Teaching & Playing

TECHNIQUE

MATTHEW SHARP Solo cellist, operatic baritone and professor of cello at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK

Embody and inhabit your sound

BORN Lisbon, Portugal

STUDIED WITH Julia Pringle, Kate Beare, Alexander Baillie, Boris Pergamenschikow

TEACHES Undergraduates, postgraduates, professionals, all ages

Singing is a fundamental and elemental part of what it is to be human; the ability to sing and thereby to express ourselves lies within every one of us. Playing a stringed instrument is similar to singing – we work with breath, flow and imagination ‘from the inside out’. The more I teach, the more I ground my work in vocal and movement-based terms. In my own playing I have found that there is something about the act of singing as honestly and expressively as possible that leaves a trace of physiological wisdom behind it to pick up on and carry forward into the act of playing the cello. This helps me and my students to zone in on and nurture the ‘grain of the voice’ in the cello sound.

We have all heard the excellent ‘play it like a singer’ advice offered to students. We have also heard and seen the kind of unembodied ‘di-dum’ vocal demonstrations that frequently accompany and undermine this good advice. In terms of accessing and benefiting from the innate sense of cello playing and musical wisdom coursing through our veins, what I prefer to do in this scenario is to encourage students to take the risk of not ‘di-dumming’ but really singing a phrase, for example, on a firm, bright vowel (‘ah’ or ‘eh’). This way they can experience the phrase in terms of breath, support and connecting one sound to the next. I follow this by helping them to explore ways to transfer this physiological and intuitional experience to the cello.