What if how I taught vibrato didn’t work?

So teaching in French didn't just test my language skills, it tested how well I really understood what I was trying to teach.

I mean, just because I knew how to do it didn't necessarily mean I could teach someone else how to do it, especially in another language, in another culture.

So needing to get a better understanding, I looked back and tried to remember how I learned things like how to hold the ball, where to place my fingers, how I recognized when a note was out of tune, how I learned to vibrate. You get the idea.

And since all of this was happening in my mind in English, my next challenge became how to explain it all in French to French students.

With this in mind, I remember working with a student who was around eight years old, and it was time to start teaching them vibrato.

But teaching vibrato had always been tricky for me. You see, when I was trying to learn it, I worked so hard that one night I actually dreamed I was vibrating.

I immediately woke up, pulled my violin out from under the bed, and did what I had done in the dream.

Et voila! I could do vibrato.

But I obviously couldn't teach a student to have a vibrato dream, so over the years I found other ways to teach it.

But with this student, none of those ways worked.

That's when I started wondering if I should send them to another teacher, someone with a different approach. I mean, I didn't want the student to develop a complex just because I couldn't get through.

I was frustrated, to say the least, and thinking about what they must have been feeling made it even worse.

While around that same time one of my older students marched into a lesson and declared that they were never again going to play Bach for a jury.

I was amused, since back then in French conservatory students had no say in what they would be playing for juries.

But despite that fact, I went along with them and asked why.

They told me that a jury member made the remark that their trills were way too fast, looking completely exasperated. They said that another jury member then told them that their trills sounded like Tweety Bird.

Well, I hid my smile and asked them to show me.

They unpacked their violin and played the passage with the trill for me.

After listening, I asked, is it just about the speed of the trill, or was there something else? They said it was only about the speed.

So I suggested that they simply slow the gesture down.

They frowned at my suggestion, but after a moment they did it. And just like that Tweety Bird flew away.

Well, they had a slower trill.

We laughed, but then a light bulb went off, as it suddenly occurred to me that this might be a great way to teach vibrato to my young student.

So I made a plan, and at the next lesson I showed this younger student how to do a trill.

I had them practice doing it with the second and third fingers, ten minutes a day, and gradually increasing the tempo with a metronome.

The following week we did the same thing, but added the first and second fingers.

At the third lesson, I asked them to do the trill again. They seemed comfortable doing it, so I asked them to do a trill with the second and third fingers, but this time without letting the third finger touch the string.

They looked confused by what I had asked, but followed my instructions anyway.

And after a few false starts they began to realize what was going on, because they had started to do vibrato, and were thrilled.

Well, I as well was relieved, and grateful.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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