Opinion: Embracing diversity in string teaching

When I started music lessons at the conservatoire, I was barely four years old. A year later, I received my first violin. I grew up in France in the 1990s, when music education was nearly free, with only a modest annual fee of 50 euros. But education in those days was ‘serious’. Classical music, or what some called ‘sacred music’, was no joke. Everything else, apparently, was lesser or even ‘garbage’, according to one of my violin teachers…