Nicola Benedetti, whose new album Homecoming, A Scottish Fantasy is featured in this week's New Classical Tracks, is also fiercely committeed to music education and to developing young talent.
According to her website, Nicola has formed associations with education establishments including schools, music colleges and local authorities. In 2010, she became Sistema Scotland's official musical 'Big Sister' for the Big Noise project; a music initiative partnered with Venezuela's El Sistema (Fundación Musical Simón Bolívar). As a board member and teacher, Nicola encourages young people to take up music and to work hard at it, and she continues to spread this message in school visits and in master classes in Scotland and around the world.
In addition, Nicola recently developed her own education and outreach initiative entitled "The Benedetti Sessions". Established in March 2013 in Glasgow, these sessions give hundreds of aspiring young string players the opportunity to rehearse, undertake and observe master classes culminating in a performance alongside Nicola. She has also presented The Benedetti Sessions at the Royal Albert Hall in London and at the Cheltenham Festival, and she has plans to develop this initiative on an international scale.
As back-to-school month continues at Classical MPR, violinist Nicola Benedetti spoke to Julie Amacher and shared her thoughts on the importance of music education for children. It turns out Nicola sees music education as truly essential for children.
"My feeling about exposing [music] on an education level and about classical music within education is, it should be as normal and as vital as being exposed to our greatest writers and poets, which is something that takes place at school," she says. "And you are not going to ask for the approval from the children, if it's OK to teach them one novel or another. You don't ask children, 'Do you think it's a good idea to study this book?' or 'Do you think it's a good idea to study maths?' We do it because we know what's good for them.
"And that's what also it confuses me about the idea of, 'Children not loving classical music instantly? Therefore, don't play it for them.' That's ridiculous to me."
Benedetti also champions creative education; here's how she defines it:
"Creative education to me is obviously not isolated to music. It's allowing children an expressive experience in their younger years. I think that can be singing in choir - which is one of the most invaluable skills and I just can't believe it's not regular in every single school - it can obviously be learning an instrument and therefore learning to play in an orchestra. The skills of that are absolutely endless from the isolated discipline it takes to improve on an instrument, but equally then you have to take that skill and insert it into something that requires an enormous amount of listening and sensitivity to those around you. And that's all not even taking into account the profound messages that you will receive eventually from the likes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Mozart.
"I think putting on plays, even creative writing, looking at novels more, and of course visual arts, being allowed to kind of offload the things that are individual only to you and that are difficult to express. I think having substantive creative experiences in your younger years are a little helping hand in facing what is a really complicated and very difficult world. I think the problem often lies in fighting to preserve those activities in school with the fight being fought on the basis of the future of the classical music industry or the future of art galleries or the future of opera: 'We need to produce more musicians and we need to have people that grow up with classical music in order to fill the concert halls.' To me, that message is not relevant to 90-something percent of people. And why should it be? If you haven't grown up with that music and you never listen to it, it doesn't touch your life in any way. Why are you now going to listen to someone telling you that it's relevant to you?
"I think the only message that is really relevant to the majority of people is one focused on how these experiences can help you no matter what it is you do in your life. That being more sympathetic, more sensitive, more expressive and more comfortable with yourself is a skill that you can apply to any profession and any future."
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