Marylin Winkle

CELLO LESSONS

My purpose for teaching is to empower students of all backgrounds to be creative thinkers and leaders. Rather than requiring all students to adhere to a traditional preconceived curriculum, I devise personalized approaches for each individual student or chamber music group. My student-centered learning strategies encourage students to improvise creative solutions to solve their own technical problems by inventing exercises around challenges in the repertoire. I invite my students to select their own solo and chamber-music repertoire while also drawing from traditional technical studies, including, but not limited to:

Beginning

• Essential Elements

• All For Strings

• Suzuki

Intermediate

• Suzuki (until book 4)

• Rick Mooney’s “Double Stops,” “Position Pieces,” and “Thumb Position” books for Cello

• Alwin Schroeder’s technical studies

Advanced

• Popper Etudes

• Piatti Etudes

• Sevcik “Changing the Positions” Op. 8 & Bowing studies

WRITING & MUSIC HISTORY

As a Writing Center Consultant and Early Music Department TA, I have learned that all students, regardless of cultural or academic background, mainly want to communicate and to be heard. As a scholarly mentor, I work to help my students identify meaningful research problems and avoid the simplest answers to those problems, instead offering fresh perspectives informed by their personal identities. My students and I workshop arguments and syntax just as we would a difficult passage of a concerto: turning a sentence around backwards or inside-out, eliminating superfluous words and making stylistically-informed decisions about the shape of the phrase. I remind my writing and music performance students alike that there are as many exceptions as there are rules, and that grammar is just a tool—rather than an obstacle—meant to empower us with choices for expression.