Sample the Book and CD | Cello Playing for Music Lovers

Cello Playing for Music Lovers is divided into five parts:

Part One begins before you start playing, helping you to acquire a cello, a musical vocabulary and other essentials. The book goes step by step, dealing with notes, fingerings and bowings, scales and chords and songs. It includes excerpts and selections from a wide variety of songs, some slightly simplified for ease of playing.
Parts Two and Three explain how to read music and how to play songs you like on the cello by ear. It introduces musical structure and theory.
- Part Two stays entirely in first position.
- Part Three introduces extensions, minor scales, arpeggios and accidentals.
Part Four explains more music theory, higher cello positions, and improvisational techniques.
Part Five introduces principles and practices of playing with others. It includes ten beginner-to-intermediate piano/cello duets for practice (with complete parts), and details the essentials for success when exploring chamber music with other amateurs.

The 303 page book moves step by step, covering notes, fingerings and bowings, scales and chords and songs. It teaches you how to read music, and also explains how to locate songs on the cello by ear, along with twenty-four play-by-ear song suggestions specifically chosen to use and reinforce the skills and knowledge gained as you progress through the book .

It provides over seventy lovely familiar melodies to play (some excerpted) including folk songs, like “Scarborough Fair,” hymns, like “Amazing Grace,” Broadway songs like “Some Enchanted Evening,” and classical standards, like a Bach Prelude and Sarabande.

The accompanying, free-to-download audio tracks played by Erik Friedlander are keyed to exercise/figure numbers in the text, demonstrating the 116 musical figures in the book. Recordings of the ten piano/cello duets are also included, played by Joe Mohan and Julian Langford. The book is arranged so that, depending on your previous experience and background, you can go in order or skip around in it, focusing just on the chapters that are of interest to you.

Selections from the included play-along CD
Cellist: Erik Friedlander.
(Click to stop, or play, music.)

Selections from the included play-along CD
Cellist: Erik Friedlander.
(tap to play, or stop, music.)

Selections from included play-along CD
Cellist: Erik Friedlander.
(tap to play, or stop, music.)

SELECTED PAGES

(Click thumbnails to see full-sized images of book pages.)