Violin Teacher Quotes

Our poor human heart is flawed: it is like a cake without the frosting: the first two acts of the theatre without the climax. Even its design is marred for a small piece is missing out of the side. That is why it remains so unsatisfied: it wants life and it gets death: it wants Truth and it has to settle for an education; it craves love and gets only intermittent euphoria’s with satieties. Samples, reflections and fractions are only tastes, not mouthfuls. A divine trick has been played on the human heart as if a violin teacher gave his pupil an instrument with one string missing. God kept a part of man's heart in Heaven, so that discontent would drive him back again to Him Who is Eternal Life, All-Knowing Truth and the Abiding Ecstasy of Love.

Before you say anything censorious about anyone, ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? If the answer to any one of these is even a qualified no, you’d best be quiet.” And she remembered it. Miss

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after

When he played that violin for us, I thought about his stories and the history he talked of, about paintings I had seen and books I had read. His violin made a smoky, mysterious sound. I heard it in the explosions of chestnuts cooking on a brazier at the edge of a river, and horses clopping across cobblestones in Siena and Florence, and also the rustle of leaves that fell on Garibaldi's troops as they marched. The violin sang 'Roma o morte,' and it wailed for the mountains of dead in an American Civil War across the sea, and for Paris glittering with the Second Empire. It rose and fell with voices reading Victor Hugo aloud by whale oil, and it sang about dynamite, about Ottomans and Englishmen falling under their horses in the Crimea, and the feet of crowds shuffling through international expositions. Above all, Stoyan's violin sang about places - places its maker had been, places the teacher of its maker had been, places its current owner would someday see, and the many, many places where he would someday perform on it.

Blanc went on to speaking parts, playing a wide variety of sardonic and hysterical characters. He played caustic delivery men and punchdrunk fight trainers. As Benny’s beleaguered French violin teacher, he suffered through Benny’s scrapings and then had to plead for his money. Inevitably, Benny had no small change—he was a dime off, and this called for a trip to his vault. At last, liberated, Professor LeBlanc would scream, “I’m free! I’m free!” and storm out joyously, singing the Marseillaise.

Or take an instance from the student’s childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost. What then is litost? Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

I Brought My Grandma's Teeth to School I brought my grandma’s teeth to school to share for show-and-tell. Billy showed his sneakers. It was more like show-and-smell. Kevin brought a violin and showed he couldn’t play. Katie brought a snake to school—too bad it got away. Our class likes show-and-tell a lot, so we were sad to hear our teacher say that show-and-tell is canceled till next year.

A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius or special talent,” Noyes was delighted, replying, “We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

The truth was he’d won the moment he set foot on Russian soil, and now the world knew it. He may have come in second, but he’d gone further than any other American—Black or white. And he hadn’t taken lessons from age three, or attended music festivals at age ten, or been drilled relentlessly by elite private teachers.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Lina Lamont provides both an effective “beard” for Don and Cosmo and a foil, representing both the reason for Don’s “unattached” state and the basis for their mutual contempt for women. Yet the signs are all there to be read for those interested in reading them: Cosmo and Don performing as a burlesque team, in which they sit on each other’s laps and play each other’s violins; Cosmo’s comment to Lina after the premiere of The Royal Rascal, “Yeah, Lina, you looked pretty good for a girl”;30 and their bullying, in “Moses Supposes,” of the fogyish diction coach, figuratively drawn out of his closet only to be ridiculed as an asexual “pansy” who can’t sing and dance (thus both confirming and denying homosexuality at the same time).31 On a broader scale, Kelly’s career as a dancer, offering a more masculinized style of athletic dance (in opposition especially to the stylized grace of Fred Astaire), represented a similar balancing act between, in this case, the feminized occupation of balletic dance and a strong claim of heterosexual masculinity. Significantly, the process of exclusion they use with the diction coach is precisely what Cosmo proposes they apply to Lina in converting The Dueling Cavalier into a musical: “It’s easy to work the numbers. All you have to do is dance around Lina and teach her how to take a bow.” But they also apply the strategy to Kathy, who is only just learning to “dance” in this sense (conveniently so, since Debbie Reynolds had had but little dance training, as noted).32 Early on, we see her dance competently in “All I Do Is Dream of You,” but she then seems extremely tentative in “You Were Meant for Me,” immobile for much of the number, not joining in the singing, and dancing only as Don draws her in (which is, of course, consistent with her character’s development at this point). With “Good Mornin’,” though, she seems to “arrive” as part of the Don-Cosmo team, even though for part of the number she serves as a kind of mannequin—much like the voice teacher in “Moses Supposes,” except that she sings the song proper while Don and Cosmo “improvise” tongue-twisting elaborations between the lines. As the number evolves, their emerging positions within the group become clear. Thus, during their solo clownish dance bits, using their raincoats as props, Kathy and Don present themselves as fetishized love objects, Kathy as an “Island girl” and Don as a matador, while Cosmo dances with a “dummy,” recalling his earlier solo turn in “Make ’em Laugh.

