On historical recordings

A window into some important reflections for students and performers of classical music. At a group lesson at The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, September 2020, we listened to recordings produced before the advent of mass media such radio broadcasting and the commercial recording industry, which changed the musical landscape dramatically from around 1920 an onwards. (See playlist below) There was general agreement, that compared to today,...

Looking at practicing

What do we classical musicians spend most of our time doing? That’s right: practicing. Nowadays this is mostly a completely closed and private process, where we are completely  alone and prefer other people not to listen. As teachers, we don't really know how our students practice, let alone our colleagues. Why has this become so? It wasn't always like this. To take a famous example, Mozart practiced most of his childhood in front of people,...

New ways in online music learning

(You can also find this at Currently - because of COVID-19 - there is a lot of focus on how to do online music teaching. The vast majority is focusing on moving the normal learning situation into a digital environment. That is the synchronous learning situation, where the teacher and student are present at the same time. However, there is an entirely different group of opportunities in online music education, which we call asynchronous methods....