File: dauschmidtkathryn-oh-rollobayschool_M.mp3
Speaker:
KD – Kathryn Dau Schmidt
KD: Some of those kids that are doing so beautifully now just started right then. They were 5 and 6 years old, some were 7. So they had a little start but they pretty much started with me. So I was getting them started on the violin and geatting them into the fiddling. Now I didn't want to teach them classical. I'm not a trained classical teacher, and I didn't want to use the classical method. 'Cause the classical method is very heavy on techniqeue. Now I try to get them to use some classical technique but not so strict with it. Cause the way the fiddlers look at it, they don't care how you hold the fiddle, or how you hold the bow, what's important is what comes out. Now you can make the fiddling harder if you hold the bow or the fiddle wrong. You can make it harder. If you're a great big fisherman with enormous hands you can collapse your [left] wrist, and it doesn't matter cause your fingers will still reach everything anyway. But if you're a child or a woman with a smaller hand, and you collapse your wrist that's going to really hamper you using your fourth finger over on the G, D or A strings. So it's in your interest to have a nice straight wrist. So you can do what those fishermen with the big hands are doing. So that 's the way I try to teach the technique. It's not "Get that hand out!" kind of thing. It's like "Look, if you don't keep your hand out, you're going to run into trouble later on when you try to use that fourth finger." And I try to leave it up to them and most of the times it works -- sometimes it falls down a little bit. One problem I have with the Chaisson kids is that they learn so well by ear, that it's hard to get them to read, and their parents would desperately love them to read. I think they can read [music] enough now that they can pick out notes, like if they're having trouble with a certain passage they can figure it out from the music. But they can't really learn a tune from notes. They still have to hear it.