced this season. 

About two weeks after that concert:

My solo Kiwanis competition would take place. 

Then? That was it

No more Chinese community orchestra and no more ties with anything CC or X. That would be the end of it all. No more music things outside of school.

This was a very clean schedule with tons of wiggle room for extra endeavors should I want to pursue any. There was enough time to learn my Kiwanis pieces and enough time to practice them with the accompanist as well. Just to clarify though, doing Kiwanis all by myself didn’t mean doing it all in my room without any outside input. I needed feedback to improve. I just wasn’t getting feedback from one person all the time anymore. Without CC, I would need to get feedback from somewhere else. To that end, I went online and made a search for cello teachers who were in the GTA area and accepting new students. I quickly landed on the University of Toronto’s faculty.

I had booked a few private lessons with some of the faculty’s cello teachers. They charged around $50 to $80 depending on who you asked and were very eye opening in their methods they used to teach. This was the first time I had a teacher outside of CC for ages. A part of me was worried that when I sought out the first cello teacher, I may harbor some immediate resentment or immediately antagonize them. I was glad to find that I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t have other teachers in music. 

As lovely as they were and as eye opening as it was to seek new cello teachers, I didn’t stay with them too long, I did tell them about my intentions right away. I was looking for input but didn’t want to stay with one teacher too long. I wasn’t really trying to find a teacher, I was trying to do this on my own. I was essentially asking for a masterclass. I did want this competition to be more or less something that I had done mostly on my own with just some help. I wanted input and not influence. It’s a fine line to walk but a necessary one for what I wanted out of this. 

The main difference I found with the teachers from UofT and CC was that they were very focused on understanding why the bowings were the way that they were. The majority of them also questioned what I thought about certain dynamics or themes in the pieces. This was a different approach to CC’s “my way or the highway” approach. I liked it, it made me feel like this was a conversation instead of a dictatorship. It was weird to be asked about the pieces I was playing and be asked to give input on my interpretations but I went with it. 

Out of all the teachers I had seen, I don’t think any of them felt like a bad fit. However, I couldn’t stay. I was going to do this mostly on my own and I told them from the getgo that I only wanted input and not influence. I was going to hold firm on this. 

There was another reason for not staying with the UofT music teachers for so long. 2 months may have been a long time for learning 2 pieces for the Kiwanis competition but the problem was, I still had my school’s orchestras, choirs and lifeguarding on the side. After about 2-3 weeks of lessons from the University of Toronto’s faculty, I quickly realized that I overestimated the flexibility I had. There wasn’t enough time in the schedule to meet up with the UofT teachers on a regular basis. 

As flexible a schedule as I had thought I had, the UofT teachers were in Downtown and I did not have a car. The commute was around 2 hours each way and slightly too costly. If I had to say why I didn’t end up getting so much out of this experience of finding a new teacher, it would be that they were expensive. Not so much in price but more so in the amount of time it would cost me to get to them. The commute was too large of a fee. 

In truth, none of the teachers I sought really even got to properly work on my Kiwanis competition pieces. While I did get the input I wanted, jumping around with new teachers usually meant a lot of introductions and assessing one’s skill, a fact I did not account for. This ate up a lot of time. We would usually talk more about techniques and fundamentals over the pieces I was there to learn not because I was lacking, but simply because they wanted to know why I artistically chose the things I did. This back and forth between the UofT faculty was expected but in the end, I think it wasn’t as fruitful as an endeavor as I had hoped. After getting only a bit of input and feedback, I had come to realize there was not much else to do except to get on it by myself. Time to really get to work on my own. 

Anyhow, though not as fruitful as I hoped, input was still input. I tried employing what I did think about from the UofT professors into my pieces nonetheless. I was competing in two categories for Kiwanis. One was a sonata competition for which I chose the piece “Kol Nidrei” by Max Bruch. The second was for a Bach Solo competition for which I chose “Suite No. 3 Prelude”. The reasoning for these two competition pieces was strategic. I knew that these two pieces were also prerequisites for cello RCM level 10. This meant that should I absolutely fail these pieces in the competition, the practice I put into the pieces could at least be used for the next RCM level. This was especially true for Kol Nidrei but Suite No. 3 Prelude…well, there’s more to it as you’ll see. 

If you ever look a bit into Suite No. 3 by J.S. Bach you’ll easily come to find a lot of popular works from the Cello suites are all from that suite. Why is that? Suite No. 3 was in C major. This meant that it was the easiest key signature to play in. This made Suite No. 3’s pieces easily the most repeated in the curriculums of beginner Bach and beginner cello books. I myself learned a few of Bach’s Suite No. 3’s other pieces when I first started playing cello. Now I was learning the prelude piece, the flagship of that suite. I won’t get into too much into the music theory and all that but here’s one last fact about this piece that’s relevant to the story. It had the most latest of CC’s notes on it. 

