The Art of Musical Pedagogy (A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing by Leopold Mozart and the Origins of Violin Teaching Methodology in Bulgaria)

Learning and improvement are impossible without teaching. Pedagogy exists to impart knowledge and skills as directly and rigorously as possible, but it is rather an art than a science, since art creates rules, while science obeys them. The only rule of art is that there are no rules, no absolute truth. Pedagogy works with personalities and individuals, which science cannot do although scientific rules are vital to the teaching process: know the rules, when to obey them, and when to break them. Thus, all teaching is connected across all cultures and traditions. Violin pedagogy is no exception. The earliest documentation of violin teaching in Bulgaria is found in the curricula of general educational institutions. This study traces the complex interconnections of common teaching principles between national and European violin pedagogy, specifically Leopold Mozart’s A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing (Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, 1756), and late 19th- to early 20th-century Bulgarian teaching in the methods of Karel Machán, Dimitar Hadzhigeorgiev and Kamen Popdimitrov.

Didaktična literatura za violino Dušana Vodiška / Didactic violin literature by Dušan Vodišek

The article discusses didactic violin literature by violinist and pedagogue Dušan Vodišek. Covering the period between 1966 and 2016, his oeuvre represents a bridge between didactic violin literature of the previous century and contemporary didactic violin literature. Over these 50 years, he significantly enriched didactic violin literature in Slovenia with his works, which include a violin book for beginners, children’s compositions for violin and piano, youth compositions for violin and piano, compositions for chamber ensemble and string orchestra, and two textbooks on position changing. These materials provide original solutions to challenges concerning individual elements of violin playing and the musical development of students. Therefore, they also represent an important contribution to the development of violin pedagogy and violin playing in Slovenia.

Exploring Bowed-String Sound

Bowed-string instruments contain a wealth of exploratory opportunities and illustrate the framework to apply flow theory to strings teaching and learning. In this chapter, the author analyzes how strings students, including very young children, experience flow by listening and exploring the sound of strings. The author also investigates the origin of bowed-strings instrument historically and illustrates violin pedagogy in a historical context. The chapter discusses Leopold Mozart, Auer, Flesh, Ivan Galamian, and Ruggero Ricci with a special emphasis on their sound production.

From Tone to Tune—Carl Stumpf and the Violin

This article investigates the work of philosopher and experimental psychologist Carl Stumpf with a focus on embedding his scientific perspective in a practice of musicianship. Stumpf wrote in an autobiographical essay from 1924 that he had considered becoming a professional violin player before taking up the study of philosophy. I claim that the practice of learning and playing this instrument sheds light on his concept of music, and at the same time signals its relevance for nineteenth-century musical aesthetics. To carve out the role of Stumpf's musicianship, I propose a “psychoanalytic” approach of tone psychology in the sense of Gaston Bachelard. For this I read through Stumpf's writings to trace the function and role of practices like analyzing tones and tunes, memorizing and notating pitch and melody, and using related tools and techniques like phonography. This is held against a reconstruction of his mentioning of the violin and of the context of violin pedagogy in the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing, I hope eventually to sharpen the notion of tone in Stumpf and thereby to contribute to a better understanding of his concept of complex qualities as opposed to the notion of Gestalt in the generation of his students.

Vitalistic Discourses of Violin Pedagogy in the Early Twentieth Century

The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.