Fantasy on Yesterday by David Johnstone

Free Sheet Music, Intermediate Cellists, Pop Music
First published on Jun 26, 2026 by Seb
Last updated on Jun 27, 2026 by Seb

Here is a stunning fantasy on McCartney’s Yesterday for self-accompanied cello, written and performed by David Johnstone, a truly one-of-a-kind cellist and composer. We first came across his work while researching our last post on a simpler fantasy based on the same song. But Johnstone is hardly new to us. He has been on the bachwrotewhat watchlist for quite some time, and we’ll be featuring more of his self-accompanied works in future posts. Of particular interest to us are the thousand-plus pieces of sheet music that Johnstone makes available, free of charge, on his website. Most are his own compositions and arrangements for cello or cello ensembles. More on this remarkable collection later.

In this fantasy, David pulls out all the stops, employing multiple stops, broken chords, pizzicato, strumming, and a wide variety of playing techniques to provide harmonic support for the melodic line. These are the same techniques showcased in the Ten American Cello Etudes by Aaron Minsky, a work that Johnstone has frequently helped promote.

On David’s website, cellists can find free sheet music for cello ensembles of every size, cello and piano, chamber music featuring the cello, concertos and other works for cello and orchestra, and, of course, unaccompanied cello.

Of particular interest to us is the extensive repertoire for unaccompanied cello, which includes not only Bach’s cello suites, but also arrangements of classical works for solo cello. Johnstone himself has also arranged many modern pop songs for unaccompanied cello, in addition to writing a substantial body of original music for the instrument.

David makes all of this sheet music available free of charge, but he doesn’t have infinite computing resources to deal with relentless online scraping by bad actors. To access the free music, you simply need to show that you’re a real cellist with a valid email address. Create an account on his website to establish your presence. Here is the registration page.

Once you’re logged in, simply search or browse the catalog and add sheet music to your “cart”, just as if you were shopping online. When you “check out”, you won’t be asked to pay anything. The website never asks for a credit card. Instead, an email is sent to you almost immediately with links to the sheet music you’ve selected. You can receive links to up to 10 PDF scores per day this way.

Here is the catalog page for Fantasy on Yesterday by David Johnstone.

Johnstone also wrote a series of 18 works for solo cello in the style of Bach’s cello suites, titled Breaking Into Bach. The collection is published in two volumes of nine pieces each and is available in editions for either cello or viola. Here are a few excerpts from the collection, beginning at 4:52 in this video. Catalog pages: volume I and volume II.