Scale Exercise

As a pianist and piano teacher, Sibylle has a wealth of music knowledge and material, all of which has benefited me and my studies more than once. Recently when she was practicing I could tell she was playing some kind of scale up and down the keyboard and asked her about it.

The patten she was using comes from a Louis Hanon method book. In a nutshell you work your way up the scale in five note increments, but the first interval is always a third, whereas all the other intervals are a second. So for C-Major you’d start with C, E, F, G, A, and then return down with G, F, E, D, and then up again: D, F, G, A, B. And so on. I liked the way it sounded and have been using it on my cello. To help out with that I made up a sheet of music using Sibelius.

I like that it forces me to think ahead, to think about the intervals, and that it involves string changes. This could easily be added to with slurs or hooked bowing. And I like that something from the piano world can work in the cello world too.