As mentioned previously in Playing Bach Cello Suite 1, I picked up cello playing seriously again, after two decades of neglect. For months now, I’ve playing with great enthusiasm the first suite of unaccompanied cello music from Bach. In the process I discovered a general lack of music written for an unaccompanied solo cellist.
It became obvious to me that very few people make a distinction between “solo” and “unaccompanied solo”. The great majority of music advertised as “cello solos” are in fact cello with piano accompaniment, cello-piano duets, other forms of duets, ensembles, or even music with entire orchestra backing. The rest are sheet music with simple melodic lines. There appears to be a large gap between “accompanied solos” and “single-voice solos”.
There is a lack of knowledge about multiphonic music written for a single cellist to perform. I am talking about music that delivers a full-range sonic experience through the use of arpeggios (broken chords), double-stops, and the likes commonly found in Bach’s cello suites. In fact, most amateur cellists will only be able to name Bach Cello Suites as an example of this genre. And I counted myself among them – just a month ago, I would not have been able to name anything other than Bach’s suites.
Professional cellists do know better. Such unaccompanied cello music does exist in abundance, now that I’ve researched it for weeks. But my initial attempts using search engines and LLM models such as ChatGPT yielded mostly misleading results. The few unaccompanied ones were difficult to play for folks other than virtuoso cellists. Cello Solo Sonata by Zoltán Kodály being a great example. And most of these explored the extremes of sound-making, giving off grand soundscapes, but failing to provide melodic lifelines for unschooled folks such as myself to cling to.
So I wrote one for myself to play. This was initially inspired by Youtube videos. I’ve watched many cellists attempt to play The Swan by Saint-Saëns, alongside Prelude in G major from Bach. Folks have made valiant efforts at forcefully marrying these two pieces, in a sort of cello “double solos”. But I thought, why not simply rewrite The Swan in the style of Bach solo?
Bach Wrote The Swan was thus born.
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