SAXTONS RIVER — Cellist and composer Eugene Friesen will lead a tour, Inside the Cello, at Main Street Arts on Friday, Nov. 13, as part of the Taste of the Arts, Tales from a Community series.
A dinner at 6 p.m. precedes the award-winning musician's talk.
Based in Vermont, Friesen is familiar to local audiences through his performances in the Stone Church Arts series in Bellows Falls. He has performed widely since 1978: as a member of the Paul Winter Consort, with Howard Levy and Glen Velez as Trio Globo, and with the Delos String Quartet.
Friesen, a graduate of the Yale School of Music, is a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and runs a nonprofit production company, Sonoterra Productions, producing concerts, recordings, and workshops.
Although he can't improvise melodically through chord progressions, Friesen has broken new ground for cello: He's used the instrument in a wide variety of non-classical settings and created techniques to expand its role as a solo and accompanying instrument.
He has also performed thousands of concerts for young audiences on cello and electric cello as CelloMan.
Friesen is the author of the book Improvisation for Classical Musicians: Strategies for Creativity and Expression (2012, Berklee Press/Hal Leonard). He received his first Grammy Award as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for the 1994 album Spanish Angel, his second in 2006 for the Consort's silver solstice, his third in 2007 for Crestone, and his most recent in 2011 for Miho: Journey to the Mountain.