Cello Suite No. 1 in Three Movements (2019)

A lot of my classical music life in the bay area revolves around a dear friend and collaborator of mine, Lewis Patzner, who is a phenomenal cellist, composer, and musical leader. He and I run the Glenview Classical Series together, which since 2018 has had monthly classical music concerts.

One goal of the Glenview Classical Series is to promote new and local music, including our own, and it was for one of our concerts featuring local bay area composers that I wrote this cello suite. By this point I knew Lewis’s playing very well, having written much music for him to play with others up until this point, but the Cello Suite would by my first attempt at writing a piece for him to play alone.

Because of our close relationship, I was able to bounce ideas off of him constantly. He was able to tell me which of my ideas were idiomatic and possible to play, and which were truly impossible. He also provided me a lot of alternative ways to achieve my musical ideas (different voicings of chords, slight melodic changes) without sacrificing the gist of what I was trying to express.

As with most of the works that I write, I sit down for a long time at the piano with a lot of staff paper and just write as much as I can without much of a filter or concern about how ideas will link together. The process in the early stages of writing a piece will look quite different from day to day: some days I will expand upon an idea that I had come up with the day before, some days I will embark on totally new material. Once I felt like I had spawned enough material, I then began to group and separate elements, develop ideas where needed, and connect them, and eventually separate the work into three different movements. Of course all of these processes are more or less happening simultaneously.

I definitely found huge inspiration in the first cello suite of J.S. Bach and the first cello suite of Benjamin Britten, two of my favorite composers, and two of the most important works for cello in the repertoire.

Here is a live recording from the Glenview Classical Series new local music concert on October 19, 2019 performed by Lewis Patzner: