There are enough études out there about trying to be good.... I wanted to write something that canonized all the terrible things I love to do on cello, hence the title! The piece is pure fun and insanity. I wrote it with the hope that Robert deMaine also has been waiting to unleash some badass cello vibes, à la Eddie Van Halen.

The piece is called a study of some of the terrible ways I love to play the cello. As I was thinking about what I wanted to write—having grown up playing cello, but not having written anything for solo cello since I was...6 years old!—I kept thinking about that struggle to get things exactly right (which was always hard for me). And as I was thinking about that sometimes extreme effort we undertake to do something right, which is usually what we think of when we think about études, I realized I wanted to create a little space to canonize some of the other ways and reasons we love to play. This piece is a celebration of some of the wrong ways I love to play—it’s a little show of freedom, of pure joy in playing the cello, a space to not worry about whether something is good or right but just...a love of playing. I built the piece out of some of my own favorite slightly crazy ways of playing the cello, and  I hope that Bob—and other cellists who play it—have as much fun with it as I had in putting it together and are down for unleashing a little bit of their inner Eddie Van Halen! —Dylan Mattingly