I started learning English from Abuelo Jorge's old grammar textbooks. I found them in Abuelo Celia's closet. They date back to 1919, the first year he started working for the American Electric Broom Company. At school, only a few students were allowed to learn English, by special permission. The rest of us had to learn Russian. I liked the curves of the Cyrillic letters, their unexpected sounds. I liked the way my name looked: Иван. I took Russian for nearly two years at school. My teacher, Sergey Mikoyan, praised me highly. He said I had an ear for languages, that if I studied hard I could be a translator for world leaders. It was true I could repeat anything he said, even tongue twisters like kolokololiteyshchiki perekolotili vikarabkavshihsya vihuholey "the church bell casters slaughtered the desmans that had scrambled out." He told me I had a gift, like playing the violin, or mastering chess.

Beethoven was so awkward on the violin that his teachers believed him hopeless as a composer.

I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find that my college teachers—famous academics and composers—inhabited an entirely different musical universe. They knew nothing about, and cared little for, the music I had grown up with. Instead, their world revolved around the dissonant, cerebral music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers. As I quickly learned, in this environment not everything was possible: tonality was considered passé and “unserious”; electric guitars and saxophones were not to be mixed with violins and pianos; and success was judged by criteria I could not immediately fathom. Music, it seemed, was not so much to be composed as constructed—assembled painstakingly, note by note, according to complicated artificial systems. Questions like “does this chord sound good?” or “does this compositional system produce likeable music?” were frowned upon as naive or

Even supermotivated people who’re working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice. For instance, when a Japanese rowing team invited Olympic gold medalist Mads Rasmussen to come visit, he was shocked at how many hours of practice their athletes were logging. It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you’re after, he told them. It’s high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued, just as Ericsson’s research has shown, for just a few hours a day, tops. Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, says he’s been playing the violin since he was two but didn’t really start practicing deliberately until he was twenty-two. Why not? There was no lack of motivation—at one point, young Noa was taking lessons with four different teachers and, literally, commuting to three different cities to work with them all. Really, the problem was just that Noa didn’t know better. Once he discovered there was an actual science of practice—an approach that would improve his skills more efficiently—both the quality of his practice and his satisfaction with his progress skyrocketed. He’s now devoted himself to sharing that knowledge with other musicians.

Schools also tend to minimize powerful healing and resilience-building activities like sports, music, and art. These are often viewed as elective or enrichment activities, when in fact they can be the very bedrock of academic learning, thanks to their regulatory and relational elements. Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity makes the overactive and overly reactive core regulatory networks (see Figure 2) get back “in balance.” Music falls into this category—both playing and listening. All sports involve doses of it. Dance, too. And, of course, each of these activities also has very important relational elements. You learn when to pass the ball to your teammate; you learn how to move with your dance partner; you synchronize playing your violin with other members of the orchestra. Finally, there are cognitive elements to sports, music, and other arts; they engage, activate, and synchronize activity throughout the brain, from the bottom up and from the top down. These are whole-brain healthy activities. Now imagine thirty children, sitting in rows in a classroom, passively listening to the teacher

