The Well-Tempered Cello: Life with Bach’s Cello Suites by Miranda Wilson
Miranda Wilson was a child in New Zealand when she first began to learn the notes of Bach’s Cello Suites, starting with the famous Prelude in G Major. After moving to the United States for a career as a cellist, music journalist, and professor, she became obsessed with the goal of performing all six from memory in a marathon concert. Relearning and reinterpreting the Cello Suites, she realized that there is always something new to be found within their notes and melodies, as if they possess a life of their own.
In a six-part structure that resembles the arc of Bach’s cycle, The Well-Tempered Cello creates both an expressive reading of Bach’s Cello Suites and a reflection on the musician’s restless search for meaning. It is a book for music lovers who seek to know why we listen again and again to the compositions that accompany us on life’s journeys, and why music seems to listen to us too.
Cello Practice, Cello Performance by Miranda Wilson
Most other instructional works for cellists address techniques for each hand individually, as if their movements were independent. In Cello Practice, Cello Performance, Wilson demonstrates that the movements of the hands are vitally interdependent, supporting and empowering one another in any technical action. Original exercises in the fundamentals of cello playing include cross-lateral exercises, mindful breathing, and one of the most detailed discussions of intonation in the cello literature. Wilson translates this practice-room success to the concert hall through chapters on performance-focused practice, performance anxiety, and common interpretive challenges of cello playing.
This book is a resource for all advanced cellists—college-bound high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and professional performers—and teaches them how to be their own best teachers.
Miranda Wilson 