Cello Video Lesson: How to play the Dotzauer Etudes

Hello everyone. My name is Joseph Mendoes. I'm here with another video for virtualsheetmusic.com.

I wanted to do a video on the Dotzauer Etudes, actually, the first volume of the 112 studies for cello. I think that this first volume is really, really valuable for a couple of reasons. Each etude, with the possible exception of, I would say, five or six of them in the first book, I don't find them terribly useful...

But, most of them have a very, very specific technical aspect to them. They address one particular thing very, very, very well and kind of almost repetitively throughout the etude, but not in a way that makes it boring to practice. In my opinion they're very interesting harmonically, and some of them are actually quite musically deep and satisfying.

These etudes, at least with some of my students, get a little bit of a bad reputation. Some of my students feel like they're a little bit boring or a little bit, you know, well, boring. But, largely it has to do with how you practice them and how you view them. If you view them with enthusiasm and with the right spirit, you can play them and practice them in the correct way.

Now, there's one in particular I'd like to highlight today. It's number 11 I believe. It goes a little bit like this.

Anyway, it's largely a string crossing exercise as you can see. We want to practice making sure that we get these string crossings very, very smooth. Now, this is something I talked about a little bit in my...in fact, in the very first video I did for virtualsheetmusic.com, the video on the first Bach Suite. You know, the...We talked about getting the string crossings very, very smooth and exploring the space between the strings.

Basically, we want to be doing this here as well. We don't want it to sound like whenever we have a string crossing we slap it. We want to avoid that completely and try to get this as smooth as we can.

Now, there's another aspect to this as well. We want to make sure that we're doing every single bow change, every single change of bow, from down to up or up to down, with the maximum amount of smoothness. So, We want to be listening for this. Now, this is something that is... I know there are differences of opinion on how to achieve this.

It's my belief and feeling that the bow change is something that is best done by the fingers and the fingers alone. So, you can think of it like this. When the bow is to the end of the bow, or you get to the end of a bow, and then you want to change, your fingers need to be the ones doing the change. The smaller joints are best suited to these kinds of things, to do these things very smoothly.

For example, if I try to do it from the shoulder, if I keep everything here locked and I don't move it at all, then I do it from the shoulder, you can hear it. There's a little bit of a click at the bow change and it's not very smooth.

The reason for this just has to do with, I'm probably going to misquote poor Isaac Newton here, but one of his laws of motion that has something to do with the relationship between mass and movement. That, you know, when you have something moving in one direction and you need it to change direction, you need a large amount of energy to get that large mass moving in the other direction.

Now, this is why I try to use the smallest amount of mass to do this change as possible. Because that means it's going to be the easiest to control. It's going to be the most effective at getting this change of direction to happen smoothly.

So, that's why you'll see me in this etude doing the changes primarily with the fingers. I'll demonstrate in the etude one more time. The rest of the etude progresses like that.

Now, another kind of basic fundamental idea that we need to grasp here is the dynamics in this etude. You can hear I'm doing very subtle crescendo and diminuendo as I go up and as I go down. This is written into the etude in most editions, I hope. This D is louder than the first D. We want to be making sure that that really comes out.

I always find personally that in order for dynamics to really come out, I need to be thinking of them on a very large scale. I need to be exaggerating them as much as I possibly can. I think that's important, too, just to kind of start off with that idea in your brain.

Then, to actually accomplish this I think we...I don't remember in what video that was, actually. Maybe it was the bow fundamentals video. I talked a little bit about the arc of the bow, that the bow actually...you need to feel that, that comes up as you approach the tip like this in order to really sustain.

A crescendo has almost everything to do with this. A crescendo, the only things we're going to manipulate past actually doing that and kind of exaggerating that even more is accelerating the bow speed a little bit. I think you'll see that when I'm doing this. You see I suddenly use a lot more bow when I want to play a little bit louder.

This goes along with this playing on these little curves. Those curves go along with it. Because if you just increase the bow speed but you're not really kind of lifting on every down bow, lifting meaning, you know, this elevation change here. If you're not doing that every time and you increase the bow speed, you'll just get this. The bow will be slipping instead of getting really solid, good quality sound.

Now, later on in this etude there are some interesting things to do with the left hand. I know I've been talking about the bow only. Let's see if I can remember where. Yeah, starting here.

There, of course, we have a shift. So, you can work on your shifting. And, it's the same things we talked about in the shifting video, making sure that your thumb is really, really free and making sure that that finger is releasing before you actually move. That's really important, too, to make sure that the finger is not...So we hear that big slide. Now here, when we start to have these E flats and B flats, this is where you actually want to make sure that your first finger is really free.

I'm not a big fan of leaving fingers down that aren't in use. I think I have this in common with the late great Hungarian cellist Janos Starker. He taught this as well, to never leave fingers down when they're not being used.

I think this is really important for intonation. Because there's always something that you can be doing with another finger to get ready to play the next note. So...so, when I play that F, for example, and I get to here, you'll see I'm able to freely go back. If I started like this, now I kind of need to pinch back. You see, I need to do that kind of move, and it could end up being clunky. Now, you know, you could do that if you practice it a lot, but this way it doesn't require much practice.

You can see as I go through this passage how much my first finger is really staying up. Sorry. You'll see even here where I have to go a large distance I'm making it feel like it's not a large distance, because I'm starting with that first finger up. If it's here, this is when I'm going to squeeze and do something like that. Then, it makes it really easy to get to that position, to get to that note if I start in this position. Same thing there.

Anyway, there's not too many more examples until the end of it. Whenever I try playing through the whole thing for you, hopefully this will go pretty well and I'll be able to demonstrate a lot of these things in this etude.

I hope I remembered to show you everything in that etude. There's even more things to work on, such as just the beauty of your sound, and making sure that you're applying vibrato in the right way, and making it sound really musical and as poetic as possible. I think if you're focused on doing all of those things you'll have a lot of success with this etude.

I hope you discover more of these Dotzauer Etudes - which you can find on the Virtual Sheet Music website for purchase. Yeah, I hope you enjoy these. I hope you learn to love them as I did and as I continue to do.

So, enjoy, and I will look forward to seeing your comments. Once again, this has been Joseph Mendoes with a video for virtualsheetmusic.com.

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