Benedetti adds another string to her bow with focus on education
The world-renowned violinist has announced she is to step up her role teaching music. PHIL MILLER outlines her ambitious plans
SHE is one of Scotland’s finest musicians, an award-winning violinist feted in concert halls across the world.
But now Nicola Benedetti, fresh from two lauded concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival, said she is to increase and intensify her emphasis on music education.
She is to juggle new education projects with her glittering professional career, beginning with a new series of masterclasses, called Super String Sessions, in four cities in Scotland next week.
An outspoken advocate of music tuition in schools, Benedetti said her future plans for education works were “if anything, way too ambitious”.
Benedetti is to help teach 500 young people the fundamentals, and finer points, of strings at four events in Scotland. They will be staffed with teachers from the Big Noise youth orchestras in Aberdeen, Stirling, Dundee and Glasgow.
There will be more next year, and she has ambitions for further growth.
Last month, she became President of the European String Teachers Association, and is also involved in bodies such as the National Children’s Orchestra, the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland and Music in Secondary Schools.
Benedetti has long campaigned against cuts to instrumental teaching in schools, and earlier this year said music learning had been “left to decay in many British schools”.
She said: “My plans are, if anything, way too ambitious.
“There will be many, many more workshops, and not just for students, but for teachers too.
“I just prioritise, and schedule it.
“It’s not easy, because different things come at different times, and it is hard to resist things that you want to do professionally, but its just really that much of a priority for me.”
Of the Super String Sessions, she said she wanted to connect with young musicians who are not in the catchment areas of the four Big Noise orchestras, for which she is a patron.
The violinist said: “It stems from a general desire from me that the expertise that Sistema Scotland [which runs the Big Noise] has built up over the last 10 years is shared with more and more children.
“It’s something that I’ve really desperate to happen more and more.”
The increasingly uneven provision of music tuition continues to concerns her. She said: “That is our society - that is British society. It is an uneven one. It is not one that gives equal opportunity to all children, and that affects music – insofar as music is absolutely not taught in a high number of schools.
“To teach an instrument is hard, to teach it well is even harder, and to make sure that a teacher is equipped with what is needed to teach a child the violin – a lifetime of study is required for that.”
Super Strings will culminate in a festival of Strings Day at the Caird Hall, Dundee, on October 9.
Ms Benedetti said she would also continue to speak out about music tuition and the value of music to children and to society.
She said: “I think, with the exception of the post-world War Two period, money for anything that does not seem absolutely necessary and immediate is something that you constantly have to fight for.
“I do think that some very strong arguments are being made for it in Scotland, and some of them are being won.
“But we do hear, week in and week out, of a new council that is in danger of losing its ability to give children music lessons for free, which of course just exacerbates the difference in experience from those who have, and those have less.
“Music and the arts, because its so difficult to quantify, because it deals with a lot of invisible things, it fits less neatly into charts and tables and statistics.
“All of these decisions are detrimental to putting music and creativity and the arts, never mind at the heart of education, or anywhere close to a priority in education.”
In the last year she has taught more than 1000 children in workshops, masterclasses, partnership projects and school visits, and estimates she has met more than 100 teachers.
However, Ms Benedetti does not plan to set up an educational institution, like the Yehudi Menuhin School, which she attended as a young musician.
She said: “I don’t want to lose my mobility.
“I don’t want to lose the unbiased collaborative spirit, I want to be able to be putting on workshops up and down the country, with people I can work with collaboratively, with charities, primary school teachers, and institutions of all types.”
To teach an instrument is hard, to teach it well is even harder