Fiddling around

The elegant Holly Stern has taught violin, viola, chamber music, and “basics of strings” at the University for eleven years, and also plays professionally with the Portland Baroque Orchestra. She started the violin at the age of seven, in Eugene, has traveled far and wide with her music, and is today a musician who loves to teach as much as she loves to play. “Per-forming music is all about communication — knowing the language of the composer, the rhetoric of the piece, the style of the time in which it was written,” she says. “It is also about knowing your body like an athlete would, and knowing the physics of your instrument and the balances and angles that allow you to use the least possible effort to achieve the sound you want. And it is something else — the ability to stay out of the way of the music, while keeping fully engaged in the creative spark it inspires.

“Teaching is about finding the imagery to communicate all this. I love the problem-solving of teaching, looking for the areas of tension that are keeping a student from achieving her goals, searching for a new way to explain things that will connect with someone who processes information differently. It’s the difficult students that teach me the most. They force me to be creative, in order to get through to them, to let them find their own talents.

“Most of my students at the University have not been music majors. This semester, I have majors in nursing, biochemistry, and elementary education. For several years, I had a student string quartet that was three-quarters engineering majors and one-quarter nursing major. They’ve stayed together as the Al Fine String Quartet.

“I try to give my students a balanced diet of composers and styles, but no-body escapes my studio without being exposed to Baroque style — the era of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi. Mozart’s another biggie. Then we add in the Romantics and the more contemporary composers — Fritz Kreisler’s a favorite. There’s a fine feast of music available to the violinist. Like this ...” And off sails the elegant Holly Stern into a medley of tunes so deftly played, with such swirling emotion, that students walking by freeze in their tracks until the last notes sail up and away.

— Editor

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