International Music Teacher Archives

2025-01-302025-02-08

Community and language in string teaching

We have a tremendous responsibility toward the community (besides providing the professionally-delivered solid basics and technical expertise) to be loving and caring toward our students' perceptions, experiences and needs.

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2023-06-092024-01-22

A hypothetical, historical, energetic journey of a violin

A conceptualization of the path of energy involved in the transformation of a violin, something I wrote in 2016 as part of a course on Energy with Eann Patterson in a MOOC at the University of Liverpool. Thanks to Cheri Noble for reminding me of this! I have deliberately composed this looking at the journey …

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2023-03-082023-05-31

Why seek string teacher coaching?

String teacher coaching is something we string teachers can use to help us in our work, and indeed, all kinds of teachers can benefit from being coached. Why? The main purpose of string teacher coaching is to help us realize and act on our own solutions, with guidance and perspective from our position in life …

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2023-01-282023-02-05

Friendly string teacher

Are you friendly as a string teacher? Well, of course you are, I hope. Why do I ask, you may be asking yourself? The reason is, we often have skewed views of ourselves and the way we interact with our students and colleagues. The real question to ask is, “Am I friendly toward myself?” …

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2022-06-092022-06-23

Strings and the pandemic in Suzhou

Being a strings teacher in China during the pandemic - playing and waiting and online teaching and we still aren't done

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2021-12-172022-01-13

Tone III

There is another aspect to tone that heavily influences and even overshadows the previous two essays. As a string teacher advocate, I will now focus on how we can nudge ourselves into becoming better teachers by becoming aware of the tone in our life. There is a way in which we go about our day-to-day …

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2021-09-232021-09-23

Tone Part II

Tone has another side that’s too often missed, hence this post. (Part I is the previous post on this blog.) What happens when we dictate everything we want as teachers for the student, and don’t notice our own tone in the process? What happens when we demand things from the parents of our students if …

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2021-07-282021-08-16

Tone – Part I

Tone: a massively important element of what we teach and learn in violin, viola, cello, and doublebass

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2021-03-202021-04-03

The Myth of Violin Fragility & A True Confession

I am going to tell you the truth. The fragility of violins is something of a myth. Of course, violins will be broken if you drop them on a tile floor or if something heavy like a car or a human smashes down on top of them. Really there are myriad ways to damage a …

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2020-06-132020-06-13

String teaching during COVID-19, June 2020

It's already the 13th day of June, 2020, in an undeniably extraordinary year. This year will probably be named 'hindsight', as in, "Hindsight is twenty-twenty." I don't know about you, but it's up and down like a roller coaster from my point of view. There is still plenty to be totally glad about and a …

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