Chats To Violin Students On How To Study The Violin

Chats to Violin Students on How to Study the Violin is a teaching book by John Tiplady Carrodus, the English violinist and teacher who lived from 1836 to 1895 and who was one of the leading English violinists of the second half of the nineteenth century. Carrodus served as the principal violinist of the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden for many years and was substantially involved in the major English orchestral life of the late Victorian period.

Carrodus had studied with the great German violinist Bernhard Molique and brought to his English teaching career the substantial continental violin tradition that the major European violin schools had developed across the nineteenth century. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music and at the National Training School for Music, the predecessor of the Royal College of Music, and his various pupils included substantial numbers of the next generation of English orchestral and solo violinists. His Chats to Violin Students presented the practical wisdom of his teaching experience in accessible form for the substantial audience of English violin students who could not study with him directly.

The book covers the various practical aspects of violin study that a serious student needs to attend to. There are chapters on the selection of an instrument, the importance of good posture and bow grip, the various technical exercises that build the fundamental skills, the proper approach to scales and arpeggios, the methods for practicing difficult passages, the development of musical interpretation alongside the purely technical aspects of playing, and the various other questions that arise in the course of serious violin study.

Carrodus wrote in the direct conversational mode that the title suggests. The chats format gave him the room to combine technical instruction with the kind of practical wisdom about the realities of musical study that an experienced teacher accumulates across decades of work. The book is meant to be read alongside actual lessons with a teacher rather than as a substitute for them, but it provides substantial supplementary material that a serious student can work with between lessons.

The book is of interest now to violin teachers and serious students interested in the historical violin teaching tradition, and to historians of late Victorian English musical education. It pairs naturally with the various other violin teaching books of the period including the works of Leopold Auer and the major continental violin methods.