Teaching Violin from the Beginning

So after I'd been teaching at the conservatory for a few years, the director invited me into his office.

That's when he told me that I'd be given beginners to teach the following fall.

Now as exciting as that might sound, I was nervous. I mean, I'd started a few students back in the US, but this would be different.

This would be in France, with French students, and of course, in French.

For sure there were beginner methods out there, but I hadn't been trained in any of them. But more to the point, I felt like I needed something that fit the world these students were coming from.

That's when I started thinking about French children's songs. Music that was already part of their lives.

It made sense to me that those songs could become the vessel for everything I believed a beginner violinist should learn and experience.

So the first step was not obvious, as I had to look through a mountain of French children's songs and decide which ones might actually work.

My wife, being French, was obviously an enormous help as my instincts, of course, came from the American side of the Atlantic.

Once I had made my selections, the next question was what keys should I use, and in what order? I started thinking back to the music I had learned as a child, and I noticed how many of those early pieces, like Vivaldi and Acolle, were in A minor.

This made me wonder if there was a connection.

I thought about how piano methods often begin with C major, and how A minor is its relative minor.

So maybe that was why A minor had such a presence in early violin literature.

I tried it out on the violin, and that's when I noticed something else.

To play an A minor pattern on the G string, my elbow had to come very far under the instrument.

And while young children are flexible, starting them off with that kind of posture felt like I was sending the wrong message. So I moved the same finger pattern, whole step, whole step, half step, to the A string. And there it was.

The first tetrachord of A major.

Then I tried the same pattern on the E string, and I had a full one octave A major scale.

I was amazed.

Not only did the scale pattern work, but my elbow stayed in a very comfortable position.

And the finger spacing, A, B, C sharp, D, seemed to line up with how the fingers naturally fall when the hand is relaxed.

So physically, it all just made sense.

My next realization came when I noticed that if I simply started the same pattern from the D string, I got a D major scale.

And the same thing happened when starting on the G string.

On top of that, I was gently moving the elbow further under the violin with each new string.

This way, the G string position was achieved with much less stress.

By the way, all of this reminded me that when I was young, I had been taught scales using tetrachords, not by memorizing the circle of fifths.

Learning that way helped me understand how scales were built.

So now one octave scales that started with open strings were clear.

But what about when we started with the first finger? That's when the beauty of tetrachords became even more apparent because the pattern from the open string scales was the same.

Whole step, whole step, half step.

It almost became a mantra.

So just as I had done before, I started with the elbow in mind and came back to the A string. B flat became the first finger starting point. Then I moved to the D string and began there with the first finger on E flat.

At that point, I wanted to explore another tetrachord. So I looked at D minor and F major.

D minor was interesting, but I settled on F major, mainly because the elbow could now position itself comfortably for three strings.

And this completed my key order of A, D, G, B flat, E flat, and then F.

So with all that, my newly learned computer skills were now going to be put to the test.

I decided to begin each new key section with a page that showed the scale with its tetrachord pattern written underneath.

I included my fingering board, which was a visual representation of where the fingers were placed on the string, and also a piano keyboard.

On the next page, I placed a picture that visually represented the song and underneath it, the lyrics. That page would be followed by excerpts from the song to help organize practice, along with a few short exercises.

Because the year of solfege was required back then before they could start an instrument, they were already capable of reading the notes.

But because they knew the song beforehand, memorizing was easy.

And so now I had my book for beginners, which I call Chanson pour les Jeunes Villainistes.

To teach them, I decided not to play along on the violin, but instead to accompany them at the piano, playing simple chords and the melody.

I felt this would help them focus on what they were doing rather than on how I was playing.

It also created a harmonic background that could support them as they learned.

I also insisted that a family member attend lessons. I wanted to be sure the parent understood what we were doing so that they could answer questions if they came up at home.

Once a month, I organized groups of three to rehearse together, with me at the piano, of course.

They all had a lot of fun playing the songs together, playing all of them from memory, of course.

We were even asked to perform for other classes.

And eventually, three of the students presented a few songs in a conservatory concert. It was my piano debut, so yes, I was nervous.

But those three calm six-year-olds carried the day.

And as they received a grand ovation, the pride in their eyes said it all.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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