Recently, I was privileged to attend two lectures by two creative artists, deep thinkers, and people of color who have struggled to expand the white-centric art world’s definitions of who is worth listening to. Favianna Rodriguez spoke at UCLA’s Visual and Performing Arts Program on February 6, 2019. She grew up in Oakland as the…
Tag: pedagogy
the gift of permission to fail
One of the main challenges of learning the violin is the lack of instant gratification. You will not be able to play perfectly after one lesson. Or two, or a month’s worth. As a student, you may spend several weeks practicing nothing but bow holds, or playing a single note on an open string…
Learn like a Punk Rocker
One of my favorite things to read is memoirs and biographies of musicians. I just finished reading Clothes Clothes Clothes, Music Music Music, Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine, best known as the guitar player for The Slits. In both their music and their image, The Slits challenged so many preconceptions of what women were…
free and creative from the beginning
A teacher is always continuing to learn, and must always be open to new ideas and challenges. Learning is a lifelong process of continuous evolving and tweaking how we do things. I once heard in a class that one of the more important sentences for a teacher is, “I used to think ___ but now…
Why we need both a Suzuki and an O’Connor method….
… I was prepared to not make a comment on this at all, but recent discussions about violin pedagogy and which method books to buy have reached a level of passion and vitriol I usually associate only with religion and politics (and that usually sends me looking for the door.) For those of you too…
Maintaining a love for the violin even after the secret’s out on how hard it is…
I remember getting my first violin, and feeling enchanted from my 6 year-old eyes, the cloth covered, curved box made of wood stained with a dark orange hue. It seemed almost scary in its unapproachable fanciness, as if it possessed magical properties. So I just kind of looked at it with a sense of awe,…
what I learned about violin teaching from a hamster…
A few days ago, my wife and I became the proud owners of a very adorable longhaired hamster, mostly not by choice. A neighbor knocked on our door and handed us a shoebox of the adorable but feisty creature, telling us she had too many animals and was looking for a nice home for…
Four musical approaches…
When I first walked down this path of using strings to create sound, I was unaware how versatile it could be, or how the same instrument could make me comfortable in a huge variety of settings. I have inserted my voice into all kinds of situations – sometimes projects involving many hours of rehearsal, and…
two fiddlers, many ways of music learning
My first exposure to how wonderful and exciting the sounds emulating from a box with four strings could be was with a bluegrass band at an amusement park. My four or five year old self was completely captivated, and that moment started a musical journey for me from which I’ve never looked back. In…
Violin Lessons with Michael Fox 