Marjorie Gere, violin
Resident Musician, Rehearsal Coordinator
marji@musiConnects.org

Favorite teaching method/activity:

In my private teaching, I use a semi-improvisatory epic story about the jungle that helps me convey information about the physical, sensory experience of playing the violin. The story takes place in a big beautiful tree (the child's body, the bow, and the violin) and has nine characters. There is the five-member primate community of the bowhand: a gorilla (the child's right hand index finger), two monkeys (the middle two fingers), a baby (the pinky), and the infamous Chubby Monkey (the thumb), the big guy who loves to curl up underneath the other primates, but who has trust problems and gets easily nervous and tense. Then there are the four birds (the four left hand fingers) that live out in a soft and cozy nest (the thumb and palm of the left hand) at the end of the most beautiful branch (the violin). 

There are many things that I find useful in treating the violin lesson as an interactive storytelling session: 

• The story is rife with outer space adventures, dance parties, and all the beauty and dangers of the jungle; I am able to end each lesson with a cliffhanger that makes the student impatient to return to lessons the next week. 
  
• I am finding that children have positive physical and verbal responses to questions such as, "Oh, is your Chubby Monkey tired? Is the gorilla not taking care of him like he is supposed to?" but usually respond negatively (or not at all) to commands like "Bend your thumb. Pronate your index finger." 
  
• In my own education, technical suggestions that were hyper-focused on one part of my body/mind  usually led to debilitating fixations, rather than contextualized, tangible solutions; moreover, having my hands treated as utilitarian objects, rather than an expressive part of me--the whole living, breathing, organism that I am--felt anti-musical and inhumane.  My jungle story challenges me to think and talk poetically about violin technique and music-making, and in a way that draws a connection between countless processes and expresses my appreciation for the student's physical, emotional, intellectual condition.

A favorite chamber music exploration: Hockets!

My little Chittick chamber music group really loves playing with hockets, which are single melodies produced among two or more voices such that alternately one voice sounds while the other rests. In an improvised hocket, everyone in the group chooses their own note, and the music changes based on what order and duration the notes get sounded. One fun thing we do is alternate between playing our melody in hocket and trying to sing the composite melody as a group. Another fun thing to do is experiment in putting rests into different parts of the hocket to create new performance challenges and to experiment with rhythmic feel. Another way to use this musical technique is to take a familiar melody and, by dividing it among the group into a hocket, making a mystery piece for the ensemble to create, listen to, and recognize. 

Hockets get at the necessity of watching and listening as a group, and present high-level challenges that call absolutely on group focus, not individual prowess. And they foster a very lively, almost sporty atmosphere in a chamber music class.

Watch/hear an example of a Chittick Music Circle hocket below. For a challenge, try to sing along with it, and then by yourself! I find this melody quirky and catchy--it reminds me of the music of Prokofiev.

- PRESS KIT BIO - 

Marjorie Gere builds her life and work around meaningful, complex, long-term, collaborative projects with idealistic artists and thinkers from a wide variety of backgrounds. In collaboration with composer/pianist Dan Sedgwick, she has performed violin/piano recitals, composed puppet shows, pop songs and rounds, and organized An Exciting Event, an unwieldy and wacky chamber ensemble of musician/puppeteers. She and Dan will be co-teaching at the 2012 Xenharmonic Praxis Summer Camp, a music festival dedicated to the exploration of new and neglected tuning systems.

Through musiConnects, Marjorie teaches violin and chamber music to students at the Chittick Elementary School in Mattapan, MA, and performs as member of the Boston Public Quartet. She also teaches music, leads workshops in puppetry, music, and creative writing at the Charlestown Working Theater. Between 2002-2005, as a two-time fellow of the US State Department's Cyprus-America Scholarship Program and representative of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire, Marjorie conducted action research in reconciliation through music, as it applies to the Cyprus peace process. 

Marji received a Master’s in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Bachelor’s degrees in Music and English from the University of Iowa, where she studied violin and chamber music with Annette-Barbara Vogel, the Maia Quartet, and the late Leopold LaFosse.