There’s simply nothing more fun than playing cello ensemble music. The cello’s range is vast — bigger than those of the other members of the bowed strings family — and when you get a bunch of cellists together, you can have the highest and lowest voices of an ensemble at the same time as that glorious all-cello tone.
So it’s with great pleasure that I’ve decided to make my arrangements for cello ensemble available on SheetMusicPlus. I’ve added a page to this site of currently available music, and will continue to add to it as more and more is published.
Why Did I Do This?
Everyone loves the sound of a great cello ensemble, and yet it’s strangely hard to find really good arrangements for multiple cellos. There’s plenty of material available, but when I was looking for music for my undergraduates at the University of Idaho, I would often get frustrated with arrangements that were un-idiomatically written for inexperienced players, strangely voiced, or needed a lot of marking up before I could give out parts to students.
It’s important to me that my scores are user-friendly, so I’ve made them look as clean and clear as possible, with no awkward page turns or hard-to-read markings. I’ve added suggestions for fingerings, bowings, articulations, and dynamics, so that they’re ready for you to play without having to spend hours bowing the parts. I also paid a lot of attention to voicing, usually having the two top parts a bit higher-pitched to avoid a “muddy” timbre. For this reason, all the arrangements are for mixed-ability groups — which is very practical in any teaching studio, since we all have students at different levels of advancement.
I hope readers will consider buying my arrangements for that far-off day when we can play chamber music with friends again… or for making Acapella videos at home alone!
Miranda Wilson 