Memoir 1: How I overcame a miserable violin teacher
OrchestrasFrom a beautiful reminiscence by Fiona Maddocks in today’s Observer:
…The only abuse I got, looking back, was from the bullying violin teacher I was assigned. The experience of being confined in a tiny practice room with an emotionally and psychologically threatening adult is, alas, not rare for children learning musical instruments. The necessary intimacy of one-to-one lessons can be a joy or a peril, the risks only very recently brought into the open, and monitored. The same could not happen now. In my case, the problem was not sexual. This teacher, I’ll call her Mme Lorgnette – you must picture her, squeezed into the unlikely attire of gold lamé smoking jacket and matching skirt, and muddied brogues – arrived late every week, puffing and blaspheming, pulled by her charmless dog.
While I struggled to play dull technical exercises, madame blew smoke rings from her cigarillos and read her newspaper, occasionally screaming “Shut up!” at the dog (or it may have been at me) as it yowled in open contest. Both dog and owner were acridly malodorous, the windowless room a fug. Every minute was torment.
The only abuse I got, looking back, was from the bullying violin teacher I was assigned.
At the end of each session, I had to take the dog outside (“make sure it does its business”), making me late for my next lesson elsewhere in the large building. But I had a scholarship. I was lucky to be there. My parents were proud. How did one complain, by oneself, at that age? No one ever asked how I was getting on, or inspected a lesson, or wondered why my progress was so pitifully slow and lacklustre….
Read on here.
Very affecting (and of course beautifully written): thank you, Fiona.
Magnifique.
Thank you, Madame Fiona.
Why is it that the Brits never name names?
Americans almost never do, either.
I spent a lot of money on alto sax lessons
i had a well known teacher. who used to
fall asleep when i played.
some just teach for the money.
Oh, the challenges of being a viola teacher. Wardrobe color coordination, matching socks, hairstyling…..
It’s weirdly refreshing to read about abuse not involving sex.
Indeed! When I was a kid, my mother thought it were becoming for a blond girl to play the piano but my teacher wanted me to practice every day so I climbed out of the window to never return. We both kept this silent and were only caught after a couple of months since I did not progress very much.
Sally
Interesting article about the struggle to keep playing, but a bit vague. It sounds like Maddocks’s teacher was nasty and had questionable judgement, but the behaviour described does not quite amount to “abuse”. That said, I appreciate that the description in the Guardian article is probably not the full story, and it may be that Maddocks avoided going over the worst details.
But WHY has the Graun given links to a couple of questionable tutoring agencies as the first two recommendations. Do they not realise that the MusicTeachers website has been acquired by an upstart who is about to destroy that directory in order to steal the high Google search ranking for his existing agency? Why did they not recommend the ISM’s Music Directory, a FREE and reliable website for finding vetted professional musicians?
I think there’s quite a lot of this sort of thing still going on now, everywhere.
The Menuhin School has really gone downhill.