Sorry if this is kind of a core dump, but here's the story...
Several years ago, my two daughters and I all started strings
together. My older daughter was on violin, I was on viola, and my
younger daughter (now 8) was on cello. My older daughter is very
musically talented, and the whole thing was her idea to start with --
we even tried to discourage her or get her to pick an easier
instrument originally. At this point, I'm enjoying the heck out of
viola; I'm in a quartet, and am also taking a summer string orchestra
class at a community college. My older daughter got up to the Seitz
allegro (Concerto No. 5) in Suzuki book 4, spent several months
struggling with the piece with less and less motivation, and finally
quit the instrument. My younger daughter is doing Dotzauer and
Klengel, and is playing the Breval sonata in Suzuki book 4. Both kids
had/have teachers who I thought were/are good and quite competent. I'm
not qualified to say anything about the finer points of string
pedagogy, but it seems to me that both teachers were very
knowledgeable, and knew how to communicate well with the kids. Both
kids have also been involved with their school music program.
The contrast between the private lessons and the school program is
amazing. In the school program, the teacher sends home notes the week
before a performance saying that if the kid hasn't ever come to any
meetings, he would like them to come to at least the one rehearsal the
week before the performance. At the performance, you get many kids who
put their left hand on the instrument, wrist bent, in what looks like
third or fourth position, spread their fingers with roughly equal
spacing, and proceed to play with the fingers that they should be
using in first position. In defense of the teacher, his more advanced
groups really sound quite good. I think he's a good musician, and I
admire his dedication to bringing music to kids who otherwise wouldn't
get exposed to it, but I'm guessing that most of the kids in the
advanced groups sound so good because their parents have been sending
them to private lessons for five or six years.
My younger daughter just spent her most recent cello lesson visibly
holding back tears. Her teacher wasn't really being all that hard on
her, but my daughter was making a lot of mistakes like not playing the
right bowings, or playing a dotted half note as if it was only two
beats. This was after 2 or 3 weeks of working on the first page of the
Breval piece. After the lesson, she cried in the car and said she was
thinking about quitting cello because it wasn't fun. When I asked her
why it wasn't fun, she said that she didn't really enjoy the pieces
she was playing, and that her teacher expected her to be perfect at
everything.
I would really like my daughter to stay with cello, and I would also
like it to be something she can enjoy. We play little easy duets
together, and it's a lot of fun. I think part of the problem is that
the Suzuki books progress much too fast from easy material to more
difficult material. I'm no longer using them on viola, but I remember
some of the student concerto movements being incredibly frustrating,
even though I had 20 years of musical experience under my belt and was
practicing hard every day. In the Breval piece my daughter is working
on, for instance, there's a lot of difficult stuff going on
rhythmically, like switching back and forth between 8th notes and
triplets. It's a sophisticated baroque piece, and musically I think it
just goes way over her head. I'm working on her for 10 minutes or so
every night on theory, because she's in way over her head in terms of
understanding what's going on. For instance, if her teacher says,
"Let's play starting from the B," my daughter doesn't know which note
is B. She doesn't have any trouble with learning it intellectually
(she's good at math), but she doesn't get any practice with it as part
of her daily practice routine. I would think that for someone to be
playing music at the level of the Breval piece, you should really know
automatically what note names correspond to what places on the
fingerboard, or that the interval between a B and a C# is a whole
step, but this is all stuff that she has to figure out, rather than
knowing it automatically. The Dotzauer etudes also seem to me to be
way over her head in terms of sophistication. They have all kinds of
fancy harmonic ideas in them, which my daughter simply doesn't hear or
understand. I'm working on teaching her, e.g., to look at the key
signature of a piece with one sharp and to recognize that the tonic
triad is going to be G-B-D. That's the level she's at in terms of
actual musical understanding and appreciation, not secondary
dominants, diminished sevenths, etc. She whips through her etude every
night as fast as she can, and when you hear her play all these
sophisticated harmonic and scalar things out of tune, it's painfully
obvious that she's not ready to play them in tune, because her ear
doesn't pick up the ideas.
I feel frustrated, because it seems like the school program is at a
level that's way too low for my daughter, but the private lessons are
at a level that's way too high. I've tried to get at this in one or
two quick discussions with the teacher after the lessons, but it's
very awkward, because after all she's right when she corrects my
daughter for playing a dotted half note as two beats, and I don't want
to be seen as undermining my daughter's respect for her teacher. My
daughter is also sometimes stubborn about certain things. For
instance, her teacher has been telling her over and over to use a
metronome when she practices, but my daughter won't do it, saying she
hates playing with a metronome.
I'm tempted just to pull her out of the private lessons and teach her
myself. I don't play cello, but I've spent a lot of time playing her
cello material in unison with her. I'm worried that I'd damage her
technique somehow, but really it's not all that different from viola
technique in many ways. I could also try to have a more serious,
lengthy talk with the teacher. However, I'm really not optimistic
about getting anywhere with that. She's a serious player herself, and
she seems to be very focused on producing kids who are topflight
players. We went to a community orchestra concert recently where one
of her teenage students played a difficult showpiece of a concerto,
and it was just beautiful. If my daughter had that kind of talent and
motivation, I think what this teacher is doing would be perfect for
her. But realistically, not all of us have that level of talent.
Sorry this is so long --- any suggestions on handling the situation
would be much appreciated!
Ben Crowell
crowell08 at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL dot com
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