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Hello passionate cellists! I hope you are having some cello time this summer and maybe even taking part in a course. I have just spent six days with a wonderful group of players at the annual Unsung Heroes Summer School which was described by one student as transformative, which is so good to hear as I know from my own experience, that this is what we all want. To be presented with new ideas, technical skills, musical ideas and personal

Christopher Bunting would have been 100 years old this week. He was, and remains a powerful influence on my life and, I imagine, on the lives of those of us lucky enough to have studied with him. I met him first as a teenager when I performed at the Cambridge Competitive Music Festival. I played Kol Nidrei and Christopher was the adjudicator. Before that day, I had heard him broadcast and I knew he was an extraordinary cellist and teacher

How lovely to have students like Dan who want others to gift themselves the experience too: Hello Catherine and friends of the cello, I am sitting here on a grey, rainy morning in Victoria on the most southern tip of Vancouver Island in Canada and thinking and dreaming about being in Lewes with you again this summer. I couldn’t have dreamt that my days in Lewes in 2018, with two years playing cello under my belt, would or

We practice, we think, we listen to music and watch people perform and the biggest joy is ours, when we gather with others, to work together and create a collective vision. I still remember the thrill of going on summer courses when I was a teenager. I loved having that deep immersion in music, chosen to inspire us and on our playing, that challenged us and pushed us to new levels. One of these summer schools was so important to

Happy New Year all you passionate cellists! When term started a year ago, I noticed that several students were feeling a bit blue and wintery, and that their concentration and spark was lacking for some time. Until Spring arrived in fact. Our playing and work at our instrument is a spiritual practice; we have to keep forging ahead, even when we feel depleted, so just be kind to yourself and allow for rebalance. If this rings any bells for you

Hello Cellists! I do hope you are having some time to rest this summer. I find that when I step aside and change gear, I make room for new ideas to come into view to refresh me and help me re‐think and reshape. I am looking forward to next year’s Summer School as people are enquiring in order to make plans. I have had requests from freelancers too and what has come out of this is that

Hello Passionate Cellists! The days are getting longer and lighter and I am thinking more about what the year holds for us cellists here at Cello Courses. I am thrilled by the success of the new online course, All About My Bow, and its very new sibling, the Bow Primer which launched just two weeks ago. In order to bring music alive, we need a skill set that is both intellectual, aural and physical. Our technique is a big subject

Dear cellist, As we come to the end of the year, I just wanted to make contact with you and to let you know that there are courses and workshops for 2023, both in-­person, and online now up on my website. I love presenting this year’s new series All About My Bow which is attended by players from around the globe. This infinite subject is a constant source for us to explore together, enabling you to

Please tell us more about your online cello courses. Well, they came out of COVID. I had always intended to open myself up to teaching one-to-one online, but when COVID struck, and we all had to swing around and reinvent ourselves, I’d had to cancel all of my in-person courses, in particular the summer course, and thought, “So what am I going to do?” Because I was already doing some one-to-one

Hello Cellist! At last, we are going to be together again, in-­person, playing, learning and growing. We have all had a long, unnatural break in our musical lives and I’m so glad to be able to tell you that the 1-­day Unsung Heroes Cello Ensemble workshops start on February 19th, here in Lewes, East Sussex. More will follow through the year. I love these days when we immerse ourselves in fabulous music, explore and

It’s lovely to have you onboard. What a year this has been on so many levels for all of us and I do hope all is well with you and yours. So many of us instrumentalists swung round at the start of lockdown and started a teaching practice online. I have found that I see, think and teach differently in this new, unforeseen scenario. Many exciting ideas have come out of these strange times. As I could no

We like to think that our progress and development is more linear than may be the case. I see progress where sometimes a pupil doesn’t. In fact, this week a student I was teaching, felt she was going backwards. She sounded almost as if she was, to some extent, in crisis. Perception is a thing that needs closely looking at. What we see, because we inhabit our own world and thoughts, our vision and dreams that we hold

I have been teaching cellists online for a few months now, and on Saturday I launched the new Online Time Line series. It is another arm of the Unsung Heroes Cello Ensemble workshops and courses I have been running since 2005. This online project had been quietly going round my head for a while, and then was brought into focus by the idea of restriction from our state of lockdown. Limitation can be seen as a gift and makes it

I have been working for a year now with a lady, in her 70s, with Parkinson's. Normally I would cross town to teach her as it’s difficult for her to travel and we need to work when her drugs create the best situation for her. Now though, I’m teaching online and I’m seeing new things, thinking differently and changing habits. As I played the piece to her that we are now learning

Listening and hearing… what a subject! As teachers and players, we are doing them both all the time. It’s absorbing and can be tiring. This last week I have noticed two pupils have suddenly “heard” what I’ve been saying for a long time. They have acted and I can see the enlightened looks on their faces, of the surprise and pleasure of having shifted themselves into a new state of awareness and new

I intend to be sharing thoughts and ideas here and hope we can start some conversations whether you are a teacher or student. We all learn from each other. At the moment I have a private teaching practice with a wide mix of children, teenagers and adult students. I love having a mix. It keeps me on my toes. Over the years I have taught players with Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Asperger’s and one person, with part of a finger

Unsung Heroes has become a central part of my working life, but it came gradually to me. I had just had my son, moved from London and, soon after arriving in East Sussex, we were flooded and had to move away to West Sussex. While living away from our new home, I had found myself going to a music library and looking at vocal & choral music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. I borrowed scores, went through my own

When I was 10 years old, I started lessons with the cellist, Pamela Hind O’Malley in Cambridge, where I grew up. Over her piano was a large portrait of a distinguished looking man, who looked very thoughtful, noble and wise. Pamela told me this was Pablo Casals, the father of modern cello playing and someone she had studied with in Prades. Every time I was there, I took in that image. Around that time, my father gave me

I love the playing of the great Italian pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. One of my teachers at college, Eileen Croxford, told me how she had been practising in a room next to him at a festival in Italy. She listened to him playing the same large leap over and over. Eileen went in to meet him and asked what he was doing. He replied that he had to get the leap right 100 times in a row. If not, he

Passion is a driving force within all of us. Whether we decide at the age of 40 to learn the cello, or as a child, to become an engineer, a cook or a nurse, we set ourselves on the road to fulfilling a dream. Dreams though, aren’t all fanciful and perfect. We seem to always be holding opposites in order to grow. When we begin a new piece of music, we start by not being able to play