Teaching Violin by Skype

Out of the blue came a request from someone I didn’t even know, someone who lived far away from me.  “Would you consider giving me a violin lesson by Skype?” she asked me by email.  It sounded both fun and challenging, so I said, “Sure.”

I’ve been giving lessons by Skype for over a year now, and I’ve discovered a lot of interesting things about this kind of teaching.

I teach violin / fiddle to beginners, including adult beginners.  Beginning fiddlers really do need teachers.  The physical techniques necessary for playing the violin are challenging.  Beginners must learn, consolidate, and maintain many motor skills with left and right shoulders, arms, wrists, hands, and fingers.  It is crucial to develop good habits right from the start because bad habits will be very difficult to correct later.  Beginning students need a teacher to watch them play and make corrections.  

There are different kinds of online violin lessons.  A common one, which is not mine, resembles a large scale group lesson.  The teachers videotape themselves teaching lessons and put the tapes online for anyone to use for free.  I have looked at a lot of them, and some are very good.  The way I teach, via Skype, is really a private lesson.  I teach one on one and in real time.  I watch and listen to a student and give him or her feedback just as I would to a student in my home.  My online lessons are up close and personal.  

I often read beginning fiddlers say that the sound they make is like squeaking and squawking and that the people who live with them can scarcely bear listening to them for the first year or so.  I always tell my beginning students that after just one lesson, they will be able to make a pretty sound with their violin.  I have never been proven wrong.  I regard the squeaks and squawks of beginning fiddlers as cries for help.

Most people believe that it is best to have a teacher who can be with them in person, and I agree.  However, this is not always possible.  Most of my online violin students live in musically underserved areas.  That includes people in rural areas in the U.S. as well as those in other countries, notably Australia.   Since I live in a major metropolitan area with lots of violin teachers and violin stores, this has been a new concept for me.   One of my fun experiences teaching online happened when something streaked by outside the window behind one of my Australian students.  He later told me that it was a kangaroo.  One of my students lives in a small city in Alaska.  There was only one violin  teacher in her city, and he moved away.  I asked one of my students in Australia how far she lived from a violin store, and she said, “An eight hour drive.”  When these people need help learning to play the violin, online lessons can be a godsend.  

My distance learning students fall into one of two groups.  First are the ones whom I teach regularly  once a week.  Teaching them is very similar to teaching my students in my home weekly.  The second group consists of self taught adult beginners.  Some of them have been struggling alone in the wilderness for too long.  Some have no fiddle teachers nearby.  Others just can not afford to pay for weekly lessons.  They all realize that they need help from someone who can watch and listen to them play and give personalized feedback.  They generally take lessons from me on a sporadic basis.  Results would probably be better with regular weekly lessons, but I’m glad to help them in any way that I can.

I love playing the violin; I love learning new things; and I love helping others.  Teaching violin gives me immense personal satisfaction.  Teaching one on one online has helped me extend my reach and explore new ways of teaching.  I just love it.

Teaching adult beginners to play the violin

I am a patient, encouraging teacher of beginners of all ages, and many of my students are adults.  A lot of adult beginners approach me saying, “I don’t even know whether it makes sense to start at my age” or “I have no experience with music.  Can I start now?”  I tell them, “It is never too late to start doing something you love.” 

You can read about me as a teacher on the website I made for my students and on my personal website.  Be sure to read about my adult beginners, too.  

I have found one big difference between adult beginners and kid beginners:  Adults are impatient. The adult beginners often want to jump ahead and do complex things before they master the basics. They also get frustrated easily because they think that, "I've been studying for a year. I should be able to do this right by now."  I tell them them to remember that the violin is a very technical instrument.  I also advise them to give themselves high marks and feelings of accomplishment for every increment of progress, no matter how small.  A teacher who has experience with adult beginners can help by giving you positive feedback whenever it is justified.

Of course, adults’ bodies are not the same as kids’ bodies. Often I find that adult beginners, especially adult males, can not use their hands and fingers in the preferred way,  I have to help them find ways to "cheat" and still produce a good sound.  I treat each student as an individual and avoid the "one size fits all" approach.

