Tradition is one of music’s greatest strengths. It connects us to generations of performers and teachers, preserving ideas that have stood the test of time. Yet tradition should never prevent us from observing, questioning and learning. This essay explores how respect for the past and openness to new understanding can work together to create better musicians and better teachers.

Recently, while in the Far East recruiting musicians for Wells Cathedral School, I heard two very young violinists performing familiar works by Sarasate. The younger played Malagueña, the older sister Zigeunerweisen. I had played that same repertoire at roughly the same ages myself, guided by my teacher Warren Jacobs, who had been schooled in the Russian tradition after training in St Petersburg. I found myself wondering whether the girls’ teacher came from the same lineage. I was right… the girls had a Russian teacher.

There was something comforting in this recognition. Certain pedagogical traditions endure because they work. Carefully sequenced repertoire can teach technique, stamina, sound production, and musical character in ways that abstract exercises never could. When chosen thoughtfully, repertoire becomes a vehicle for embodied learning, carrying generations of accumulated musical understanding.

But the girls playing made me uneasy.

The repertoire was beyond what these young players could cope with. Both were struggling physically, playing with visible tension and technical blockages. Their discomfort was not simply musical, but bodily. Neither was using a shoulder rest: a choice that, at this stage of their development, was clearly making the instrument difficult to support and limiting their freedom of movement.

There is, of course, a school of thought that violinists should play without a shoulder rest. It is true that the sound of the instrument can be reduced when they are used. This thought becomes problematic when such positions harden into doctrine. What struck me was not the absence of a shoulder rest in itself, but the sense that an idea about what violinists ought to do was being prioritised over what these particular children needed. A well-fitted shoulder rest, chosen carefully and revisited over time, would almost certainly have helped them enormously at this point — physically, technically, and yes… musically.

In that moment, what I was witnessing felt less like a necessary challenge and more like an unnecessary obstacle. It reinforced the impression that teaching was being driven by inherited beliefs and familiar pathways, rather than by close attention to the individual child in front of the teacher.

This is the quiet danger of any strong tradition. What begins as a thoughtful pathway can, over time, harden into habit. Teaching slips from asking “What does this child need now?” to “What comes next?”

Musical instrumental education has long prided itself on rigour. Technique is honed, standards are upheld, and lineage is respected. For generations, this has produced musicians of remarkable skill and discipline. Yet alongside these undeniable strengths sits an increasingly uncomfortable question: what kind of human being is this system quietly shaping?

Teaching is never neutral. Every lesson, rehearsal, and assessment carries assumptions about authority, worth, error, and success. These assumptions are rarely articulated, but they are felt acutely by students. They learn not only how to play, but how to interpret judgement, how to locate their personal value, and how to respond when certainty is withheld or approval delayed. In this sense, music education is always doing more than teaching music; it is forming people, and, by extension, shaping the kinds of citizens they will become.

Some of the most influential teaching I have experienced worked in the opposite direction to prescription. When my teacher Warren Jacobs asked me to improve a passage, he would often ask me to close my eyes and listen, not to my instrument, but to the sound and phrasing I wanted to hear inwardly. Only once that inner concept was clear (and he could always tell if I was cutting corners) would I play, from memory, recreating what I inwardly heard. He rarely described the technical adjustments required. Instead, my body adapted itself to my ear and intention. Technique improved not because it had been imposed, but because it had been called for by musical intention.

The strength of this approach was that technique emerged organically, in service of musicianship. Its weakness was that I was not always sure what I had done differently to make the improvement. The learning was deeply embodied, but not always consciously named. Over time, I came to understand that this too was part of the process: technique discovered through listening eventually invites reflection, language, and refinement. Musicianship and technique were not sequential stages, but a conversation, each clarifying and deepening the other.

This understanding has continued to shape my own teaching. I have become increasingly aware that technical work can itself be a source of musical inspiration. Certain technical ideas do more than correct; they provoke listening. They open expressive possibilities rather than closing them down. I have found that this kind of learning happens most powerfully when teachers are willing to step into the learning process alongside their students.

