Matthew Owens Cello

I am very lucky to have found Matthew as a cello teacher. I started to learn to play the cello as a beginner since almost a year and can strongly recommend him as a teacher. It has been an amazing experience for me to play the cello ever since I started my lessons with Matthew.
He is amazing, extremely patient and explains musical concepts and the cello as an instrument to an adult with great precision. In addition, he has a great ability to communicate and can provide explanations to you that suits perfectly well to the way you can understand, which is essential for learning. He always has an analogy to an everyday movement when you learn a new technique that is a great help.
Matthew is a remarkable person and has a great personality. He can combine his understanding of humans with his teaching extremely well. Although sometimes your own performance might not be the best (e.g. because you could not practice enough for the lesson) at each lesson you learn a lot and have a smile on your face after you leave the lesson.
What I like the most about Matthew’s teaching is that he has an exceptional sense of creativity and tries to unmask this ability in his students.

Matthew is, hands down, the best music instructor I’ve ever had, on any topic.
My musical background — both in theory and technique — is pretty scattered. After college, I decided I wanted to learn the cello, so I searched Craigslist to find a teacher. I recognized Matthew’s name from Ifshin’s and he had a good review from the Berkeley Parents Network, so I decided to schlep up to El Cerrito (from South Berkeley, without a car, with a large instrument) to attend a lesson. Matthew was able to quickly, accurately, fluidly gauge what topics I understood and which I needed help on, and immediately cobbled together a lesson in which I felt not a single minute was wasted. I came away from that lesson feeling like I’d learned more from him in an hour that I’d learned from other teachers in six months. I was hooked.
Since I already had a basic background in music theory, Matthew jumped pretty quickly into teaching me straight from repertoire. Matthew himself is quite an excellent musician — very artistic and expressive — and gives similarly excellent instruction on musicianship. He has the unusual ability of being extremely precise about what he wants you, the student, to do to achieve a given effect. (And is very good at being precise from several different approaches until you have that ‘a-​ha!’ moment.) He’s been very patient with me on the days that my head just hasn’t been in the game and very persistent in making sure I get something out of those lessons, anyhow.
Because of his high degree of achievement in cello and his patience, innovation, and keen intellect, Matthew would probably be a wonderful teacher from everyone from complete novices to seasoned professionals. (He does, in fact, teach both these levels, but I can only speak from my own experience. :P) I have moved towns twice since I started taking lessons with him and, six years later, he is still absolutely worth the transbay drive.