Bayberry String Quartet sat down with one of the world’s greatest violin teachers, Almita Vamos, at the beginning of 2020. This post is part two of three about Mrs. Vamos’ childhood, her teaching, and her politics.
How has your teaching changed over the decades?
So much so that when I look back upon my teaching 40 years ago, and I remember people said I was a very good teacher, I wonder, how could they have thought I was a very good teacher?
I think that it’s very important for me that my teaching doesn’t stay the same, that it has to grow with time. I feel like I have to learn the music, that I have to learn it better, so of course I think I’m teaching it better because I’m living with it longer and I’m changing ideas.
Whenever I’m taking a piece of music, I always have the pencil. I’m always changing bowings and fingerings, and listening, and YouTube has been so fantastic! One teacher said, I don’t have to teach anymore, I just tell my students to listen to YouTube. I do encourage them to listen a lot because I give them ideas but I don’t want them to be stuck with only my ideas. I want them to do as I do and get ideas from other people, and the only thing I say is, ‘Don’t listen to one recording and copy. Listen to many recordings, and then plagiarism is ok in music. You’re allowed to copy. If you hear something you like better, by all means try it out.’
I think my teaching has improved, and I am working on some aspects of it now.
What are you working on now?
I know some people like the teacher who gives many ideas at one time, throws a lot of things, and other students can’t take it. My husband’s teaching is very different from mine. He can very nicely make a point, one specific point, very calmly, and if the student doesn’t take that point, he’ll go on to another point, whereas I have a hard time saying one point, so I might throw 5 or 6 things out to the students, and some students can’t take so much, so now I’m trying to change it a little bit and experiment.
Also, I think that you have to teach each student differently. I have some students that I know they’re dying for me to be tough, and they want a lot of things thrown at them, and they want me to be harsh. They think, ‘Oh, I had such a good lesson’ and then other people crumble, so I have to adjust to that. I haven’t always, but I’m thinking about it now.
Do you ever get burnt out from teaching, or could you teach all day, every day?
Teaching the students who have a lot of problems, I find much easier because I know exactly what to do, but students who play very, very well, I don’t think we should try to change something that’s good. I think we should just let it alone, but if you don’t say enough, then they feel like, perhaps, why am I paying for the lesson? So, you have to really think hard. And some students who don’t grab things or who physically have problems, it’s not always easy to spot exactly what the problem is. There’s an art in it, and you have to try one way and try another way, and I get a little frustrated if I can’t find the answer. But, as I’m aging, I’m beginning to be careful about that. So yeah, I think it’s no fun to play the same way you played last year, you want to get better, and same with teaching, you want to make your teaching better. Otherwise, I get burnt out.
Do you have a favorite age of student to teach?
I enjoy all ages. I teach college level, and I love that, but I think all the big teaching is done pre-college. Dorothy Delay once said to me, ‘You know Almita, all the teaching is done before they get to college, or most of the teaching.’ It’s a different kind of teaching, but since it’s a young sport, it’s very important that the younger years are taught well. I also believe that there are many ways physically of approaching the instrument. I think it would be much easier for me to teach if I had a system where the thumb goes here and the pinky goes here, but I am not married to one particular system, and that makes it hard. I can’t just sit there and read from a book, and this is the way you play. I really think that every hand is different. For example, I play with a high Russian bow grip. That’s the way my teacher [Misha Mishakoff] taught me but I don’t know how to teach it. Instead, I teach lower, you know, between Franco-Belgium, mostly German now I like. I feel like it’s a happy medium.
Gabe: Can you show us?
[Here is a video of Mrs. Vamos demonstrating various bow grips].
You have previously talked about your teacher Persinger and his influence on your own teaching.
Yes, he was a great musician, and he believed – and I believe – so strongly that music and technique are one, that you don’t separate technique from music.There might be a day where I’ll be stressing technique all the time, but when you’re learning a piece, you have to have a musical technique, so you have to use your bow musically. You have to have a great legato. You can’t make music without the technique, so it’s all together, and I think it’s very important to start kids out from the very beginning with musical intention, and I think later on there’s a question, are they talented? Yes, there are some people who are physically talented; there are some people who can innately play with spirit; or they can play with sensitivity, but if there’s a student that doesn’t have it, you can show them how to play more sensitively and more beautifully. Some people may have a beautiful vibrato from the beginning, but they might be very calm and quiet in their playing. They might not have much spirit, so you try to give them spirit. I think the teacher can enhance talent. It’s part of our job.
Matan (10 year old grandson): What’s your favorite thing to teach?
You know, I actually enjoy teaching a scale. Everything is in a scale, so I ask them to do everything. And so that’s fun. In music, I like to teach phrasing and lines and dynamics. But I don’t have one scale or one exercise that I prefer to teach.
We enjoyed spending the evening with Mrs. Vamos, and it felt like we could have talked forever. If you’d like to read a transcript from the first part of our interview on her teachers from childhood, check it out here. Stay tuned for the third and final part of the interview, “On Performing.”