The composer states:'The term 'oblique strategies? was coined jointly by British musician Brian Eno and German-born British visual artist Peter Schmidt to describe a series of printed cards they developed throughout the 1970's. The cards had their origins in sets of uncannily similar working principles that both artists had established independently, and featured aphorisms intended as a means of triggering inspiration or providing useful stimulus during the creative process, particularly when encountering difficulties of fatigue or time constraint.As Eno and Schmidt wrote in their introduction to the first edition in 1975: 'They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case, the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident?.I chose eleven of Eno and Schmidt's strategies, ordering them in a way that revealed to me a logic and potential inter-relatedness within a hitherto disparate set of single ideas I had assembled for solo cello, each of them in turn a reflection upon the commission's initial purpose of creating a test piece for the 2014 Emanuel Feuermann cello competition.It's my hope then that the resultant composition may provide not only an interesting test of the competitors' talents but also offer the interpreter an opportunity to reflect upon the delights and pitfalls of creativity as he or she comes to terms with the various musical and technical challenges to be found within these ten minutes of music for solo cello.? / Violoncelle

Media Type : Book Level : Beginning-Intermediate Musical Genre : All Styles Number of pages : 40 Practice for Performance provides a rare and intimate view into a very thoughtful and successful performer's personal toolkit. Set in the context of his own personal history of growth as a performer, cellist Daniel Morganstern (principal cellist for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York) displays rare honesty in discussing the problems that faced him at various point of his career, and the ways to solve them. The discoveries sensibly unfold in a fascinating account of experiences with many notable artists whose comments and examples shaped the author's thinking. These ideas are not to be found in any other treatise on the subject of musical preparation. The examples in this book, both musical and non-musical, offer a foundation to help evoke instinctive musical responses in the mechanical processes of playing the cello, and have been advantageously applied to other instruments as well, including voice.