A Teacher Lineage - Mostras

So, does the name Mostras mean anything to you? Well, when exploring the teacher lineage of Glamian, the name Mostras appears prominently.

But given that at the same time, Auer had been producing violinists such as Heifetz and Milstein in St. Petersburg, Mostras' name is probably overshadowed. So that said, just who was Mostras? Well, he was born on April 4th, 1886 in the village of Ardzinka in Russia's Tambov province. As a young man, Mostras left the village for Moscow where he studied with Boris Sibor at the Moscow Philharmonic School of Music and Drama.

Sebor was a graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as a student of Auer and later continued his studies in Berlin with Joseph Joachim.

Sebor was a solid, respected teacher who transmitted what he absorbed from Auer and Joachim, but he didn't systemize or theorize his approach the way Mostras did.

It's Mostras that's remembered as a methodologist and systemizer who brought scientific rigor to violin pedagogy.

Having taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1965 and heading the violin department from 1936 to 1950, he was deeply committed to the analysis of violin playing and teaching.

In 1931, he instituted a course at the conservatory devoted exclusively to violin methodology.

Mostras was interested in the psychophysiological side of playing and teaching, and this led him to introduce the concepts pre -hearing and pre -feeling.

Mostras' concept of pre -hearing referred to hearing the pitch in the mind before producing it on the instrument. Pre -feeling referred to anticipating the tactile sensation, the finger placement, the musical action before executing it.

For Mostras, the two worked together as a unified mental -physical preparation that preceded every action on the instrument.

His idea was, you hear it internally, you feel it internally, and only then do you play it.

So could Mostras' ventures into performance have led him to those conclusions? Well, he did perform one year in the Lenin Quartet, one of the earliest Soviet string quartets, and from 1922 to 1932 he also played in Persefans, or Pervesenfochesky Assemble.

Seriously, my Russian is really bad, but translated it means First Symphony Ensemble Without Conductor.

Founded by Lev Zeitlin, the ensemble embodied Bolshevik ideals of collective labor, and its unusual elliptical seating arrangement meant that some musicians performed with their backs to the audience.

The violin professors at the Moscow Conservatory, those being Lev Zeitlin, Abram Yampolsky, and Konstantin Mostras, held classes at the Moscow Conservatory, and when David Oistrakh arrived in Moscow after graduating from the Odessa Conservatory, he sat in on them and built a relationship with Mostras.

Now, Oistrakh wasn't Mostras' pupil, but he worked under him for 15 years, performing his arrangements, editing the 1947 edition of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with him, and he headed the department after Mostras stepped down.

So Mostras came out of the hour and the Joachim tradition through Sibu, but what he developed went on to build and extend that inheritance.

His books, Intonation on the Violin, The Rhythmical Discipline of the Violinist, The Dynamics of the Art of Violin Playing, and others, helped formalize his method and cement his place in what came to be called the Soviet Violin School.

So the lineage of ideas goes from hour and Joachim through Sibu to Mostras, then from Mostras to Glamian, and from Glamian to DeLay, and, well, let's just say that it keeps moving forward.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEcJMoSCuP0

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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