We are lucky to get do what we love. Over the past fifty years we have been blessed by the opporunities both to study with dedicated teachers and to continue to learn from our wonderful performing and teaching colleagues (info about our current performing ensembles here). For twenty-five years, we have had the honor of sharing music with a wide variety of students, teaching at home (including online lessons), at The Hotchkiss School (where Annie taught for ten years), at various festivals, and at The Hartt School (where Steve has taught since 1998).
Annie Trépanier, violin
Steve Larson, viola & violin
Whether you are looking for a teacher for a young or middle-school aged child, are an advanced player headed towards college or grad school, or are an adult player at any level, we would love to help you along your musical journey. Please do not hesitate to reach out and start a conversation.
-Annie & Steve
We offer violin and viola lessons at our home studio in Winsted, Connecticut and online lessons for students from anywhere outside of our local area (this is in addition to Steve’s Community Divsion, college and graduate teaching at The Hartt School and summer teaching at the Wintergreen Academy). We regularly organize and coach small ensembles of our students, sometimes playing with them ourselves and sometimes including siblings on other instruments. Playing with friends and/or teachers is both exceptionally beneficial AND incredibly fun! We also host in-home student concerts (with piano accompaniment where needed) several times per year. Of course, since the beginning of the pandemic, in-person ensemble playing as well as in-home lessons and concerts have not been possible, although we have done some safely distanced outdoor teaching and look forward to resuming that when possible. We are so proud of our students and families who have adapted to these challenges and continue to enjoy making music and striving to gain new skills. We have found that online lessons work very well as long as we supplement the lessons by providing audio and video recordings when needed, assigning students self-recording projects, and taking advantage of online technology to do occasional collaborative recording projects.
In addition to the joyful and fun aspects of learning to play music, we love being able to communicate to our students that through their lessons and practicing they are becoming part of a tradition of string playing that traces its roots through our own teachers back to the very beginnings of the violin and viola and beyond. We think it can be exciting and empowering for students to know that they are not separated from the great players and composers of the past by some magical barrier. Without any exaggeration it is possible tell our students that they are in the process of becoming direct musical descendants of seemingly legendary teachers and performers such as Shinichi Suzuki, Ivan Galamian, Carl Flesch, Jascha Heifetz, Joseph & Lillian Fuchs, Karen Tuttle, Leopold Auer, etc. Reality is, their legacies live on in the players and teachers of today and we want to help it live on in the students of the next generation.
More information about our teachers and our own approaches to teaching coming soon…
In the meantime please feel free to contact us, whether to set up a lesson, or to just ask any questions you might have about private lessons, college or grad studies at The Hartt School, studies at the Hartt Community Division, or summer studies at the Wintergreen Music Festival and Academy.
Violin Viola Etc. 