Introduction

Colourstrings by Hungarian brothers Geza and Csaba Szilvay has inspired music teaching for forty years. This child-centered approach implemented in the East Helsinki Music Institute links the child’s imagination to musical content according to Kodaly principles which involves an integrated, theoretical, technical, aural and emotional, framework. Innovative multi-sensorial didactic strategies and an optimal environment are also crucial to the success of the project.

By his side, Caprice Ltd., distance solution in violin studies, in cooperation with Colourstings since 2012 through International Minifiddlers (IM), proposes remote coaching and online video lesson examples, with the view of bringing the expert closer to the novice in the implementation process of this approach.

Body

From January to June 2018 three Catalan Conservatoires took part in the IM project. A multipoint connection on Saturday’s morning link Prof. Geza Szilvay from Finland, to four violin teachers and ten students from three different Conservatoires: Tarragona, Reus and Tortosa.

Prof. Szilvay shares content, observes violin lessons and gives advice, life examples and motivation words. The aim of this research is to draw from this experience a deeper understanding of the Colourstrings approach, a main character in the Finnish music miracle (Luonila, 2017), and based on Shulman’s paradigm (1987) to explore how an innovative ITC project impact on violin teacher’s knowledge. For this purpose, qualitative research has been conducted, based on data triangulation, through personal observation of the project, recording and analysing videoconferences and interviewing IM chief, Colourstrings expert and active and listeners teachers.

Conclusions

IM makes possible a remote expert-novice model in violin teaching. Teachers highlight the uniqueness of being observed by an expert and obtain guidance in real-time during the lessons with their students. Also, it is pointed out that besides content and didactic strategies come into play different aspects related to the sort of atmosphere you have to create when you are teaching, key aspects for students, family and the teacher’s motivation. Finally, it is important to remark the agreement that distance teaching could never replace face to face instrument teaching in at the basic levels but distance coaching could be a very useful tool in different levels of teacher training.