Playing the violin can cause muscle cramps, especially while learning.  The people who are most often affected are adult males because their muscles are large.   You can not play the violin with muscle cramps, just as you can not run with leg cramps.  Stretching can help you keep your muscles healthy and pain free, and it is important for all violin players, particularly for adult males. I recommend stretching before, during, and after practicing.  I have a page on my website (https://sites.google.com/site/paulinelernersviolinstudio/stretching-exercises-for-violinists) with videos of helpful stretches, and I teach these stretches to my students.

I love teaching adult beginners.  My lessons are stimulating, fun, and rewarding for both me and my students.  

Through the Windows of My Mind

When I look at my photo of light and open spaces at Strathmore Music Center, I sometimes see an intriguing world beckoning for me to come there, outside the window.  I think about Alice, who stepped “Through the Looking Glass” and explored a world related to, but in some ways very different from, our own.  In another story, Peter had a wonderful trick of flying in through the window and later flying away through the same window to a very different world.  Wendy loved to listen to his stories about his other world.

The child is father to the man.  Robert Louis Stevenson was an invalid child who spent most of his childhood in bed.  His nurse would carry him to the window so he could look out.  Back in bed, he would play with his toys, sometimes pretending that he was exploring outdoors.  Some of his childhood impressions were expressed years later in his poems in “A Child's Garden of Verses,” which I learned to read on.

Robert Frost wrote a poem about a tree outside his bedroom window.  He said

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. 

Many of Georia O’Keefe’s paintings are about light and open space.  When she was a little girl,  someone told her to build a doll house.  She went outside, found two sticks of about the same size, and put them down on the ground in a plus (+) shape.  Her dollhouse had lots of open space connected to the outdoors.

Wordsworth was impressed with daffodils that he had seen outside dancing in the wind.  Later, in a pensive mood, he saw them with his “inward eye” and found that

...then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

I thought of all these things and will likely think of more just from looking at my photo.

The Alleged Death of Classical Music

“Please comment on the decline of Classical music listeners in our society and what, if anything, can be done to reverse the trend.”  No, this is not the subject of an essay required for admission to a school of music.  It is a question posed on LinkedIn recently and discussed con spiritu online.  To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reported death of classical music has been greatly exaggerated.  

I got revved up on the subject and wrote the following.

Will people be playing and listening to Lady Gaga in 20 - 40 years from now? Many people love and listen to music by dead European musicians such as Bach, Handel, Mozart, Chopin, and many, many more today, and people will continue listening to their music and loving it long after Lady Gaga and her ilk pass from the public eye and ear.

I agree with the music teachers who emphasized the importance of getting classical music to kids when they are young and impressionable. My parents listened to classical music around the house all the time when I was a kid. We didn't have much money, so the only live performances of classical music I heard during my childhood were sponsored by a local brewery. I think that live outreach concerts of classical music for people who would not hear it otherwise are very important.

Classical music does not need to be dumbed down for kids to understand it. I'm old enough to remember listening to and loving Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. I was excited when they were re-released on video and DVD, although I could not afford to buy them until just a few years ago. I still listen to them over and over, love them, and keep learning from them.

BTW, I love listening to and playing, when I can, music by the Beatles, Bill Monroe, the Tannahill Weavers, Ravi Shankar, and more. I play and teach classical and other styles of music, and I can attest that there is a surplus of prejudice on all sides.

Let's not forget that Lang Lang -- the great, young, Asian born and raised, master of classical music by dead European composers -- was first turned on to classical music by a Tom and Jerry cartoon with music by Liszt.

Ride, Sally, Ride

I feel saddened by the passing of Dr. Sally Ride and impressed by her legacy. She was the first American woman astronaut and forged ahead despite public putdowns regarding the innate inabilities of a woman in a male-dominated field. Equally impressive to me was her stance as a panel member investigating the tragic blowup of the Challenger space shuttle shortly after takeoff and the resulting deaths of all of the crew. Dr. Ride asked tough questions and was morally outraged at the refusal of NASA administrators to take seriously earlier warnings about the O-rings instability that caused the blowup. I'm glad that I came of age when she did. I have respected her and benefitted from her role as a professional.