Summer School 2019: Richard Barlow

ESTA Summer School Bursary Report 2019

Richard Barlow

I attended this Summer’s ESTA Summer School and I was very fortunate to receive a Nannie Jamieson Nutshell Bursary sponsored by Universal Edition. This provided me with the opportunity to take part in one of the best Summer Schools ever, due to the high quality of all the presenters and tutors as well as a wonderfully diverse range of evening concerts.

Attending the Summer School is always a great way of rejuvenating and recharging the batteries ready for another year of teaching and this year I have certainly come away with a number of concrete ideas and teaching techniques which I know I will be incorporating into my teaching. The Upper Strings Sessions on the Paul Rolland approach to string teaching will have an even more fundamental impact on my teaching, in that I will be totally reconsidering the way I teach beginners, with more emphasis on free movement and establishing good habits which will enable pupils to play with more freedom and without tension. Joanne May was a brilliant and inspiring teacher and we were clearly very lucky to have her and her colleague Joanne Erwin, both established teachers from across the pond.

The daily yoga sessions and a session on injury prevention acted as a great reminder of how important it is that we look after our bodies in relation to playing and that we also pass this on to our pupils so that they are always as comfortable and pain-free as possible.

The sessions had enough space between them to allow for the very important conversations over a coffee, usually reflecting upon what we had just heard, making sense of it and relating it back to our individual teaching contexts. These informal moments are also invaluable as we learn so much from each other.

All the sessions deserve mention for the value that they added. There were big inputs as ever from Steve, starting with playing a variety of music for string orchestra and also including two concerts, very different to each other and brilliantly executed as ever.

An additional bonus was the opportunity to have a meeting with fellow regional officers, where we were able to share our experiences of our role and hopefully help us to grow in those roles.

We are all well aware of how lucky we are to have such great sponsors who support ESTA very generously. Many of us work in environments where we rely on ESTA for our professional development, as budgets are so tight within councils, so ESTA is a vital lifeblood for us. So, a final sincere and impassioned thank you to Universal Edition and all the sponsors. Your support is really valued and appreciated.