Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with,...

Last night's Proms concert with the Budapest Festival Orchestra was ravishing, but raised an uncomfortable question I have a friend who...

Two weeks at a violin practice retreat were life-changing for me, but left me wondering why there aren't enough places for amateur...

Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and...

I came across this footage of Menuhin playing Bach's 'Air on the G String'. Just look at his left hand – is that not the most perfectly...

You probably didn’t know that my mother was also a journalist – the apple never falls far from the tree, as they say. She was the...

One of my aims with this website is to be a non-denominational space where all forms of string music are equally respected and...

Julian Lloyd-Webber has come out in The Times against competitions, and accused them of being corrupt. That’s quite a broad brush with...

I’m just back from Womad: three days of camping in a field and listening to music from all over the world. I’m sunburnt and have sore...

The First World War began 100 years ago, on 28 July 2014, with Austria–Hungary declaring war on Serbia, a month after the assassination...

At first I thought this New Yorker article about the Carpenter family by Rebecca Mead was going to be a puff piece, but it turns out to...

I heard this band on in the background playlist at the Green Note in Camden last week and had to stop my conversation, I was so...

If you've been trying to notch up 10,000 hours of practice in the hope of being deemed talented, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwell's rule...

A really interesting article about wine in the New Yorker suggests striking parallels between how we choose wine and our attitudes to...

I just came across this lovely interview with mandolin super-hero Chris Thile. Thile came to fame as a Bluegrass player but in recent...

In the 1980s, string pedagogue Sheila Nelson took her seminal teaching techniques to underprivileged schools in the London borough of...

I discovered My Viola and I, the autobiography of Lionel Tertis, in the library at Magic Mountain. It's a charming read with great...

I discovered this tirade in a seminal string pedagogical work: 'It is most regrettable that our present-day instrument-makers take so...

I've been raiding the library of the Magic Mountain library and came across The Memoirs of Carl Flesch. He's not the most compelling...

The great violinist served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. Here he gives a moving and deeply humane account of his time...