KJ's Strings Studio

To anyone who plays a musical instrument: whenever you start feeling frustrated about your playing just remember you're literally making an inanimate object sing, which really is amazing.
Never get discouraged.

'Most musicians only learn about stretching and warming up when they become injured and seek help'

Violinist Laura Frautschi shares her experiences and approaches to maintaining a high level of physical and mental endurance as a musician, drawing parallels between the demands of professional musicians and elite athletes. Link in comments 🎻

📷 Vincent Tullo

ONE MORE WEEK TO REGISTER!!

Canadian Music Centre: Prairie Region's Music Engraving Summer Camp

Are you a composer, arranger, musician, educator, or student? Do you want to learn how to prepare professional quality sheet music and develop your engraving skills? Want to relive the whimsy of summer camp?

The Canadian Music Centre: Prairie Region is excited to announce our first ever Engraving Summer Camp, a two-day intensive designed to introduce you to the world of music typesetting and score preparation, led by industry professionals, from July 18-19, 2026.

With sessions led by our very own in-house engraver, Anton Lindenblatt, you’ll learn the basics of engraving, including notation conventions, score and part preparation, and the many options of music notation software available.

As a bonus, Michaela Kleer, head librarian of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, will also present a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most crucial roles in orchestral operations, and the work in preparing scores and parts for the musicians!

The full intensive will take place in-person at the University of Calgary in Craigie Hall F202, from 9:30am - 3:30pm, with an hour break for lunch.

For the one day/flex pass, participants will have the option to join virtually if they would like to attend the first session on July 18th, which includes access to the orchestral librarian seminar. The librarian seminar is also available as a standalone purchase.

We offer discounts to CMC Associate Composers as well as music educators for the one-day and two-day packages!

Register through the link in our bio!

'Mindfulness practice places emphasis not on maintaining perfect focus, but on noticing when attention wanders, and then gently bringing it back'

Link in comments 🎻

📷 Getty
Performance Guru

When we instruct our body to do something that goes against its design, we set ourselves up for pain and injury. Jennifer Johnson, author of "What Every Violinist Needs to Know About the Body," goes over some of the most common "mis-mappings" for violinists.
https://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20236/29669/

🎵 She was living in a council house in Aberdeen. She had never been on a stage. She had never recorded an album. She did not consider herself a performer — she was a tradition-bearer, a carrier of songs learned from her mother and grandmother in the travelling and settled Scottish Traveller communities of the northeast. When the folklorist Hamish Henderson knocked on her door in 1953, Jeannie Robertson had no idea that what she carried was considered remarkable. She simply knew the songs.

What Henderson discovered in that Aberdeen kitchen was a voice and a repertoire that the scholarly world had been searching for without knowing it — a living connection to the great tradition of Scottish ballads documented and partially preserved in the eighteenth and nineteenth century collections of Percy and Child, but heard now not as historical artefacts but as a living, breathing, technically extraordinary performance tradition. Jeannie Robertson knew versions of the great Child Ballads — Lord Donald, The Twa Corbies, Edward, Johnie C**k — that were longer, more complex, and more musically sophisticated than any version previously recorded. And she sang them in a voice of such natural authority and emotional depth that it silenced rooms.

She was awarded an MBE in 1968 and was recognised in her lifetime as a Master of Traditional Arts — an honour that attempted to capture something that the word singer did not quite contain. She was not simply singing songs. She was the living repository of a tradition that had survived in the Scottish Traveller community precisely because that community had never abandoned the oral culture that the settled world had allowed to atrophy.

She gave the world back songs it had forgotten it had lost.

Her voice is on recordings in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. If you have never heard it, remedy that. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.