Teaching violin through FaceTime or Skype

There's a nice article in today's New York Times where a teacher and a student who is unable to leave his home in China because he is infected with the Coronavirus have made the best of the situation.

I found the premise of the article interesting, but then I realized that the whole relationship that this student has to his teacher, who lives in America, is conducted by way of Skype, so the only really unusual thing here is that he has nothing to do but practice!

The roads here in rural Illinois were icy yesterday, so I taught my first ever lesson by way of FaceTime last night. I set myself up: I put my iPad on a music stand in exactly the same place where my student would stand, and had another music stand with her music next to me. It surprised me that we could actually work on basic things like fingerings and rhythm, and I found that I could still figure out what was going on in my student's mind to cause some of her difficulties.

(I find it interesting that when playing in an unfamiliar position on the violin or the viola that rhythmic confidence tends to suffer. My solution? Learn to play challenging rhythms in familiar positions so that there is "head space" for counting.)

This student is smart, fairly advanced, and has a great ear for intonation and sound quality. The sound quality that came out of her iPhone and into my iPad was not always beautiful, but I knew that the lack of beauty had to do with the means of transmission and not because of her sound production. If our relationship was entirely electronic, I would really have no way of knowing much about the quality of her sound, unless both of us had professional sound equipment.

Also, there was a time delay that popped in here and there, and the sound would drop out occasionally for a note or two. The relationship of the bow and the fingers to the notes I heard was not exact. Teaching string instruments properly, in my opinion, has everything to do with the exact relationship of bow and the fingers. There would be no way I could work on that aspect of playing with a student via FaceTime. I like to comment when something is being done correctly while a student is playing, and my students are used to this. With the time delay in the computer connection it just isn't possible, and when I said something this student would stop playing.

But nobody got hurt in the ice, and we can both appreciate the fact that next week looks clear, and that we can have our next lesson in real time and space.