One of my favorite things about music lessons is that sometimes you get to watch the story keep going long after the lessons themselves are over.
That happened recently with Phoenix Abbo and one of his former violin students, Chloe Svadlenka.
Chloe now teaches with us in Dallas while finishing her senior year at UNT.
But years before she was teaching students of her own, she was sitting in lessons with Phoenix as a 15-year-old violin student trying to figure out how far she wanted to take music.
According to Phoenix, from the very beginning Chloe was calm, nice, and determined.
And honestly, determined students can be both the easiest and hardest students to teach.
Easy because they care.
Hard because sometimes they care too much.
When students become serious about an instrument — especially when college auditions and long-term musical goals enter the picture — something changes psychologically. The pressure increases. Practice becomes more intense. Students start thinking every mistake matters.
Phoenix said a huge part of Chloe’s growth during those years centered around one difficult concept:
Learning how to loosen up.
That sounds simple until you’re the student sitting there trying your absolute hardest to succeed.
A lot of serious music students assume “working harder” means squeezing tighter, concentrating harder, forcing more effort into every note.
But ironically, high-level playing often comes from the opposite direction.
Freedom.
Relaxation.
Trusting technique.
Allowing the instrument to resonate instead of fighting it.
That’s a hard lesson for ambitious students to learn because it feels counterintuitive. When you care deeply about something, your instinct is usually to grip tighter.
But musicians eventually discover that great playing often feels more natural than forced.
Phoenix spent years helping Chloe work through that balance while preparing her for the next stage of her musical life.
And now here she is years later teaching students of her own.
Honestly, I love stories like this because they show how teaching music becomes generational in a way.
Teachers pass ideas, encouragement, habits, and philosophies to students.
Then eventually some of those students turn around and pass those same things forward to someone else.
And the really cool part is that Chloe seems to be building her own version of that connection already.
Her families absolutely love her.
She’s doing an amazing job with her students, and I’d imagine somewhere inside her teaching style are pieces of every lesson she experienced herself growing up.
That’s probably true for most great teachers.
Nobody teaches in isolation.
Good teaching gets handed down.
Shaped.
Adapted.
Personalized.
Then shared again with the next student sitting in front of you.
And every once in a while, the student becomes the teacher.