The most effective way I have learned to internalize rhythm and pulse is to halve the length of the beats per minute on the metronome. For example, if the piece of music is played at 60 bmp, then I will set the metronome to 30 bmp. This way I have to play two beats of music within one click of the metronome. This forces you to feel and know exactly where the two beats sit. Once you are very comfortable with the tips mentioned above, try challenging yourself further by playing with one click per measure. This will help you develop your inner pulse. For example, playing in a 4/4 time signature: 1. Play the passage so that the metronome click is on the downbeat (beat 1). 2. Play the passage so that the metronome click is on the 2nd beat (beat 2). 3. Play the passage so that the metronome click is half-way through the measure (beat 3). 4. Play the passage so that the metronome click is on the upbeat of the measure (beat 4). I know and I have heard many teachers say that you should practice as much with the metronome as without it. In my experience, the closer I got to being confident playing 1 measure in 1 click, the better I played without the metronome. I would strongly recommend playing a lot with the metronome at 1 click per measure and challenging yourself beyond that. Play 1 click for every 2 measures, even for 3 or 4 measures depending on the speed of the piece. This is what will help you play in time without a metronome.

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

The last violin notes rang in my mind’s ears. I closed my eyes and beheld the face of the Teacher, the Old Doctor, my friend. I vowed to keep his memory alive and share the treasure of his wisdom so that everyone could know that good does triumph over evil.

The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words. The economic problem of the teacher (of violin or of language or of anything else) is how to string it out so as to be paid for more lessons.

There is a difference between a lump-in-the-throat kind of blessing, and edification. A preacher who plays the emotional violin can make you feel good for a time, but at the end, what do you have? Nothing. As the ancient rhetoricians would have put it, nothing dries more quickly than a tear. An edifying preacher or teacher gives you a brick, and, when you get home, you know exactly where in the wall to put it. As a result, the structure goes up.

She asked me if I would visit the music class sometime and speak to the kids about the viability of a music career. A few months later I found myself there in that same music room, talking to the kids and jamming out for them. The kids were beautiful, the jamming and talking was cool, but I walked away from the experience shaken. The last time I had been in that room was twenty years before, and it had been packed full of kids playing French horns, clarinets, violins, basses, trombones, flutes, tympani, and saxophones, all under the capable instruction of orchestra teacher Mr. Brodsky. It was a room alive with sound and learning! Any instrument a kid wanted to play was there to be learned and loved. But on this day, there were no instruments, no rustling of sheet music, no trumpet spit muddying the floor, no ungodly cacophony of squeaks and wails driving Mr. Brodsky up a fucking wall. There was a volunteer teacher, a group of interested kids, and a boom box. A music appreciation class. All the arts funding had been cut the year after I left Fairfax, under the auspices of a ridiculous law called Proposition 13, a symptom of the Reaganomics trickle-down theory. I was shocked to realize that these kids didn’t get an opportunity to study an instrument and blow in an orchestra. I thought back to the dazed days when I would show up to school after one of Walter’s violent episodes, and the peace I found blowing my horn in the sanctuary of that room. I thought of the dreams Tree and I shared there of being professional musicians, before going over to his house to be inspired by the great jazzers. Because I loved playing in the orchestra I’d be there instead of out doing dumb petty crimes. I constantly ditched school, but the one thing that kept me showing up was music class. FUCK REAGANOMICS. Man, kids have different types of intelligences, some arts, some athletics, some academics, but all deserve to be nurtured, all deserve a chance to shine their light.

Many such top performers overcame their average—or even below-average—intellects and nonexistent aptitudes to develop outstanding abilities in disciplines such as chess, music, business, and medicine. Examples of such remarkable transformations abound throughout history. Henry Ford failed in business several times and was flat broke five times before he founded the Ford Motor Company. In his youth, Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Beethoven was so awkward on the violin that his teachers believed him hopeless as a composer.