Capturing video recordings of your students’ recitals and performances is a great way to promote your program and identify teaching opportunities. Yet video recording a live performance isn’t necessarily the easiest project.  

Summer may be rapidly coming to a close, but there’s still time to curl up in a hammock or grab that beach chair and relax a little – with a good book! 

The wonderful news: Your violin was designed and built to make great sounds.

More wonderful news: The right tips and techniques will support you in optimizing the sounds you create – both during practice time as well as performances.

Your violin’s strings are essential to producing good sound, and that means their care is every bit as important as the care you put into the body of the instrument. From protecting the violin in a case, to choosing the right types of strings and creating a daily care regimen, all defend strings from permanent damage and help them create beautiful, warm, resonant tones.

Freshen up your viola practice by learning some popular songs. Classical works are classics for a reason and shouldn’t be ignored. Yet there's no reason to ignore some fun, easier to master, crowd-pleasing popular songs too.  Learning to play pop music on your viola will keep you motivated, stretch your musical sensibilities and challenge your technique in exciting ways.

Johan Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are classical music standouts for numerous reasons. This collection of six concertos nearly fell victim to becoming lost history, as have so many of Bach’s works. Yet today they’re considered the virtuoso collection of the variety and apex of Baroque music.

French cellist Gautier Capuçon has been described as imbuing “the cello’s lushly lyrical lines with myriad shadings” and his playing as “genuinely heartfelt and easily captivating the audience.”

Perceptions of contemporary guitar music are closely entwined with popular music, which relies heavily on electric guitars. Electric guitars and bass guitars are awesome. Who wants to live a world without Smoke on the Water?

In an earlier post on the string instruments of the Indian subcontinent, we focused on the plucked string instruments. Frankly, we were only able to scratch the surface in that post, as we are with this list of the bowed string instruments from the Indian subcontinent. The musical tradition throughout this vast region goes back thousands of years and has produced a wide variety of instruments.

Remember the halcyon days when musical genres had distinct lines? No one expected to hear a harpsichord in a Classical composition. Boundaries were clear. Sure, everyone had to keep clear the distinction between “Classical Music” (mid-1700s to early 1800s) and “classical music” (instrumental music from the Baroque period through today), but that was manageable.