Violin Resources – A Performing, Learning, Artistic, and Teaching Web Resource and Platform for Violinists and Musicians, By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge, MA, est. 2023

Simon Fischer – A Brief Biography

Professor of Music at the Guildhall School of Music in London, the violinist and pedagogue Simon Fischer was born in Sydney, Australia. 

The son of singer, librarian, and violist Mary Wynn and father Raymond Fischer, esteemed professor of piano at the New South Wales State Conservatorium and then at the Royal College of Music, under an appointment by the great Sir David Willcocks, Simon Fischer was the fourth of four children born into a remarkably musical household.

An outstanding violinist and teacher, Fischer is perhaps best known for a violin pedagogy that also took the violin lesson into the 20th and 21st century and beyond, particularly by way of his outstanding and astute transcription of aural exercises encountered in his years of study with pedagogues including the great Dorothy DeLay, as well as his own, taping of classes for masterclasses which can be accessed around the world.

Prior to this, violin exercises and studies such as those found in his books like Basics, published by Edition Peters from his writings for the strings journal The Strad, as well as violin lessons or masterclasses themselves, were inherently or intrinsically anecdotal, oral; passed only in lessons from teachers to students.

Written forms of violin exercises by way of Fischer’s brilliant transcriptions and astutely pedagogical curations and contextualisations, Fischer brought these exercises to life in a violin pedagogy that reaches, comprehensively, all, and in ways that were pedagogically relevant and especially structurally or foundationally useful. 

Said to benefit the violin teacher as well as music student, violinist, and even professional violinist, Fischer’s Basics, for example, is a vivid compendium of comprehensive technical and musical exercises designed to assist in stretching both mind and body.

Consisting of musical and technical exercises his own as well as Dorothy Delay’s, and gleaned from his years of extensive musical education and study, this kind of work was – prior to Fischer and in a manner that remains inimitable since – otherwise unrecorded or available in written or aural transcribed form. 

For more educational material on Fischer’s work, as well as an e-book, please feel free to contact us with the contact form.

By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge, MA, 2023-2024

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