January 2011

Teacher Talk

A series of teaching-articles in the Strad Magazine

How do you keep teen­agers on track? The super­stars will always prac­tise, but what about the future rank-and-file play­ers who seem to be drop­ping out of prac­tising, not to speak of school orches­tras, in record num­bers? Mark Merkel, Alberta, Canada
Boris Kuschnir: Super­stars often don’t prac­tise enough, either! Of course they prac­tised a lot to reach their status but once they get there some of them stop being self-critical and so they might lose the excel­lence of their begin­ning. Rank-and-file play­ers tend to prac­tise bet­ter when their teacher gives them inter­est­ing goals such as pre­par­a­tion for com­pet­i­tions, con­certs or record­ings. The teacher always has to give an idea of how to reach these goals on a very spe­cific level, not just say­ing, ‘Prac­tise a lot’, but giv­ing clear guid­ance about how to solve both tech­nical and musical prob­lems. The res­ult will not only be that the stu­dents even­tu­ally prac­tises more and more, but also that they enjoy it.

How long should a young per­son work on a rep­er­toire piece? Notori­ous ped­agogues form days of yore often kept a stu­dent on a piece ‘until they had mastered it’. How­ever, today’s fast pace seems to demand con­stant change. Justine Ren­frew, Santa Fe, New Mex­ico
Boris Kuschnir: The dur­a­tion clearly depends on the goal that teacher sets for the stu­dent. For example, they might choose a piece to prac­tice tech­nical prob­lems such as vibrato, stac­cato, spic­cato, legato, bow-division, double stops or the learn­ing of dif­fer­ent musical char­ac­ters and styles. When the stu­dent reaches a good level, nor­mally the best thing would be to leave the piece and go on with some­thing else. Of course in the case of record­ings, import­ant con­certs or com­pet­i­tions, we should look for the mas­tery of that piece, which could take months, or even years.