Joel Lambdin
About
Joel’s career as a violinist reflects his eclectic musical interests. From free improv shows at ABC No Rio, to his own classical series at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, to new music at Galapagos Art Space, to Radio City’s Spring Spectacular and Broadway’s Burn the Floor, to past membership in metal band Resolution15, Joel is equally comfortable on the pop and rock stage as he is with an orchestra. He has toured with Bollywood superstar Arijit Singh, and with Broadway's Cinderella most recently. A believer in the inherent transformative power of art, he has spent much time developing artistic outreach that seeks to highlight and provide easy access to this power. Thus, Joel has been a Teaching Artist for Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Since 2005), the Brooklyn Philharmonic(2007-09), and most recently Abrons Art Center(since 2014) in addition to public school and young performer educational programs of his own design(2000-2004). All of these initiatives have allowed him to work with students of all backgrounds and ages to deepen their own creativity and their appreciation of music. As an advocate of contemporary music, Joel has premiered work by Tom Kraines, Cameron Britt, Lainie Fefferman among others. Joel has collaborated with Missy Mazzoli and New Amsterdam Records in concerts showcasing their work and that of their artists, and has placed their work beside the standard repertoire in concerts designed to put new and old music on equal footing. Performers involved in these concerts include Laura Metcalf (Sybarite5), Miranda Sielaff (The Knights), Suphala, Kurt Nikkanen (NYC Ballet, concertmaster), and Tony Award-winning conductor and pianist, Stuart Malina.
Joel has been a private violin teacher since 1998, and has taught at Elizabethtown College, Packer Collegiate Institute, and Abrons Arts Center as professor of violin/viola and strings instructor. Additionally, Joel has developed and taught classes using music technology, especially Ableton Live, to help those without substantive musical training to write their own music. Joel served on the faculty of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival for several years, training aspiring musicians in how to conduct musical outreach, including developing alternative concert formats, audience engagement, and programming workshops. He completed BM and MM degrees at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he studied with Sarah Johnson and Kevin Lawrence.
Seeing the value of introspection through the study of music, Joel began to become interested in meditation as a way to improve his artistry. At age 17, he began a 20 year study of Tai Chi and Chi Gong (Sang Gee Tam, David Harold, "Jin Taiyang" Kris Brenner, and Master Yang Fukui), which eventually led him to and intensive study of Zen meditation with the Mountains and Rivers Order in New York in 2004. From there, meditation became the driving force in his life, and developed an Advaita practice in the Indian tradition. Joel has been visiting Jaipur, India to study with his teacher every year since 2011.
GENERAL
My goal is to give students a personal tool kit that addresses common problems we face as musicians, as well as the personal goals of the student. This can take the form of listening techniques, practice methods, basic exercises, or even live concert recommendations. The idea being that while the teacher can shorten the road, the student must learn to teach themselves. I try to avoid reward-based teaching, and emphasize process over outcomes.
VIOLIN
I use the Suzuki Books as an easily accessible framework, but incorporate more so-called traditional elements (scale systems, etc.) from the beginning. Once a baseline technique is established (often around Suzuki Book 4), the student is encouraged to learn whatever music they may be interested in, alongside or in place of classical rep. Each student requires a different balance of spending time perfecting a piece or technique versus going through rep quickly. While I tend to fall on the "slower but thorough" side of this balance, I make an effort to be sensitive to a particular student's need for progress as a motivator. A typical lesson begins with basic exercises, scales, and sight-reading, with the remaining time spent on repertoire. In all of these, I approach each problem a student encounters as an exploration of the sounds they are making. We then recreate the steps taken to solve the problem so a student builds a knowledge base from which they may draw when facing similar issues in the future.
MUSIC TECHNOLOGY and COMPOSITION
Computer programs like GarageBand are approached in my classes from a compositional standpoint: "How do I get the sound in my head to come out of the speakers?" For beginners, we start by learning how to listen for simple structure and instrumentation, then recreate what we are hearing in progressively complex ways. For the more experienced, we focus on work flow and finding the ways that we most easily tap into our creativity. Great emphasis is put on experimentation, so evaluating music is done from the standpoint of "what am I hearing and do I like it?"