ABSTRACT
The cello first gained credibility as a solo instrument in seventeenth-century Italy, but it was not until the eighteenth century that performers began to write detailed treatises that codified aspects of instrument and bow hold, and particularly fingering. Michel Corrette’s Méthode pour apprendre le violoncelle (1741) is the first such treatise, though Corrette himself was primarily an organist. John Gunn (1789), Jean-Marie Raoul (1797), and Pierre Dominique Bideau (1802) were important predecessors of the first “modern” cello treatise by Jean-Louis Duport (1806). Because Duport codified the modern cello fingering system, this survey will begin with his pedagogy.
