Kemp Stillings

Katharine Kemp Stillings was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and began studying violin from a very early age. She went to Berlin to study with Joseph Joachim, and to Saint Petersburg for further studies with Leopold Auer.[1]

Stillings performed in Russia and Finland before World War I.[2] She played with pianist Frances Nash in 1917 and 1918, in New York and several other American cities, and was a guest soloist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.[3][4][5] She toured in South America in 1920.[6]

Stillings became suddenly blind in the 1920s, and after that focused on teaching.[7] "It has been a handicap, but also a blessing," she told an interviewer in 1940. "It has made my critical hearing ever so much more acute. Besides, something like this makes us so human."[8] She was on the faculty at the New Jersey College for Women from 1927 to 1952,[9] and taught her own master classes in New York City,[10] which were modeled on the pedagogy of Joachim and Auer.[11] Her students included conductor Walter Eisenberg.[12]

Stillings published violin exercise books for children, The Great Adventure (1928), At the Crossroads (1929), and The Giant Talks (1929),[13] and wrote compositions with titles like "Take a Little Eighth Note", "Tick Tock", and "Double Meaning".[14] She also took an interest in cookery, sharing recipes for fruit dishes with a newspaper in 1940.[15]

Kemp Stillings died in 1967, at her home in New York City.[16]

• Cora Cooper, "Kemp Stillings: The Most Famous Violin Teacher You've Never Heard Of" (May 27, 2012) and "Kemp Stillings: Part 2" (June 7, 2012), "Kemp Stillings: The Finale!" (July 17, 2012), and "Update on Kemp Stillings Article" (August 14, 2012), at Violin Music by Women: A Graded Anthology . Four blog posts about Stillings.