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Simon Fischer – Basics – Some Notes and a Brief History on the Book and Teaching Guide

Simon Fischer (left), violinist and writer, pictured with his father, the pianist and pedagogue Raymond Fischer (right)

The student of Yfrah Neaman in London, and later the great American pedagogue Dorothy Delay In New York, and at the Juilliard School, the outstanding violinist Simon Fischer, is a gifted pedagogue, writer, and teacher for students the world over.

An active recitalist, soloist, and leader as well as soloist with some of the United Kingdom’s most outstanding orchestras from the Philharmonic to the BBC Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic, just to name a few, Fischer brings a lifetime of artistic contributions from working with musicians and conductors as esteemed as Yehudi Menuhin, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Sir Charles Grove, to bring on his literary and musical output.

Fischer is known also for both authoring a series of violin guides as well as presenting violin lessons on taped masterclasses that are made available for an international viewership, such that students are able to learn the instrument wherever it is that they are, either by books or through multi-media guides.

A frequent contributor to the violin journal The Strad by way of technical, violinistic, and musical columns, it is out of Fischer’s written work here that the collected writings and exercises in Basics, and outstanding teaching and violin learning guide, emerges.

Consisting of some 300 exercises for professional violinists, teachers, and music students alike, the exercises in Basics aim to assist in improving and cultivating all manner of violin technique. From exercises for improving violin tone to violin intonation, the work covers a span that runs from how to develop a relaxed and versatile palette for vibrato, shifting, to a great canvass of what technical difficulties a violinist may encounter over the course of a violinistic lifetime. Also found here are exercises for the alleviation of ‘awkward’-ness and even ‘tension’ that may also contribute to tonal issues, as Fischer himself has written. 

A work further understood by the great American pedagogue Dorothy DeLay to be ‘original, detailed [and] useful to anyone sincerely concerned with violin technique’, it is an indispensable guide including some bow exercises with a pedigree that can be traced all the way back to Lucien Capet in the ninteenth- and early twentieth-century, for example.

As Fischer himself has also written in the Preface to the work, some exercises come by way of the great Dorothy DeLay herself. S student of Galamian’s, who was a student of Capet’s, Fischer’s is a revolutionary and groundbreaking written transmission for our day and age and beyond of oral lessons that would have otherwise come by way, only, of private classes.

In writing these exercises and principles down, Fischer has transcribed a lifetime and earlier generations of learning for students the world over. Examples range, as Fischer has written, from

‘The first of them […] a tone production exercise that I learned from Dorothy DeLay. [In fact], before sending the article to the magazine, I telephoned Miss DeLay in New York to ask her permission, explaining that I did not want to ‘steal’ her exercise. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry. I learnt it from Galamian, and he learnt it from Capet, so feel free – what is important is that these exercises become known’.

The result of this, as earlier established, was the written collection Basics, first published in 1997, and by Edition Peters. It is an indispensable guide to violin technique, and is available for sale through this website also.

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Further Material for Sale – Please feel free also to use the contact link to enquire. Violin lessons and educational material that teaches and expounds upon the principles expounded in Basics are available also. 

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

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Simon Fischer (Left), in a Taped Masterclass with a Violin Student (Right)

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts Cambridge MA, All Rights Reserved

All Rights Reserved