top-rate viloin teacher
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Anonymous
You need a different hobby. |
Anonymous
Sorry that you didn't find my commentary useful. I know that if I was new to town, and was looking for an excellent teacher for my son/daughter, I'd want to know all the inside scoop on a particular teacher and their style of teaching (because there are so many out there) before I started exploring on my own and narrowing down the list of possible teachers. But what I mentioned about Horman is pretty common knowledge in the upper level studios. Ask any competition teacher in town if they have had any experiences with ABH poaching efforts, and they will cringe. |
Anonymous
Thanks for the information. We are looking for an advanced teacher for my son. I had heard about Amy Beth HOrman a while back, so good to know that she is no longer in the area. But yikes on her poaching... I'm sure this happens often the higher up you go. Whether it's violin, piano or any other instrument or sports even. Teachers are always looking for the best students especially the competition teachers. |
Anonymous
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Honestly, yes, ABH has historically drawn from other people's studios, but this kind of thing is not at all uncommon in most cities with serious violinists. Violin teachers often have four distinct levels of specialty -- teaching beginners, teaching intermediate students (which requires the ability to teach technique in a very precise way), teaching advanced students (the high end of technique plus some degree of artistry), and teaching artists (players with fairly "finished" technique who in need of some level of artistic refinement, usually.
It is relatively unusual for teachers to take students as beginners and continue to teach them all the way through their advanced years. It does happen, and there are some teachers who have that approach, but the more common situation is that students switch teachers after their beginning years or after their intermediate years. It's also fairly common for students to switch when their ambitions change -- for instance, when they start becoming serious about competitions or when they become interested in pursuing a professional career. Music teaching is a business. If you feel you can get what you want from another business, you will switch where you patronize. It is perfectly healthy for students to switch teachers. It can sometimes be frowned upon to aggressively solicit students from other studios, but ABH's previous policy of open auditions for her studio is perfectly reasonable. Students are unlikely to switch unless they feel they're getting something from the new teacher that they weren't getting from the previous teacher. It's not considered unethical, nor is it a negative mark or indication of a lack of skill if a teacher chooses to take competition-ready students rather than developing them from scratch. (Indeed, at the college level, everyone is taking students who were developed by someone else.) |
Anonymous
This is a very nice summary of the different levels of violin teachers out there and it makes sense. If you look at the MD or VA teacher list, there are just too many to know who these beginner, intermediate and advanced specialty teachers in the area are. If you could list off a few in each category, who would they be? So that we don't have to look through a list of 100 names in the area without direction. And bonus if you happen to know a general price range for each teacher. |
Anonymous
| Is the competition really intense from the teacher's perspective amongst their fellow teacher peers to find the best and brightest students to teach? My friend's kid (who is doing fairly well) recently played the violin for another teacher in town, very innocently. When she reported back to the teacher that she played her piece, the teacher got really upset with them. |
Anonymous
Anonymous
Thanks for the link - was hoping to avoid having to gloss through a long list of names without any context. If anyone can provide a brief summary of beginner, intermediate and advanced teachers who have a reputation for their excellent teaching that would be appreciated. I know so much of this is subjective, but there has to be a general sense of agreement that most can agree are the top teachers for each category. |
Anonymous
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If you don't get answers here, the biggest competitions in the area would publish lists of the winners in each age group and the teachers, wouldn't they? I'd look to see if any of the teachers names show up more than once and then Google them. That would be for intermediate and advanced anyway.
Beginners are a little trickier. If it were me, I would attend some of the conservatory recitals, like Levine's, and pay attention to the youngest kids' technique. If the students of a particular teacher stand out, I'd start there. |
Anonymous
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It is generally not okay to take a lesson from another teacher without informing your regular teacher, except in the context of a summer camp, master class, or other activity specifically designed to give students outside feedback. There is a practical reason for this; there are many different physical and mental approaches to playing the violin. and it can be confusing for a student to receive contradictory information if they go to another teacher. (If the student is just playing in front of another teacher, as opposed to actually taking a lesson, though, there should be no issues.)
