Sturm to receive two awards from the International Rabbath Institute

Hans Sturm
Hans Sturm

Hans Sturm, associate professor of double bass and jazz studies and area head for strings, will be traveling to Paris in December to receive two international awards from the International Rabbath Institute, one for teaching and one for performing.

Sturm will receive the Prize and Diploma for Performance Excellence and the Prize and Diploma of Professor from the institute, which is founded by noted bassist François Rabbath.

“I could not be more excited at the news of this prestigious award for Dr. Sturm,” said John W. Richmond, Professor and Director of the Glenn Korff School of Music. “Hans has enjoyed an international profile as an artist and pedagogue for many years. It was a major coup of our Glenn Korff School of Music to recruit him to our faculty. With each passing day, that decision is affirmed.”

Born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, Rabbath is a self-taught bassist. In 1955, he went to Paris to study at the Paris Conservatory.

“He discovered upon his arrival that he actually played as well as the teacher at the conservatory, so he began to play professionally right away,” Sturm said.

A virtuoso player, Rabbath’s major contribution to bass pedagogy is represented in his method book, “Nouvelle technique de la contrebasse.” A fifth volume of the book is due out soon. The main difference in his approach is Rabbath’s use of the left hand and his detailed attention to the bow arm.

“His way of teaching and way of approaching the instrument has completely revolutionized the bass,” Sturm said. “His students hold principal positions with major symphony orchestras, but also his technique is very versatile and includes some of the greatest jazz bass players of our time.”

Sturm purchased Rabbath’s first method book when it came out in 1984 and worked through the first three volumes.

“I had worked at it and studied it, but I was studying with other people and doing other things,” Sturm said.

In the late 1990s, he saw a former student, Sandor Ostlund, who is now associate professor of double bass at Baylor University, playing a Bach cello suite on his bass at a bass convention.

“For us to play a Bach suite at the same suite as a cello is a huge deal,” Sturm said. “I was flabbergasted.”

In visiting with him, he learned Ostlund had gone to Paris and studied with Rabbath.

Later, Sturm went to George Vance’s Institute around 2000. Vance had studied the Suzuki violin method on the bass and had put together a methods book titled “Progressive Repertoire,” that combines the Suzuki way of teaching with Rabbath’s technique.

“I went to Vance’s Institute, and François was there as a guest,” Sturm said. “He heard me play and he has this way of saying things: ‘Why you play that way exactly?’ he asked me. You don’t know. You just say this is the way I learned it.”

Rabbath encouraged him to study with him in Paris, so Sturm began making twice yearly trips to Paris on his own to study with him, while he was teaching at Ball State University. He took a sabbatical and studied with him for a semester.

“I learned a lot from him and studied deeply with him during that window,” he said.

But then there was the issue of mastering Rabbath’s bowings.

“If you see the note and the finger above it and the string below it, you have an idea of what he’s asking the left hand to do,” Sturm said. “If you see a slur mark above with a bunch of dots, you don’t know exactly what’s entailed for the bow. I had been at this for several years. It’s his bow arm, and I can’t get it. I’m getting frustrated. And he said, ‘This is my fear. I’m not going to be able to transmit my bow arm.’”

During his return to Ball State, Sturm’s plane was delayed. He asked for reading material and was given a golf magazine, despite the fact that he doesn’t play golf.

“There was an article in there about a new Tiger Woods golf video game, and they have him in the skin-tight suit studying his biomechanics,” Sturm said. “And I thought, surely, if they can do this for a game, they can do this for a bow arm.”

He returned to Ball State and made a cold call to their biomechanics lab. After completing some tests on Sturm, he received a grant to create a study of Rabbath’s bow arm, which resulted in the best-selling DVD “The Art of the Bow.”

“I’m very proud of the work,” Sturm said.

They followed up with a second DVD in 2010 that focused on Rabbath’s left-hand technique. The DVDs include biomechanics animation and user-selectable camera angles, as well as interviews, performances and lecture-demonstrations.

“It’s one thing to see what’s on the written page and have a two-dimensional thing. It’s another thing to take a lesson with somebody and have that experience. But it’s another thing to be able to really study and change the angle and see the motion,” Sturm said.

When Sturm came to UNL in 2011, he worked with their mutual friend, Johnny Hamil, who founded the Kansas City Bass Workshop, and Rabbath came out this summer for the workshop. Sturm worked with the Glenn Korff School of Music to offer a one-credit graduate class for string music educators who wanted to get more involved in the bass during the course of the bass workshop. Rabbath heard Sturm perform during his recital at the workshop and invited him to come to Paris to receive these awards for teaching and performance.

“It was a culmination of a lot of things,” Sturm said of the awards. “It was him seeing what I have become, and certainly, I stand on the shoulders of all of my other teachers. It’s like a lifetime achievement award, so it means a lot to me.”

In addition to his trip to France, Sturm will also be traveling to New Zealand in November to serve as an external judge for the Graduate Music In Jazz Studies Exams and Recitals at the University of Auckland’s National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries.

He will examine the Doctor of Musical Arts final recital and participate as one of two external faculty in the oral exam of Olivier Holland, who is also a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland’s School of Music.

“I was an exchange student to Australia when I was in high school in 1976, but I’ve never been to New Zealand, so I’m very excited,” Sturm said.