It’s always the greatest pleasure to lecture at the Cambridge Violin Making School’s summer course, and I try to make it for at least one of the weeks each year. The course attracts the most wonderful assortment of musicians – amateur and professional alike, academics from the university, and a good sprinkling of the unexpected as well as students trying out violin making for the first time before committing to Newark, West Dean or the other international violin making schools.

  During the 2022 visit by Merton College students, known for their instrument repair course, I ensured they explored the Hill Collection and handled instruments in my workshop. As a unique addition, I always guide them to Trinity College’s chapel to admire Grinling Gibbons’ reredos. This visit provides a refreshing perspective on wood virtuosity beyond Amati and Stradivari violins, offering a visual break after scrutinizing Cremonese varnish. For a number of years I served as external examiner to the course.

In the world of violins, expertise varies— a stellar soloist may lack in chamber music, an orchestral musician might struggle as a teacher. Similarly, in violin restoration, intense focus on repairs can overshadow the instrument’s significance. My annual identification lecture emphasizes foundational knowledge while recognizing the vastness of the field. Hence, I hope to illustrate and give some foundations, some explanation of what we can look at to determine an attribution, but to understand that it is is just another

Bringing original instruments for students to examine is critical to their learning and beyond what colleges are able to offer from their own resources. This lecture trip to West Dean College allowed the students to get close and personal to a viol, viola and violin by Barak Norman all made between 1690 and 1710, as well as an earlier violin by Thomas Urquhart from 1662. One student later copied this Barak Norman viol, using it as a study for the

In October I welcomed the first year from Newark School of Violin Making for a two-day hand’s on visit to the workshop and study at the Ashmolean Museum over the half term break. Unfortunately nobody told their teacher, the great John Wright, who was taking a quiet holiday with his partner in Oxford. Here is the moment we mobbed him outside the Ashmolean.

It was good to spend online time with the historically informed practice students of Jacobs School of Music to talk about the hardware of violin history, and how it relates to the bigger world of musical performance. What are the issues of the miriad of different modifications and uses of the violin, what are the practical challenges and how can we face them as modern musicians surveying the whole world of the musical past. I hope I didn’t lead them

Since I chaired the 2017 Messiah conference for the British Violin Making Association, I have had enormous pleasure in presenting a summary of the conference to numerous audiences including that the Ashmolean museum and annually to students at Newark School of Violin Making. In November 2023, I gave a presentation to the Michigan Violin Makers Association. There are some ferociously dedicated makers in that part of the United States, so I really had to be on top of my game.