Sander has explained the process in great detail above. As a teacher, the main thing for me is to reflect on what he is saying. Sander had of course acquired great skill on the violin with the help of my colleagues at the Academy by the time we started working together. The problem was that he was unable to apply this skill properly. You could compare it to a gymnast trying to perform a floor exercise on ice. Every detail was laboured, with the result that the flow of movement was interrupted. We needed to find firm ground to stand on and then piece his violin playing back together again, first in terms of basics such as balance and breathing and the regaining the fluency of arm movements. Lastly, we tried to loosen up his hands and fingers – when practising vibrato, for example.

I have helped several students go through such an unlearning and relearning process, and I know it is challenging for those involved. Suddenly Sander suffered a relapse, almost taking him back to where he had started. Paganini was replaced by basic movement, breathing and co-ordination exercises. Crucial to a process like this is that it must be built on co-operation between student and teacher. While Sander describes how he had to work hard to find the necessary motivation, I am also impressed by the way in which he adopted the principles of the methodology and continued to perfect them. He posed constructive questions and made reflections that helped me develop new exercises and ways of addressing his violin technique. In other words, by putting me on the spot he helped me teach him better.

This might be a good time to say something about practice, which I consider to be a form of exploration. By taking this approach, even simple exercises can result in new ways of perceiving yourself, your movements and sound. Sander and I found new sound characteristics to listen out for – such as overtones, resonance and reverberation – while we gave nuances to others. This way we turned practice into exploration – of music, instrument and self, and of our own attitudes and reactions. One way of commencing this process was to ask Sander to learn Fritz Kreisler’s playful Rondino on a Theme by Beethoven by heart before the first class lesson – but without practising it on the violin! This meant that he had to practise mentally, alternatively practise the left and right hand separately, but without playing any part of the piece before presenting it. He succeeded, but it still took time to get completely rid of Sander’s habit of thinking of practice as a rigorous safety and control process. We discussed what the content and objective of practising should be, whereby I would define the objective as the coming together of thoughts, emotions and movement – including breathing. I have written in more detail elsewhere about practice as a phenomenon (Carlsen, M. (2015). Practice as Self-Exploration. I F. Pio & Ø. Varkøy (Eds), Music Education Challenged – Heideggerian Inspirations. Music, Education and Personal Development. Dordrecht: Springer forlag).

Against this backdrop, it might be interesting to look at the concept of musical gestures. It is easy to see control as something that must be applied to every detail of the performance. These details quickly add up; one well-known violin teacher insists on dividing a single bow stroke into five separate components. This kind of reasoning may give the brain an overwhelming amount of individual elements to deal with. We are now getting close to how Sander describes his own playing. As an antidote, I am seeking to convey a notion and perception of the gesture as the basic element of the playing technique. For example, a single impulsive thought enables us to walk through the room and open the door when someone knocks – we do not have to think about each step or about lifting the arm and turning the door handle as individual actions. In the same way, a series of bow strokes could, in combination with the associated lift and fall of the fingers, be made to feel like one gesture, triggered by a single impulse. Of course, you must first have learnt to operate a door handle and, respectively, to perform up and down bows and left-hand fingering. By connecting individual elements in this way, we can achieve the feeling of control as something that applies to patterns of movement, and which can easily be associated with musical phrases. Therein lies some of the above-mentioned amalgamation of thoughts, emotions and movement while performing.

The more confident Sander became about his basic technique, the more he was able to apply his virtuosic skills without falling back into his old habits, which also included some occasionally funny twists and grimaces. However, we still had to be on the alert when five months later we started working on Brahms’ violin concerto, which was Sander’s big ambition. Even with his reflective approach to playing, a certain amount of raw power could easily create obstacles when facing the huge musical and technical challenges that this work poses. As far as possible, we sought to resolve the technical challenges by means of musical concepts. This means that the concept had to be as clear as it could be before being converted into associated gestures. The thing is, the more meaningful the phrase, the easier it is to execute.

This takes time, but just the fact that he now feels comfortable studying one of the greatest works in the violin repertoire tells me that he has succeeded in this challenging process. I should like to congratulate both him and myself!