How to teach adult string students

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This article appeared in The Strad August 2014 issue

Many years ago, having finished music college, I agreed to fill in as interim cello teacher at a girls’ boarding school in Sevenoaks. I was granted an interview with the head teacher, a Maggie Thatcher lookalike, who informed me, in cut-glass tones, that I was hired as long as I refrained from ‘such appalling Americanisms as blue jeans and chewing gum’. So intimidating did I find her that I agreed to so refrain without daring to observe that gum-chewing is not a sin to which I had ever been addicted, or that peer-reviewed research has yet to establish any link between the wearing of jeans and rotten cello teaching.

The school proved to be my introduction to cello teaching, and a pretty steep learning curve it was. There was little Lottie (not her real name), whose innovative notion of a down bow was a strokestarting near her left earlobe and ending curled up somewhere around her right. There was Susanna, scion of a famous literary family, who disdained second and third position, preferring (with a perseverance worthy of a better cause) to play (at speed) D–E–D–E on the A string with the profoundly original fingering 4–1–4–1. And there was Joy, who confided to me her determination to run away from school, and who was, I flattered myself, my one success of the term. (Managed to talk her out of it; don’t know why; giving the matter impartial consideration now I think I’d have run away, too.) Not to mention the freezing hut where the instrumental teachers were regularly cast into outer darkness, nor the weekly machinations necessary in order to swipe little Sophie from the clutches of her rapacious French teacher and into her cello lesson.