To get a violin lesson from Anne Akiko Meyers in the past, you’d most likely have had to go to her New York City apartment—if you could catch her there between the dozens of performances she gave around the globe—or be lucky enough to snag some personal instruction at one of her occasional master classes.
But starting this fall, 10 violin students at the University of Texas at Austin have Ms. Meyers as their regular instructor for weekly lessons. The Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music hired her this year as an assistant professor of violin.
Ms. Meyers, who is 39, has had a meteoric musical career, beginning with her performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 11. She debuted with the New York Philharmonic under the conductor Zubin Mehta the following year, and released her first album playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at age 18.
She has become celebrated for her powerful performances of an eclectic, relatively modern repertoire, including several works written for her by the world’s best-known contemporary composers. She now has 21 recordings on a variety of labels, and in 2008 gave scores of performances in more than 20 cities, including concerts with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in Britain, and the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. She performs on a 1730 “Royal Spanish” Stradivarius violin that was once owned by the king of Spain.
The Butler School’s hiring of Ms. Meyers is something of a coup, even for a major university with a music program that boasts more than 100 faculty members and more than 700 students. While top symphonic performers in major metropolitan areas regularly supplement their income with college teaching positions, few musicians who make their careers entirely as soloists end up as regular faculty members.
B. Glenn Chandler, director of the school, calls it a happy coincidence that his university happened to have a vacancy for a violin instructor at the same time Ms. Meyers was seeking to curtail her touring schedule and teach. “Many outstanding schools would love to have recruited her to their faculty,” he says.
Ms. Meyers became interested in teaching regularly after a two-week residence at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008: “I realized I wanted to build a studio that passed along the strong teaching traditions I grew up with.”
She was attracted to Austin because of her friendship and professional associations with other music faculty members there and because of its supportive environment. And the university promised her some flexibility to travel, she says. “They were looking for a violin player and someone to make the department much more exciting.”
But she also knows that some of her tasks in academe, like making out schedules, will be decidedly mundane.
For soloists, meeting bureaucratic requirements can be a challenge, says Emanuel Borok, concertmaster with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, who teaches six students at the University of North Texas.
Weekly private lessons can also create a greater challenge: dealing with not only students’ musical capabilities but also the intensely personal issues they may be struggling with, he says.
Having a number of teachers when she was growing up, Ms. Meyers says, showed her how teachers can leave deep impressions—good and bad. She tries to show students how “music and life and emotions all work together,” and to use that understanding to become better performers. “A lot of people’s playing is based on fear,” she says. “I just want to show them we are all scared. You might as well leave your mark.”
Pasha Sabouri, who took several lessons with Ms. Meyers in New York as a graduate student at the Butler School, says her personal warmth puts students at ease, even if, like him, they may be nervous about being critiqued by someone who has performed at the highest levels. “To her it wasn’t a big deal. To me it was petrifying,” he says of his first session with her.
The key to Ms. Meyers’s success as a teacher, he says, is her emphasizing that technique—for example, how much of the bow to use—is useful only in its service to musical expression. Unlike a lot of teachers, “she focuses on what’s coming out as an artist: It’s the sound, and what’s the color and character that you’re looking for,” says Mr. Sabouri, a music lecturer at Centenary College of Louisiana who is finishing his doctorate in musical arts at Austin.
Although Ms. Meyers has not had a permanent university teaching position before, she has some knowledge of how academe operates. Her father, Richard S. Meyers, was named president of the Fielding Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, Calif., in February and served as president of four other colleges from 1975 to 2008.
Mr. Meyers, an amateur clarinetist, says he wasn’t surprised that his daughter had chosen to take a position at a university. But he advised her that after traveling for more than two decades, she would have to be patient with her new position. “It’s going to be a very different path,” he says.
Ms. Meyers says she will cut back on her solo playing after this year. While her travels are a good way to recruit talented musicians to the Butler School, she is also concerned about leaving her current students without a teacher for some weeks. And she is happy to have settled into a Texas-sized home. Austin, she adds, is “a great place to work and live.”
“After having such a punishing travel schedule,” she says, “a lot of people are very surprised I wouldn’t do that forever.”