Course Director Jane Roberts

This course gives adults who are relative beginners or relatively inexperienced players of stringed instruments (approximately Grades 2 to 5+ ) the opportunity to play together in a group, providing the experience of ensemble playing and orchestral techniques not available in solo lessons and practice, and equipping them to move forward to the Chamber and Symphony orchestras at a later date. It also allows them to be involved in the atmospere of a week-long music school with many other courses and musicians, informal events and concerts, both professional and amateur.

The course will continue with the ideas that workded so successfully last year, and the number and variety of carefully graded parts contained within the works to be studied will provide a further, and if necessary maore advanced, challenge for more advanced, challenge for previous participants, whilst enabling newcomers to join in at their present standard.

As well as full sessions, there will be discussions about musicianship, rudiments, sight reading, and other aspects of the techniques required to take to take part in concerted music making. Sessions will be informal and practical and there will be opportunities for students to play in smaller ensembles.

Jane Roberts is Head of Strings at the Gütersloh Music Centre. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Institute of Education, London University. She has taught in the Home Counties, North Wales and Germany and is particularly interested in the Kodaly and Orff principles of music teaching. She conducts orchestras and choirs as part of her work and participates in a number of courses every year both as string tutor and as piano accompanist.