EXCERPTS FROM ROSINDUST

The best teachers are not necessarily the most accomplished in their field, but they are most definitely the ones who care enough to communicate their enthusiasm and curiosity about a subject to others. What has made music significant and meaningful in our lives? Can we articulate what we love about it? Perhaps it is the beauty of the music we play, or the discipline of learning a challenging instrument, or the opportunity for personal discovery. When we draw energy from the joy and fulfillment of our own experience with music, then the greatest gift we can offer is to share this passion with our students.

From Chapter 5 Why We Practice:

It’s quite a revelation to learn how practicing causes the brain to establish new connections. The brain literally has billions of already-existing configurations of nerves, chemicals, and electrical impulses to do all the things it already knows how to do. When a brand-new task is demanded of it, a signal may have to zigzag through a multitude of those existing connections, taking the long way around because there is no other way. If the brain is asked to do the same new thing twenty-one days in a row, however, it creates its own shortcut—new nerve fibers called dendrites grow like branches on existing nerves, and a new synapse will be created that connects straight from the command to the goal! This new connection cannot be seen or felt, but the new skill that seemed so difficult at first just isn’t any more. Stop practicing now, and this fledgling synapse will soon disappear. Repetition over months and years will make that synapse a permanent one, and that’s the kind we’re trying to cultivate.

From Chapter 9 Intonation:

While it’s one thing for students to know their intonation needs work, it’s another altogether to know how to fix problems. Be sure to suggest specific practice methods for working on intonation, and allow time during lessons to teach students how to use these methods. Students need to do most of the work themselves, however. In other words, instead of you, the teacher, saying, "Your intonation was good except the G was very flat," ask your student what he heard. Get specific with your questions if necessary: "How was the G? Sharp, flat or in tune?" If he’s still unsure, don’t tell him—have him play again and listen. Ask how he could test it. Without offering too much, gently lead the student through the process so that he learns by listening and thinking for himself. The less work you do, the more adept students can become observing and resolving intonation problems.

Once the student has clarified a targeted note during a practice session or lesson, that note usually stays in focus and is reinforced for at least the rest of the hour. However, there have been times in lessons, that a student will switch to another piece, and there’s that D again—yet it’s out of tune as if he’s never heard D before in his life. "Hello??" I say, "Recognize this note? Is there something vaguely familiar about it?" Rather than throwing in the towel on a student when he doesn’t make this connection, though, I use it as an opportunity to offer some excellent news: that once that D has been tuned it is the same D in every piece he’ll play—in fact it is his for life. If the student grows up to play in a professional symphony, even if he become the most famous cellist in the world, the in-tune D he just played at this very lesson is the same in-tune D he will play forever. Melodramatic, I know, but it gets the student’s attention, and after a while the truth of it begins to sink in.

From Chapter 11 Teaching Musicianship:

Generally speaking, we teach the way we were taught, and perhaps not all of us had a teacher who had much to say about musicianship. Having good instincts ourselves, there was no real conscious effort to play musically, so now as teachers, it might be a real challenge to find words to describe what we do. Often suggestions aimed at helping students play more musically manifest themselves mechanically, so what we offer is only superficial information about making music. Without an expressive context or meaningful connection, dynamics, tempos and other musical elements become arbitrary exercises in technical execution: use more bow on the crescendo, slide into this shift, lift the bow to leave a space, vibrate. Consider how dynamics are frequently taught to young players: we show them how to use the bow to create loud and soft sounds, and then point out that on the page it says to play loud here and soft there, and congratulate them when they dutifully accomplish this. But in doing so, have we really taught them to play musically? Haven’t we just reduced this potentially colorful aspect of musicianship to yet one more technical hoop the student is supposed to jump through?

What are we doing when we shape a beautiful phrase, or make a special sound, or time a shift so that the arrival feels just right? We have to find a way to extract the essence of our music-making, distill the concept into words, and talk about it with our students... Even if it is a struggle to identify the source of a musical nuance that feels completely intuitive, we owe it to our students—and perhaps even to ourselves—to understand the underpinnings of our expressiveness. Did we color a note with a special sound because we hear a particular emotion in the melody line, or because we were reacting to a harmonic change? Did we linger over a phrase ending to give it a sense of finality, or to set up something special to come? Why might we feel quite definite about one musical choice, yet be willing to consider more options somewhere else? When we draw students into the creative process, and explore the possibilities together, we are helping them become thoughtful, aware and personally expressive musicians.