Virtual Violin: Local Woman Teaches Music Lessons on Skype

[IS THIS AN INTERVIEW WE DID?] Question: What do you do when you want to take violin lessons, but the nearest teacher is a hundred miles away? Answer: Hop onto the Internet and take violin lessons online. At least that's what Zachary and Tobin Sommerville did. The six-year-old twin grandsons of Worthington violin teacher Susan Sommerville live on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 725 miles away from Grandma and about 100 miles from the nearest violin teacher. For about a year, Sommerville has given the boys violin lessons via the voice- and video-over-Internet service Skype. Sommerville, in Worthington, and her son, Jason Sommerville, in Michigan, had set up Skype service and equipped their computers with cameras just so the two families could keep in touch. When the issue of violin lessons arose, Sommerville saw another use for all their new technology. "We had just gotten Skype kind of working, and we said, 'Well, we'll give it a whirl,'" Sommerville said. That "whirl" turned into something of a whirlwind. Sommerville says it has been a challenge to keep Skype up and running for the kids' two 30-minute lessons each Sunday afternoon. "We're getting better at it, but in the beginning I think we'd spend half an hour to forty-five minutes getting Skype working before we could ever get the lessons started," Sommerville said. "And sometimes we'd start a lesson and lose the signal, or we might have the sound and not the picture, or vice versa, and it could happen on either our side or our son's side." Technical difficulties aren't the only challenges Sommerville has had to stare down. With two computer screens and hundreds of miles between her and her students, Sommerville can't reach out and place a tiny errant finger on the correct spot on a violin string or guide a little bow arm in the right direction. She often finds herself having to recruit her son, who as a child took violin lessons from her, to be her teaching assistant. "I'm a very tactile teacher, and I have found myself actually reaching to the computer screen to grab the hand or to touch a finger or something, and of course, I just run into the screen and they (the twins) laugh about it," Sommerville said. "So I'll have to sometimes say, 'Jason, will you straighten the wrist or curve the pinky' or whatever it is because I can't do it, obviously." Sommerville says she also can't play duets - something she likes to do with all of her students to help them learn - with her grandsons via Skype. Here, too, Jason often comes to the rescue. "There's a delay in Skype, and so we can't play together, and that's frustrating. Sometimes I'll say, 'Jason, play such and such with whoever's at bat,'" Sommerville said. Classical musicians are inventing ways to use the Internet to do their work, from rehearsing to performing before ever larger, increasingly far-flung audiences. Globetrotting conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas, since 1995 music director of the San Francisco Symphony, made headlines in 2009 for conducting a concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble whose members were selected from among audition videos posted on YouTube by musicians around the world. Thomas says he also regularly uses Skype to rehearse with musicians around the world, which, of course, means the musicians with whom he rehearses are using Skype for this purpose, too. Despite the technological and pedagogical challenges of teaching and taking music lessons through cyberspace, the Sommervilles persist. Jason Sommerville says the lessons enrich his sons' lives and add a dimension to their relationship with Grandma. "There definitely is something special about the family connection between the teacher and the student," Jason Sommerville said. "My mom is a very good teacher of children and always strives to connect with her students, but here there's already a much deeper connection just built in, which I think makes the lessons usually that much more important, certainly to my mom and to me." And Susan Sommerville says she's just glad that technology is making it possible to teach her grandsons long-distance. "Since there's no alternative but to use Skype, I'm really grateful that that technology exists," Sommerville said. "Ten years ago, we couldn't have done that." Twins Tobin and Zachary weren't around 10 years ago, and they haven't known a world without Skype, which was born in 2003. They say they think it's "weird" that "the computer keeps turning off" during their lessons. But they like learning how to play the violin "because," as Tobin Sommerville said, "we get to do it with Grandma." At the end of the day, Sommerville prefers to teach her grandsons when they're all in the same room; she says those lessons are just more productive. And, Sommerville says, face-to-face lessons make being a grandmother easier, too. "At the end of their lessons, I can tickle them."