a study of some of the terrible ways I love to play the cello
LA Phil Etudes: Book 2, Part 2
world premiere, LA Phil commission
with generous support from the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund
About this Piece
There are enough études out there about trying to be good.... I wanted to write something that canonized all the terrible things I love to do on cello, hence the title! The piece is pure fun and insanity. I wrote it with the hope that Robert deMaine also has been waiting to unleash some badass cello vibes, à la Eddie Van Halen.
The piece is called a study of some of the terrible ways I love to play the cello. As I was thinking about what I wanted to write—having grown up playing cello, but not having written anything for solo cello since I was...6 years old!—I kept thinking about that struggle to get things exactly right (which was always hard for me). And as I was thinking about that sometimes extreme effort we undertake to do something right, which is usually what we think of when we think about études, I realized I wanted to create a little space to canonize some of the other ways and reasons we love to play. This piece is a celebration of some of the wrong ways I love to play—it’s a little show of freedom, of pure joy in playing the cello, a space to not worry about whether something is good or right but just...a love of playing. I built the piece out of some of my own favorite slightly crazy ways of playing the cello, and I hope that Bob—and other cellists who play it—have as much fun with it as I had in putting it together and are down for unleashing a little bit of their inner Eddie Van Halen! —Dylan Mattingly