[cellobello virtuosity expression mastery]
[Paul Katz on Pros & Cons of Bent Endpins with rob mayes]
In your lesson with Sebastian, you were discussing the different ideas behind behind relaxed with the cello.
I wanted to ask you what you thought on endpins and the various types of endpins.
I notice that you play on a Stahlhammer endpin. Would you mind talking about that?
Well a Stahlhammer is a bent endpin.
So it's a brand I can show you. So you can see here the bend.
And the reason for that is to bring the cello up and make it a little bit flatter as opposed to vertical.
This is not an easy subject because we're all different heights.
So as you get more advanced and more experienced on the instrument,
you have to do a certain amount of experimenting. But you need to know the principles involved.
What I'm looking for is if I do it in extreme like this and I come up like this,
as the cello gets flat like this you can just rest your arm on it.
You can use your arm weight. We always talk about playing with arm weight.
But the more vertical the cello gets,
the more difficult it is to capture the weight of the arm.
So I believe when things are too vertical that people start to press.
And also a distinction that not everybody gets. There's a difference between resting and feeling weight
or pushing down with your muscles.
So that distinction is very important. So when you get this sense of weight here,
then I even sometimes have people put the cello on their knees and hold it like this
just to get this feeling of settling. Now, we can't play the cello like this
because then we can't get our left hand where it needs to go.
So that's where things get balanced. I think what we want to do
is we want to get the cello to come up and flatten
but only to the point that the left hand is comfortable back here.
Right? I'm going to tell you a personal story about myself
when I was in college.
Rostropovich came from the Soviet Union. That was the Soviet Union in those days.
He came to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and I was going to the University of Southern California
and I was studying with Piatigorsky then.
So all the cellists heard that this great Russian cellist was coming,
and we went and we heard him play Sinfonia Concertante of Prokofiev that night.
And I tell you, he completely blew us away.
He came out, first of all, and he sat down like this.
And he had a big bent pin like that.
And then he was sitting back in the chair and he was going like this,
and nobody had ever heard a sound that big in their life.
So I would say inside of one year 80% of the students in the United States were playing on bent endpins
including myself. Right?
And after two years my neck and my shoulders were so tight and so sore that I couldn't play
because I had such an extreme endpin that I wound up hunching here
and trying to get comfortable back here.
So at that point I said, "Well that might be for Rostropovich but that's not for me."
And then I dropped it and I played for about 20 years with a straight pin.
Then the Stahlhammer pin was invented. There were some others—Tortelier pin
because Paul Tortelier also played that way.
So the Stahlhammer pin, what it did is this angle is not so extreme as the early ones.
So it didn't push us up and back so much.
And also with this ability to lengthen and shorten here,
you can really—so I found this like really very helpful for myself and a lot of students.
And now I can play, I can get the cello a little flatter.
My knees are not sticking out in front of the cello because that bent pin takes the cello a little bit farther away from the body.
And I'm still completely comfortable down here.
So now for the second half of my 50 years,
last 25 years I've been playing with this bent pin.
In my teaching, I would say it's maybe 50-50.
I find that bigger people, longer arms, taller people, long lets when their knees are sticking out, things like that—
they need the bent endpin. They're far more comfortable.
And shorter people whose arms aren't so long don't need it or sometimes find it a disadvantage.
If you're short, you can get your endpin out enough this way and get the cello flatter.
But in summing up, I think whichever endpin you use
the idea is to get the cello up and flat as possible
for sound production without putting the left hand in a position where it's uncomfortable.
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