More Than a Cello Teacher

In twenty years of taking private lessons, I had eighteen cello teachers. That number is on the high side, partly because I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, a place that does not tend to hold many people for very long, and partly because I spent many summers bouncing between music camps and festivals.

My principal teachers embodied far more than someone simply explaining how to play the cello. Some felt like friends: collegial, instructive, guiding. A few were stern grandparents: kind, fair, deeply caring, but with the highest expectations. Another resembled a hockey coach. In fact, I think he actually was a hockey coach, though also an exceptional music pedagogue. And all of them, in their own ways, were mentors: present for the music, but also for the person making it.

One of them was Gilda Barston, a well-known figure in the Suzuki world. I remember sitting in the wings before a group performance of the slow movement of Haydn C, having just been sat out in front of everyone because I had not taken the care to memorize the proper bowings. Sitting there while everyone else played made the lesson unmistakably clear. But the larger lesson had nothing to do with bowings. It was about responsibility. About showing up prepared. About what it actually means to be ready. I have never forgotten it, and I will never forget Gilda.

Each teacher left something behind: technique, perspective, a way of hearing, and a way of being in the room with a student that I carry forward with my own students to this day.

Through all of them, what has been clarified for me is that the role of a private teacher is never just one thing. It shifts. It molds to the student, to the season, to what is actually happening in a particular life at a particular moment.

The most important skill is listening. Yes, to how a student plays, but also to how they are doing.

Inside a Lesson

I am genuinely interested in my students’ lives. People are fascinating and complicated, and children are just as much. I want to hear about the English teacher who has been driving them up the wall. I want to know when a dancer goes on pointe for the first time. I want to hear about the tests and projects piling up, and about the hut trip coming up that weekend. For many students, being asked and actually heard is the thing that makes the rest of the hour possible.

Some parents might quietly wonder whether talking about non-cello things is the best use of limited lesson time. I understand the question. But in my experience, on both sides of the music stand, those few minutes of real conversation often make the rest of the lesson possible in a way it would not have been otherwise.

The talking is the door you have to walk through to get there.

Yesterday I worked with a ten-year-old who had been in group classes for a couple of years but had never had a private lesson. When his strings teacher told him he would be working with me one on one, his response was immediate: “Ugh, do I have to?”

We spent the first ten minutes just talking. He was an older brother to two younger siblings. He mountain biked. He spoke two languages, and I told him how genuinely difficult that was, and how difficult I was finding it to learn a second one. His demeanor shifted in a manner that was impossible to miss.

By the end of twenty-five minutes we had refined a piece he already knew and learned a new one by ear. When I told him it was time to return to class, he looked at me and said: “Do I have to?”

This Matters More Than It Used To

Outside of family, a private lesson may be one of the only places a young person sits one-on-one with an adult who has nowhere else to be. No other students. No divided attention. Just the hour in front of them.

That kind of undivided presence used to be unremarkable. Now it is increasingly rare, and for families, a genuine luxury.

Life is more fragmented. Schedules are crowded. Screens quietly replace much of the unstructured human contact that used to be part of growing up. What fills that gap matters.

The adults who mattered most to me when I was young were the ones who noticed me. Who remembered what I had said the week before. Who could tell immediately, the moment I walked in, whether something was off.

That experience, in the context of something as demanding and beautiful as the cello, leaves a mark.

Developing a Human Being

The cello asks for patience, persistence, and the ability to embrace difficulty until something gives.

My goal in every lesson is to develop more than a cellist: responsibility, excellence, and the habits required to pursue something difficult well. I just happen to use a cello to get there.

I take that seriously. I show up to every lesson present, prepared, and invested. Connection is not a warmup before the teaching begins. It is the teaching. Everything else, intonation, vibrato, musical expression, bow arm, how to practice, flows from it or it does not.

This did not come from nowhere. My grandmother was an elementary school teacher. My father, a professor of human interaction. My mother, first an arctic anthropologist, then a clinical psychologist. I am a third-generation educator. Make of that what you will.

So What Is My Role?

It depends on the student. It depends on the day. It depends on the precise moment. And it is constantly changing.

I am always a teacher in the traditional sense: technique, intonation, bow distribution, phrasing. And then sometimes a coach. Sometimes a sounding board. Sometimes something closer to a thinking partner for whatever is happening in a teenager’s life that week. And yes, occasionally, something closer to that hockey coach.

Some of my current students have been with me since third grade. They are now in high school, making decisions that will shape their path as adults. Some of those decisions include the cello. Many do not. The relationship evolves, sometimes it deepens, sometimes it reaches a natural end. High school brings demands from every direction, and serious study is not the right fit for everyone at that stage.

As students get older, the relationship matters more, not less. A young child’s experience is shaped largely by the family around them. A teenager’s is shaped by whether they feel known. At that age, a teacher who genuinely sees them and holds them to something can change how they see themselves.

My job is to pay close enough attention to know which role is needed, and to never be so focused on the cello that I miss the person holding it.