When Dr. Nathan Groot joined ASMSA’s music faculty as a string instructor and director of the school’s String Ensemble in August 2022, All-Region auditions were about two months away.
That’s not much time to prepare extensively for auditions with a new group of students who were as unfamiliar with his teaching methods as he was with their individual talents and abilities. Rehearsal and instruction time was a precious resource as well.
“Some of these excerpts are quite challenging and require a lot of explanation and guidance,” Groot said about the pieces chosen for junior and senior high All-Region and All-State auditions. “Most of the string students I have spoken with in Arkansas, at our school and elsewhere, have not had the opportunity to take weekly private lessons. Music lessons typically cost anywhere from $250-$400 per month if a student takes them each week, and many families just can’t afford it.”
Groot, a violist, can relate to that situation. As a child, he began taking viola lessons only to be forced to drop them when his family could no longer afford them. A local retired violinist heard about the situation and offered free lessons to Groot and his sister, who was learning violin. Groot went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music performance and pedagogy followed by master and doctorate degrees in music performance.
“The only reason I am a musician today — and the reason I was able to go to college at all on a music scholarship — is because a member of my community in Tennessee gave me lessons for free and donated his time. In some sense, I want to find ways to help serve the music community in Arkansas more broadly,” Groot said.
One way to do that was to develop video lessons that help guide student violists and violinists through the All-Region and All-State audition materials. In 2022, Groot began recording videos in which he performs the pieces while also stopping to give instruction. He releases videos throughout the year, including the summer, which allows ASMSA’s student musicians an opportunity to get a jumpstart on classroom preparation.
“Our own students use the videos,” he said. “Because they can get started on their material early, it means that we start the first lesson of the semester with more advanced work rather than losing our first hour on fingerings and basics. They also like being able to play along with my recordings of the excerpts to adjust their intonation and check their rhythm.”
Groot placed the videos on YouTube so that students had an easily accessible resource. Once he began producing the videos, he had to make a choice — would he set the videos to private so that only his ASMSA students had access to them or make them public so that any student musician could use them. He chose to make them public.
“In the end, I decided that I would rather more students benefit. It’s basic information and advice that any string teacher would give, so it only serves to help students who don’t already have access to that information through lessons,” he said.
There has been some positive feedback on the videos, but it was interaction at the junior high All-Region clinic in fall 2023 that he called “the most rewarding moment so far.”
“I was working as the assistant to the junior high clinician, so I took attendance, helped students tune and repaired broken instruments. During a break, one student came up to me and said that he recognized me from YouTube and that my videos helped him with his audition. It was a short interaction but very rewarding to hear that the videos were helpful to someone,” Groot said.
He has made his way through all of the audition material for this year, but he plans to start working his way through the standard viola and violin etudes in future videos.
“I probably will never run out of material, so it’s likely that this project could last as long as I’m able to keep making videos,” he said. “I hope to continue making free resources that are available to anyone and everyone who wants to learn. Music education should be accessible and equitable. It can be hard to achieve that when music teachers also need to have an income, but I think helping anywhere we can around the margins, like with these YouTube videos, can be a good start.”
The video series can be found on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@grootvla/videos and on his website at https://nathangroot.com/allregion-allstate.