When students to go to competitions, take juries, etc. and receive written feedback, students are normally requested to discuss that feedback with their teacher, who can contextualize the comments. The teachers at Levine, Washington Conservatory, and your local music shops generally all specialize in beginners, with varying levels of quality. At Levine's Suzuki program, Susan Katsarelis (the director) and Mary Findley (who has been there for a long time) are both solid teachers of beginners. At the intermediate level and advanced level, there's generally significant overlap in this area -- the list of teachers previously mentioned who teach competition winners generally dominate at both of these levels, locally. The teachers at Peabody Prep (including folks like Christian Tremblay) are also very good. However, there are teachers whose tend not to have prominent advanced students who have excellent reputations at the intermediate level, such as June Huang. Figure that $100 is a reasonable price for a high-quality violin teacher in this area. There are of course less expensive, less in-demand teachers, which may be fine depending on your needs. |
Anonymous
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$100 for a quality teacher in this town sounds about right, so many very good ones at this price point. Yes, there are a handful who charge more than $100, they are all the competition teachers with decades and decades of proven excellence. Anyone who charges more without proven results and years of experience, I would seriously question their motivation. So many greedy teachers in town, too, who prey on parents who don't know any better and are willing to fork over the money for a lesson. Please do your thorough research, parents!
You are the second person in a span of maybe a couple of weeks who has mentioned June Huang. I am not very familiar with her, but now, I am intrigued to learn more about her. Her background sounds very soilid. Thank you. |
Anonymous
| Private teachers are essentially a luxury good for the UMC. As such, they charge what the market will bear -- which is some cases is an awful lot of money. I figure if parents didn't think they were getting value for that money, though, they'd switch studios. |
Anonymous
| From this thread and others, it sounds like Lya Stern is a top tier teacher, if not THE TOP. So how much does an in-demand teacher like her cost in this area? It sounds like her studio is hard to get into, but if one gets in, what should they expect to pay to study with someone like her? Where is she located? |
Anonymous
The problem with this strategy is that you are looking for a teacher who grooms their student for a competition, and thus with a certain goal/result in mind coming out of that competition. There is so much to learning the violin than just one competition after another. There are so many high quality teachers in this area who don't teach with the main goal being a competition, whose teachers don't select pieces for their students to learn just for the goal of which pieces would show best in a competition vs. which piece is best for the student in terms of their stage in current development. If a certain teacher's name consistently comes up in the competition results page, that would raise a red flag for me. My eldest daughter studied with a top rate teacher in the area several years ago; the teacher was Juilliard educated and a very fine violinist. But the teacher did not push the kids to competitions and yet, she had a top rate studio. The teacher's name never comes up in these competition lists but does that mean that she is an inferior teacher to those who push the competitions and whose names are always posted on these lists? A teacher who is devoted to their student, teaches a balanced nutrition of scales, etudes, technique, pieces, but somehow is able to do so with dedication to the student with incremental and steady development over the years, this is what a healthy teacher does. All the competition teachers out there, while they may be very good, are sometimes in it for the notoriety that a certain result brings back to themselves and their studios. I would also check the turnover rate in certain studios. Sometimes these competition teachers experience fatigue and burnout in their studios. If you are a dedicated teacher, the students don't hop over to another studio. Some studios have a revolving door, check out the ones where the only way to get in is through the few openings when a senior in high school graduates. But the best way to know how a teacher teaches and a studio is run, is really to have conversations with families who are currently or formerly a part of that studio. Lastly, I would add that if you ask a lot of these competition students about their repertoire, many focus on a very few pieces, like 2-3 main pieces over the course of the year and they consistently compete with these same 2-3 pieces in all of the competitions for that year. There is not a whole lot of time to expand their repertoire because another competition is always just around the corner. The non-competition studios have the time to explore many more pieces in a year because they aren't met with competition deadlines. So these are two very different approaches to developing repertoire on the violin over the years. |
Anonymous
| Ronda Cole or Emil Chudnovsky. Many of the top Suzuki teachers in the area have studied under Ronda Cole. |