In June 2022, Dr. Collins and her husband moved to Saint Augustine, Florida from Northern Virginia. They are in love with the area and are having fun making their house into a home. Her husband had always dreamed of having a boat and a pool―and he is now happily enjoying both!
Dr. Collins’s first love is teaching―the setting could be one-on-one or a string quartet or directing a youth orchestra. Her gift of connecting with students, unique way of using simple visual words to clarify a technique and ability to demonstrate that technique, are why her student’s flourish musically, win competitions and have first chair seats in their orchestras.
Dr. Collins’s Technique:
“The Bow is the Soul of the Violin.”
A highly sought-after pedagogue, Dr. Collins places significant emphasis on right-hand techniques―the bow―during lessons. As a child working with master violin teachers, Arron Rosan and Charles Castleman she learned the bow was the soul of the violin. At the Manhattan School of Music, studying with Raphael Bronstein, Dr. Collins fine-tuned her pedagogy to optimize her framework and techniques for teaching and learning and their execution. Dr. Collins continued to build on these right-hand techniques. She culminated her studies through her dissertation, focusing on the vibrating string and its relationship to tone production. Her dissertation:“Connecting Science and the Musical Arts in Teaching Tone Quality: Integrating Helmholtz Motion and Master Violin Teachers’ Pedagogies.”
