Keeping The Learning Experience Fun: An

Alternative Curriculum For Strings Instruction

“Why can’t the learning experience — from the middle school classroom to the conservatory — offer a process of exploration, discovery, creativity, and joyfulness while making music?” challenges the celebrated improvising violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman in the introduction to Alternative Strings: The New Curriculum (Amadeus Press, LLC, Pompton Plains, N.J.; 208 pages, over 50 illustrations, includes a CD, photos, and musical examples, softcover, ISBN # 1-57467-089-1, $24.95, May 2004).

For practicing amateur and professional musicians, classical string teachers, and conductors, Ms Lyonn Lieberman’s seventh book is a must-have definitive resource guide designed to “stretch” traditional classical studies and, as she notes, to “embrace the musical imagination of the world.” It is crafted specifically to help promote diversity in strings through the inclusion of vernacular and world styles.

Readers will learn more about the origins of “alternative strings,” a catchphrase for nearly thirty folk, world, jazz, and popular styles within a historical, stylistic and technical overview. Ms Lyonn Lieberman enhances the book with detailed descriptions of over two dozen styles, abundant support materials, and a massive discography.

Drawing upon more than three decades of experience as an alternative string teacher and a performer, she also brings her early classical violin studies and what she describes in the introduction to her book as her “constant exposure” to blues, world music and American vernacular to string educators and the 21st Century string pedagogy.

Alternative Strings: The New Curriculum also addresses issues such as tradition versus innovation, the National Standards in relationship to improvisation, the inclusion of non-classical styles in the classroom, to cultivating a rhythmic bow-hand, as well as the complex emotional/psychological issues associated with exploring new directions in a previously heavily codified field.

As an added bonus, the book is accompanied by a music and interview CD featuring 14 of today’s top alternative string players and clinicians including Mark Wood, Richard Greene and Bob Phillips. These featured players demonstrate rock, jazz and fiddle styles and present innovative ideas for teaching new generations of string players.

The book is slated for release in May. For information visit www.AmadeusPress.com or call Hal Leonard Corporation at 800-554-0626.

A former member of the Juilliard School faculty, Julie Lyonn Lieberman has written over 50 magazine articles and has developed instructional videos and six books, including The Creative Band and Orchestra, The Contemporary Violinist, Improvising Violin, Rockin’ Out with Blues Fiddle, You Are Your Instrument and Planet Musician, the first and only world music sourcebook.

She is also the creator of such NPR programs as “The Talking Violin,” hosted by Billy Taylor. Among her honors, Ms Lyonn Lieberman was selected as a D’Addario Performing Artist and is a recipient of over a dozen ASCAP awards and eight Meet the Composer Awards.

Ms Lyonn Lieberman is also a singer, composer, recording artist and producer. Her music for the Leonardo Shapiro Off-Broadway play The Yellow House was critically acclaimed, and her violin playing has been featured on made-for-TV films, TV commercials, the Broadway show M. Butterfly, and Off Broadway. In the early nineties, she co-produced and hosted her own radio program “Hear and Now” on WBAI for four years.

Ms Lyonn Lieberman, a former faculty member of New York University and New School University’s jazz and contemporary music program, presents nationwide clinics in which she works with string classes and orchestras. She has earned international respect and recognition as a dynamic, participatory workshop leader.

Ms Lyonn Lieberman divides her time between Newtown and New York City, where she teaches private lessons.