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.

This music is still too hard for my intermediate cello skills. But this music typifies the work I seek. I need clear and modern melodic voices that I can hum. I want unaccompanied cello solos, or more accurately self-accompanied cello solos. That is, I want to make noises at all frequencies the instrument is capable of making, to give further depth to melodies. I mean, I paid for the whole cello, I may as well play all four strings. Lastly, the music has to be accessible to an amateur cellist such as myself.

By transposing the original down a fifth, the arrangement allows notes from the original melody to be played on three strings (A, D & G), rather than just two (A & D). This immediately makes the piece more accessible to amateur cellists, as the highest note is now a G4 on the A string, instead of a D5 on the A string. I find that cello arrangers are hesitant to change a music’s key to better fit a cello’s sound range, even if that music was originally written for a violin or a flute. This is something that bothered me since decades ago. This transposition from from G major to C major also allows cello’s C-string to better add to the overall harmony.

A certain person told me that there were almost no traces of Saint-Saëns in my work. They were unable to hear the original melody. So here I lay a slightly mutated version of the original melody alongside my work, to prove that the issue lies with my poor playing, and hopefully not with the music itself.

This “double solos” is not really meant for actual performance. “Bach Wrote The Swan” stands by itself without needing additional reinforcement. But the juxtaposition allows that certain person to more clearly appreciate that the Bach-style solo retains all key elements of the original by Saint-Saëns. To wit, visually follow the two left hands, to confirm that the Bach solo always hits the same melodic notes as the original, despite flights of its fingers to provide for additional voices and harmonies.

Since writing this music, I’ve set out to find more music like it. In weeks of research I have amassed a small catalog of work that can be vaguely classified like this: “hey, it sounds like something Bach would have written for an unaccompanied and amateur cellist of the 21st century, were he alive today.”

Some of the music I found sounded as if written by contemporaries of Bach. But most are in fact rearrangements of music from the Romantic Period to modern-day, including cinematic music.

In my mind, most of them have gone well beyond mere rearrangements, such that they could be called new compositions inspired by existing works. Many retain Bach’s tricks for making a single cello sound like a multi-voice ensemble. Some have invented their own techniques. Still others are inspired by fiddling traditions from around the world.

I tried to come up with a name for this type of music. But it was nearly impossible to find a good name.

So I just call it Bach Wrote What ?!

Head over to a new website I’ve set up for it: bachwrotewhat.com. You will find more information about each piece, and how to get sheet music.