On several occasions, I have joined technique classes with my own pupils, instrument in hand, choosing deliberately to learn with them rather than stand apart. In one such class, at Wells, led by Cath Lord, the value lay not simply in observing another teacher’s approach, but in allowing the session to become genuinely dialogical. Technical ideas were explored, questioned, and refined collectively. I was learning from Cath; my pupils were learning from her; and at times, they were teaching me, through their responses, confusions, and discoveries. Authority shifted without being lost. What mattered was not who was “right”, but what helped listening deepen.

This matters deeply to me because education should not only produce musicians, but also the next generation of teachers: people capable of thinking pedagogically, questioning thoughtfully, and contributing generously to the learning of others. When teachers are willing to learn publicly, they give students permission to do the same. Expertise ceases to be a performance and becomes a practice.

It is telling that many musicians only arrive at this insight retrospectively. A colleague and friend, Nicola Benedetti, once reflected, laughing, that she wished she had been more curious and had practised a little less as a child… a little less. Coming from a musician of the highest calibre, this is not a rejection of discipline, but a recognition of imbalance. Curiosity, it turns out, is not a distraction from excellence, but one of its conditions.

Tradition must be understood in this light. Musical history is not a museum of correct answers, but a record of human responses to musical problems. The great teachers of the past were not great because they preserved methods unchanged, but because they listened acutely to sound, to bodies, to context, and adapted accordingly. To honour that tradition is not to replicate it uncritically, but to continue its work.

This belief, that great teaching and great artistry require continual adaptation, was powerfully reinforced last year when we welcomed the Brodsky Quartet to Wells in their fiftieth year of performing together. Few ensembles carry such authority and history. Yet what struck me most was not what they knew, but their willingness to explore something new.

Rather than presenting a finished product from a distance, the quartet invited our pupils directly into the rehearsal process of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, in an arrangement they had adapted to include a double bass part. Our students were not observing professionalism from the sidelines; they were inside it: listening, responding, being trusted. Despite the generational gap, the quartet adapted their rehearsal language and expectations without ever lowering standards. They encouraged, challenged, and trusted the pupils sufficiently to include them fully in the concert that evening.

The result was a visceral, moving, and deeply powerful performance of Shostakovich’s Eighth quartet, transformed into a string orchestra with the Brodsky Quartet at its heart. It was an extraordinary experience for the pupils and a profound one for the audience. For me, it was a reaffirmation that the best teachers, and the best artists, are those who remain willing to adapt, to make new arrangements, and to respond to modern audiences and modern students, rather than relying solely on inherited formats or reputations.

The psychological consequences of failing to make this distinction are significant. When excellence is equated with correctness, critique can easily be experienced as a judgement of worth rather than an invitation to refine. Anxiety flourishes in environments where standards are absolute but opaque. Curiosity, by contrast, reframes uncertainty from threat to possibility.

Collaboration plays a crucial role here. Music is inherently relational: between players, between performers and audiences, between intention and reception. When students learn to make music with others rather than merely alongside them, they develop habits of generosity: listening, responsiveness, shared responsibility. These are not only musical virtues; they are civic ones.

At its best, music education aims to form generous musicians: artists who love working with one another, who understand audiences as partners rather than judges, and who see music as an act of contribution rather than self-assertion. In doing so, it helps to form thoughtful, engaged citizens of the world.

This kind of education requires trust: trust in teachers to exercise judgement rather than follow scripts, and trust in students to meet high expectations without being diminished by them. In places such as Wells, where musical tradition runs deep and standards are high, the question is not whether excellence matters, but how it is pursued.

The modern challenge for music education is not to abandon its past, nor to chase novelty for its own sake. It is to remain alive. To recognise that the traditions we inherit were once acts of imagination, not prescriptions. To understand that technique, musicianship, curiosity, and generosity are not competing priorities, but interdependent ones.

Education, at its best, is an act of hope. It assumes that young people are not simply to be shaped, but to be met. When teachers teach with attention, open to being changed as well as to changing others, they offer students something more enduring than instruction.

That, ultimately, is what music education should aspire to: not merely the reproduction of inherited excellence, but the formation of generous human beings, musicians who listen deeply, think independently, and contribute meaningfully to the world they share.