Cello Fingerings

About the Book

Cello Fingerings: Improve Your Left-Hand Game is a concise but thorough treatise and workbook on the many facets of devising fingerings for the cello. This book is primarily designed for intermediate cellists, which usually means ages fourteen to twenty, but which could be any age from six to eighty. The purpose of this book is to provide you with much of the basic information that you need in order to become good at practicing the cello. This is the book for you if

you know how to shift but you do not currently devise your own fingerings;

you can devise fingerings, but you are frequently unhappy with the results;

you devise your own fingerings, but you frequently encounter other fingering ideas that you had not previously considered.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Part 1: Preliminaries

Chapter 1—Introduction

Chapter 2— A System for Marking Fingerings

Chapter 2.5—Random-Note Quiz

Part 2: The Basics

Chapter 3— The Basics: Priorities of Shifting

Chapter 4— The Basics, Continued

Chapter 5—Rules of Thumb

Chapter 6—Know Your Patterns

Chapter 7— Stretching the Left Hand

Chapter 8—Putting It All Together

Part 3: Applications

Chapter 9—Baroque Music

Chapter 10—General Quiz on Fingerings

Chapter 11—Awkward Passages

Chapter 12—Increasing Your Options

Chapter 13—Chromaticism and Difficult Key Signatures

Chapter 14—Test Yourself against Other Intermediate Cellists

Chapter 14.5—Random High Note Mini-Quiz

Chapter 15—High Registers

Part 4: Advanced Topics

Chapter 16—Advanced Topics

Chapter 17—Some of My Favorite Fingerings

Chapter 18—Conclusions

About the Author

Benjamin Whitcomb lives with his wife, Pamela, and twin sons in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Benjamin was born in Florida but spent most of his childhood in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He attended Oklahoma State University (BM, cello performance), Boston University, and the University of Texas at Austin (MM, cello performance; PhD, music theory), and he has studied with Evan Tonsing, George Neikrug, and Phyllis Young.

Benjamin and Pamela moved to Wisconsin in 1999 when Benjamin joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he is currently Professor of Cello and Music Theory. Benjamin performs frequently in solo and chamber music recitals. He is a member of the Madison-based Ancora String Quartet (www.ancoraquartet.com) and the UW-W Piano Trio. He has also been a member several orchestras in Texas and Wisconsin. Benjamin frequently performs duo recitals around the country and abroad with pianist Vincent de Vries.

Benjamin’s primary area of research is string pedagogy. Numerous articles of his have been published in such journals as American String Teacher, Strings, Stringendo (the journal of AUSTA), The Instrumentalist, and Theoria. He is a contributing author to Sharpen Your String Technique and to Teaching Music through Performance in Orchestra, vol. 3, and chaired the committee that revised the cello portion of the most recent ASTA String Syllabus. He has presented papers, masterclasses, and workshops at universities and conferences throughout the United States and abroad. His other books, The Advancing String Player’s Handbooks series, have received rave reviews and are available for through your favorite online bookstore.

Benjamin is fascinated by many aspects of string playing, including fingerings. Do you have a passage that requires an interesting or unusual fingering? Drop him a line to talk about it. He can be reached by e-mail at whitcomb@uww.edu or through his website, www.benjaminwhitcomb.com.