Remember that last lesson when I walked out? During that lesson we were actually working on this piece. Suite no. 3 prelude was a RCM level 10 requirement and during that last lesson with CC I had just finished all of the requirements for level 9. This was literally the last bit of influence from him. It wasn’t really from his teachings but just from his notes. The other piece I decided on, the Kol Nidrei, I started learning from scratch. Luckily, Youtube was a huge thing now, in 2011, and it was easy to find famous cellists playing the piece. 

Regardless, I wanted to do this my way and researched everything on my own terms. With the help of Youtube, I would copy all of the bowings and fingers of professionals and mark them down in my sheet music when I thought they were appropriate or aligned with what I wanted for the passages. When I was done with all the markings in theory, I played it myself and modified the fingerings and bowing to my own preferences. It’s hard to describe but some notes just feel “safer” to play than others, a unique trait for each classical musician I’m sure. For myself, I really liked 4th position just because of how anchoring the wrist feels at the neck of the cello. Anyhow, sourcing the internet and applying what I knew about my own playing style, this was what I thought was the best way of going about making a piece yours. I also have to give some credit to those UofT masterclass/lessons, they gave me the idea of researching a piece and doing it this way.

I didn’t do as much research for Suite No. 3 as the Kol Nidre. I already had fingerings and bowings from CC. So what I really had was a dilemma. Do I use his notes and learn the piece as he knew it or do I erase everything and copy a famous cellist’s articulations? I thought about this a lot. Using what was already there would be nice, it would be less work and less tinkering. But it also meant that I was just in CC’s shadow still. Using the same method as Kol Nidrei would be nice but this was quite experimental. I had never learned a piece in this method before and wasn’t sure if it’ll even work. In my mind it seemed easy but in practice, I knew that from performing, learning it at home and doing it on stage is quite different. Furthermore, it would also take more time. As I pondered which way to go. I eventually came to the conclusion of doing neither. Or rather, to do both. Which, I suppose meant I was really doing it the research way. That was not a good way to say that let me try again and rephrase this. I was going to research the Suite No. 3 prelude but I would keep CC’s notes as a source. 

I erased some of the markings from CC. Mainly just the parts that made no sense to me. Other than that, I decided to work on it on my own as I did with Kol Nidre. I got on Youtube and did more research. Finally, I then started to apply more of what the UofT faculty was doing. I tried to articulate it the way I saw fit. There was a saying in the Classical music community that all Baroque music, such as with Bach, had no true dynamics nor articulations. I’m sure if you’re a music connoisseur, you would know better but I was told that bowings for the Bach cello suites were all interpretations. If you Youtube Bach cello suites played by famous cellists, you can easily find 3 types of articulations for the same piece. They will differ in bowings, fingers and sometimes even dynamics. It was a fluid kind of affair. Some would even go so far as to say that the original manuscripts for the pieces all had no dynamics because they didn’t exist yet. A fact that may even be true.

After that was all done, the piece was truly mine. I had CC’s influence, but only partially. I had Youtube’s professional interpretations but only to a small extent. Mostly, I had my own markings and my own decision. This meant that for the majority of the piece, I did not follow anyone. My thinking for this piece became more of a “As long as my decision made sense, it could work”. In hindsight, I think this is the way all musicians should approach their music. Find out what micro-strengths you have and act on them. Each musician has strengths, even in playing the same classical piece. Play to them, not against them. If you have a good D string and want to go higher on the position for the sweetness of the sound, do it. If you have a position that just feels right on your wrists even if it means switching positions more than another method, go for it. Why would know what you like more than you? Just pay attention to your own body, wrist and ears. Let your natural tenacities and talents shine.

Music things aside, I was only interested in the fact that this would mean that this interpretation would be my own. Not gonna lie, as fun as it was, it was a bit messy. While things made sense logically, the logistics for fingers did not always align. Regardless, in the end, I was tired but content. I felt the ownership towards my notes and artistic decisions. 

With the music preparations complete, I got started on working through the pieces and drilling them in. While this was all going on, I was still attending to my other responsibilities such as my school choirs and orchestras as well as the Chinese community orchestra. Having such a full schedule meant that time flew by pretty quick. Before I knew it, it was around a month before the Chinese community orchestra’s final concert and my final concert with them.

I didn’t really have too much time to ponder on how I felt unsure about the situation. I knew that I had fun with the orchestra members but there were still some negative rumors about me circulating from the parents. I’m not sure what my legacy would just remind myself that I was graduating. This was a hard and unavoidable event.

Mental and social aside, things were going well and I was on schedule for the Kiwanis. Not having a music teacher meant that my time table was whatever I wanted it to be. While this was too much freedom for some to handle, luckily that didn’t happen to me. Persistent habits of practicing everyday was paying off. I was working and not slacking at all. I was doing well in terms of time management. 

At this stage, I had already memorized Suite No. 3 and was on a good pace to memorize Kol Nidrei as well. I was practicing 3 hours a day and was seriously starting to piss off my neighbors. Regardless, I was feeling good about all of this. 

Then I got a call from Y. 

A new opportunity has presented itself.