#teaching

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...

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...

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...

Happy Birthday, Ivry Gitlis!

The charismatic, idealistic, often contrarian and utterly unique violinist is 95 years young today. In celebration, here is an interview...

Pinchas Zukerman on how to change the world

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra celebrates its 70th birthday in 2016 and for its commemorative anniversary booklet, I had the...

Interview with Shmuel Ashkenasi

The former Vermeer Quartet leader and Curtis Institute professor discusses the negative sides of Ilona Fehér's 'tough love' school of...

Songs in the key of life

An understanding of the characteristics of the different keys can help you develop a palette of sounds. So do you know your innocent C...

The unbearable lightness of being Gary Hoffman

Gary Hoffman is one of the music world’s best-kept secrets, a fine and uncompromising cellist whose rare appearances mesmerise. For him,...

Eugene Drucker on Beethoven

I recently interviewed Eugene Drucker about his Southbank Centre concert with the Emerson Quartet on Sunday, 16 November, which you can...

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,...

A plea on behalf of amateur violinists

Two weeks at a violin practice retreat were life-changing for me, but left me wondering why there aren't enough places for amateur...

Leopold Auer weighs in on the vibrato debate

Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and...

The shortcut to perfection? Or tendinitis?

The British Pathé YouTube archive is proving to be a charming source of films about the violin, in all its forms. Here is a soundless...

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...

How Sheila Nelson made me love the violin

You probably didn’t know that my mother was also a journalist – the apple never falls far from the tree, as they say. She was the...

Sheila Nelson and her work in Tower Hamlets

In the 1980s, string pedagogue Sheila Nelson took her seminal teaching techniques to underprivileged schools in the London borough of...