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Life in Teaching: Diana Cummings

Life in Teaching: Diana Cummings

Diana Cummings comes from a musical dynasty, and her career spans solo, chamber and orchestral playing. Since 1982 has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, where she also teaches on the LRAM diploma course, which she helped devise. She is also a professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music. In this interview she gave me for the Summer 2016 issue of the European String Teachers Association magazine ARCO, she shares her life experience of teaching I was fairly r

Life in Teaching: Stefan Popov

Life in Teaching: Stefan Popov

Stefan Popov has been professor of cello at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama for 40 years, and before that taught at Boston University and New England Conservatoire. He was born in Bulgaria, and studied at the Moscow Conservatoire with Sviatoslav Knushevitsky and Mstislav Rostropovich. In this interview for the Winter 2017 issue of the European String Teachers Association magazine Arco, he told me about the strengths of the Russian School, and how he’s still learnin

Life in Teaching: Thomas Martin

Life in Teaching: Thomas Martin

Double bassist Thomas Martin studied with Roger Scott in Philadelphia and can trace a teaching pedigree that goes back to Bottesini. In a career that has combined both orchestral playing in the world’s top orchestras and teaching, he has taught at Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Royal College of Music, and is currently senior professor at Birmingham Conservatoire. In this interview, first published in the European String Teachers Association magazine Arco in Autumn 2016

Joshua Bell on Josef Gingold

Joshua Bell on Josef Gingold

Josef Gingold was born on 28 October, 1909. In celebration of the birth of a universally beloved and respected pedagogue, here is an interview I did with Joshua Bell, one of his most famous students, for The Strad Violin Heroes special edition. He goes on to discuss another violin hero, Jascha Heifetz ‘For me the most direct influence and by far the greatest hero was my teacher Josef Gingold. He was one of the most sincere and beautiful music makers that I’ve ever heard. His

Why you should stop practising

Why you should stop practising

Observing masterclasses can be a brilliant way to learn and find inspiration, and yet students rarely turn up to watch. They may be too busy practising, but have they got their priorities wrong? They say that youth is wasted on the young. In one respect I concur. In the many masterclasses I’ve been to around the world, watching some of the finest players teaching, there’s often been barely a handful of students in the audience. It happened again yesterday. Shmuel Ashkenasi, f

Bach – the teacher

Bach – the teacher

An 1802 biography of Bach offers timeless insights into the art of teaching, as well as revealing the composer's own pedagogical techniques I’ve just been dipping into the biography of J.S. Bach written by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, by way of research for the booklet notes of Gil Shaham’s new Sonatas and Partitas CD. Written in 1802, with direct input from Johann Sebastian's sons Carl Philip Emmanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, the text is short on the sort of detail we relish these

Everything you need to know about violin playing (but were never taught)

Everything you need to know about violin playing (but were never taught)

Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with, according to Burton Kaplan This summer I spent two weeks at the Magic Mountain Music Farm Practice Retreat, run by Burton Kaplan. My article about the experience is out now in the September issue of The Strad, and I've written a blog about the experience of being offered such a learning opportunity as an amateur. But in the two weeks of twice-dai

An innovative solution to peg turning

I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940 learning on a special instrument designed by John Brown, with mandolin like tuning pegs to make it easier for them to tune: rather like the systems that have recently come on to the market. The bows too are designed to make it easier for children to learn the correct position. 'They are becoming masters at what is known as technique,' says the ann