Allison J
Instruments: Piano, Violin, Viola, Electric Violin, Fiddle, Keyboard
Styles: Classical, Pop, Rock, Country
Allison J
Instruments: Piano, Violin, Viola, Electric Violin, Fiddle, Keyboard
Styles:
Classical, Pop, Rock, Country
Where I Teach:
Ages Taught: 8-80
Bachelor Degree: Oklahoma State University
2019 Florence Film Awards Honorable Mention for Original Score
2018 Co-Founder and President of Composers and Performers Partnership of Oklahoma State
2018 Principal Second Violin - Oklahoma State University Orchestra
I'm a lifelong violinist and music teacher and I love watching my students learn, as the lessons you learn from music stick with you for the rest of your life. I love turning music theory and ear training into understandable concepts and attainable goals for my students. I'm a classically trained musician and I graduated from Oklahoma State with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. In the last five years of my life I have picked up work in the popular music world, and have branched out in style. I love playing rock and pop violin, some fiddle tunes, and improvising a solo here and there!
I began teaching private lessons to young children when I was 15 under the direction of my parents, who are both violinists and public school teachers. In college, I began teaching both children and adults full time, and since graduating I have continued teaching as my full-time job. While I am classically trained, I love rock, pop, and fiddle tunes too, and I encourage my students to try out multiple genres and to find what motivates them. Well-rounded musicians are better musicians and better people! I'm never interested in turning my students into the next child prodigy, I'm only interested in turning my students into people who love and understand music.
For all my beginning students, we start with the Essential Elements book 1 for the fundamentals. Depending on a student's music-reading ability, we can jump to book 2 or a more advanced book, though the ability to read music is not the end-all-be-all of determining skill level. Two books I find myself using with my intermediate and advanced students are the Wohlfahrt etudes and Trott's Melodious Double-Stops. I tend to write a lot of my own warm-ups and exercises for students depending on their individual needs, especially if the student is more interested in pop, rock, or country as opposed to classical.
I ask all my students if they want to be a technician, an artist, or both. A technician is someone who is technically proficient on their instrument and works towards executing difficult techniques and passages. An artist is someone who makes creative choices via their instrument. There is room for both in all genres, and while learning to read music is incredibly important, I am very against the monkey-see-monkey-do approach of just reading sheet music and nothing else. I lean heavily into a music-theory based learning of not just WHAT you are playing, but WHY you are playing the notes you are playing, as I find students like to know WHY they're doing something rather than somebody just saying "do it!" It makes better technicians AND artists. I am a very realistic teacher, as I know peoples' lives are busier and crazier than ever, so I work with my students to come up with and work towards realistic goals to reach. I also know that not every person wants to or needs to study Mozart and become the next concert violinist, so I want students to achieve technical proficiency and be satisfied in their skills and have fun learning the music that they want to learn.
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