Violin teachers probably take too little advantage of the fact that it is pure mad joy to play music with other people. They could better leverage the best pedagogical tool of all: a student transfixed by the sound of two voices together, a student having the fantastic sensation of their one note pulling against some other note. Many professional chamber musicians got hooked when they experienced exactly that feeling at a young age, and if they were lucky they had teachers who nurtured a sense of wonder and love of sound all the way through their training.

Listening like this, we pay attention. Being embedded in a duet with your teacher who can hear perfect intervals and help you find the resonance of two instruments in tune is a sure-fire way to permanently wake up the ears. Playing in a duet when your partner plays tricky rhythms in accurate but expressive ways, and keeps a pulse that has character, and insists on following the meter’s hierarchy––these things teach people about rhythm in a hurry. Listening well is the perfect incentive for figuring out how to make sounds and phrase in ways that follow the logic of the music.

Additionally, if a player is overwhelmed by the delicious sensation of being in a ensemble, there is little room to bother with extraneous distractions. This last advantage is not peculiar to learning music, but is as important as the other advantages of using duets; if your student’s attention is taken up with thinking of themselves as inadequate or superior, they can’t focus on sound, meaning, or imagination. It doesn’t matter whether their self diagnosis is positive or negative; whichever side of that coin they are looking at occupies their attention, and they are left with only half a mind available to listen. Helping students learn to be engrossed in the music and to direct their own attention to constructive places is one of the teacher’s most important jobs.

When I’m teaching I work out ways for two violins to play difficult passages found in the standard repertoire, on the fly. Lately I’ve been writing down some of these little “arrangements” to help violinists use the richness of the compositions to untangle technical problems. Hunting for even more ways to incorporate more duet playing in my studio, I have been looking at existing literature and have found rich resources. The DuoKlier folks, (https://duo-klier.com/) who are publishing lots of arrangements for two violins, doing a great service to teachers and students everywhere.