My teaching at New Virtuosi
This year I was lucky enough to return to New Virtuosi in Oxford, where I was once again able to enrich my Dalcroze teaching experience with its wonderful students and faculty.
New Virtuosi is a high level international residential violin course established by Ani Schnarch (Professor at the Royal College of Music). It makes me feel incredibly grateful that Ani considers Dalcroze something so important in the students’ experience that it constitutes the first activity they join in for at the beginning of the course, as well as the start to each of their subsequent six demanding days of lessons, masterclasses, and performances.
The students are all highly skilled musicians of ages ranging from eight to twenty-four years old, in need, at the start of their day, of activities that help them not only warm up and coordinate their bodies, brains, and nervous systems and attune them musically, but also tune in with each other and gain a different perspective on music. While I always present them with elements of challenge in these classes, the latter are also very focused on the enjoyment, pleasure, and socialising.
Last year, my approach was one where I established what I wanted the students to have experienced and developed by the end of the week, and worked backwards. This year, I took a more organic and, I believe and have been told, more successful approach, where I started from the music: pieces of repertoire of varied origins (geographical and historical) that I am passionate about, in which I found elements to work on with them. This also served the purpose of acquainting these exquisitely classical music students with something they would not ordinarily come across.
The youngest students learnt how to control and convey their energy, which they are very used to doing while holding and mastering their instrument, but not yet in other contexts that are intrinsically fosterers of uncontrolled enthusiasm, such as moving to music, sharing the space with others, interacting with a prop such as a tennis ball, etc. The early teenagers (thirteen to sixteen) learnt how to overcome awkwardness in relation to their body, movement, and others, and were very driven when given challenges relating to coordination, disassociation, and such. The oldest students, finally, were those who started seeing clearly how these activities relate to the awareness and development of their artistic personality and practice.
Of course, as in any of these environments, it is not all fun and games. While most students are disciplined, focused, and open minded from the beginning, some are suspicious of movement and more creative musical avenues, considering them “a waste of time”, “embarrassing”, or, play time. In this specific environment, this last perception is sometimes due to the fact that the discipline the students have to embody for most of the day at the course in the several hours of practice and lessons, needs a counteracting part, which can easily be found in a Dalcroze lesson. This is completely acceptable, if not desirable, as long as an understanding is reached about the seriousness of the Dalcroze lesson itself. In terms of the “waste of time” narrative, again, in this specific environment, it can be understood when contextualised: it is undoubtedly hard for a young and not yet fully self aware violin student who is used to interact with music and its practice in a traditional manner by being disciplined into doing so, to seriously consider forms of embodied musical practice which have historically been misunderstood and/or disregarded.
Luckily, it is the violin teachers themselves, at New Virtuosi, who reinforce the importance of Dalcroze, which, coming to the students from the trusted source of their mentors, helps the Dalcroze teaching and learning environment hugely. It was such a pleasure to lead, at the end of the course, a brief impromptu Dalcroze session for members of the faculty, born from their own desire to learn more about the approach. Eventually, through experiences of enjoyment and satisfaction, the students realise themselves, in different degrees of awareness depending on age and personality, the importance of what we do.
When this does happen, magical moments of flow are created, and beautiful, attuned, profound movements and interactions are seen, here more than anywhere else I have been, thanks to these young people’s familiarity with music and skill.
