Violin Video Lesson: Look Back, Plan Forward!

When teaching pre -college violin students, I believe one of the goals is helping them prepare for that next big journey in their lives, college.

But how do you do that when most 17 or 18 year olds aren't even sure what they want to do as the world is changing so quickly these days? Because of this, I've always taken the position that my job was to prepare them to have choices.

For me, as their violin teacher in the US, that meant preparing them for entry into a conservatory.

This was not because I wanted them to become professional violinists, but because I wanted them to have as many options available as possible.

You see, whether they decided to study business, artificial intelligence, or violin, I believed it was my responsibility to help them avoid saying, I wish I had, help them avoid looking back with regret.

So with this in mind, how do you prepare a student for entry into a conservatory? I found my answer by starting at the end and working backwards. I began by researching what repertoire they would need if they decided to audition. Then I asked myself, what skills would they need to perform this repertoire? And that's how my backward journey began, starting at the goal and tracing each step back to the beginning.

First of all, I reviewed conservatory audition requirements and made a spreadsheet.

Live auditions usually included a slow and fast movement from a 19th or 20th or 21st century concerto, two contrasting movements from an unaccompanied Bach sonata or partita, one Paganini caprice, and one brilliant concert piece.

One conservatory made it simple by asking for a complete major concerto, a complete Mozart concerto, a complete Bach sonata or partita, and a Paganini caprice.

Well, now with this outline in place, my goal for the student became helping them to choose the needed repertoire.

I understood though that whatever they chose needed to be performance ready by the start of their senior year of high school, since pre -screening audition tapes are usually due by December 1st and live auditions happen in early spring.

All this had an impact on their junior year as they now needed to take whatever repertoire they chose for these auditions to the highest level possible.

All of this meant that their sophomore and freshman years were now dedicated to exploring repertoire and playing it in front of people as much as possible.

Doing this allowed them to find out what their repertoire felt like to perform and see how audiences reacted to their efforts.

As their teacher, I was as well able to observe how they handled pressure, which was important in helping them to prepare psychologically for the auditions they were going to take.

All of this now helped me understand what I needed to focus on skill -wise in their early development as I understood better what technical skills they would need to be able to handle the kind of repertoire they would encounter later.

I mean, how can you learn a piece if you don't have the technique to play it? This is why understanding how to guide students through etude scales and technical studies is so important.

That said, every student is different, which is why I always kept my curriculum flexible.

At each step, I would propose repertoire possibilities and let the student choose rather than dictating what they should play.

I believe this to be a good way to have them take ownership of their decisions going forward.

So for pre -college students and their parents, this way of planning helped bring clarity. It brought into focus the idea that sometimes moving forward means defining the goal first, then mapping the path that leads to it.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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