Category: Sheet Music

Life · Sheet Music

Drawing Parallels

Yu-Ting

After teaching two lessons yesterday, I went up to the city to get a lesson with David. What did I bring in? I brought in Feuillard and started looking at it from the very beginning. I learned that you can learn and teach the fundamental principles from just the first lesson. Things like…
– Committing to the tempo and rhythm.
– Playing with an anacrusis. When you start from silence and when you change notes.
– Keeping all fingers on the bow.
– Keeping your bow glued to the string.
– Legato really means cresendo on the down bow and decresendo on the up bow.
– Making sure your fingers can tap all the way down to make a louder pizzicato sound.

I have a lot of etude books with varying degrees of difficulty and I’m discovering that the things I need to work on the most are the basic principles regardless if the content is difficult or easy. If I were to master these principles in the easy pieces, playing the difficult pieces will be a lot easier. This draws parallel to the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book that I’m reading. When it comes down to it, we become better people by following the principles discussed in the book. Instead of saying “guiding principles”–Covey calls them habits. Why? Because people who live by principles live according to their habits.

Now I’m off to following the principles that we discussed about in the Feuillard. I plan on practicing until it becomes habit–which in turn will make me a better teacher and cellist.

Sheet Music

The Young Violoncellist’s Method by L.R. Feuillard (Entry 1)

Yu-Ting

I’m going to be spending the next day or so going over this method book by Louis Feuillard. I’m losing my endurance for playing my instrument and I’ve decided to just go through my music library and sight-read everything that I have.

This was the first etude book that I ever bought and I don’t really use it often with my students since I’m using the Suzuki book mostly. I think it might be good to have students get this book before getting the Schroeder Etudes book. I usually have my students start Schroeder when they get to Suzuki Book 2–so it might be good for them to start the Feuillard when they are working on Book 1 or maybe even Pre-Twinkle.

Cover/Page 1

Who was Louis Feuillard?

Louis Feuillard was the cello professor at the Paris Conservatory. He was the teacher of Paul Tortelier. Other than that, I can’t seem to find much information about him. He was a good teacher, but perhaps not a the best performer as mentioned in this All Things Strings article:

Louis Feuillard (1872–1941) formed a quartet that toured in England, but later he hardly performed—perhaps with good reason. Alfredo Casella recalled premiering Ravel’s trio with Feuillard in 1914: “I played the trio with two mediocre performers. Although we had about 20 rehearsals, they managed to achieve several blunders.” However, Feuillard was a dedicated professor at the Conservatoire; his student Paul Tortelier observed that he had an extrordinary pedagogical sense.

The book was edited by S. Patte. No idea who that is unfortunately. I don’t know why they decided to publish this book without their full names.