SARAH HERSH AND MARY HOROZANIECKI have spent the past three years reading through hundreds of violin duos written between the introduction of the Tourte bow and today. They’re searching for what they call “teaching gems,” duos that students from Level 2 and up can use. “These are things people can use in the studio to learn to listen ‘vertically,’ to listen to harmony,” says Hersh.

Horozaniecki, for her part, was inspired in this quest by a remark by one of her most prominent teachers, Josef Gingold. “He said to me, ‘Mary, you have to think in stereo,’” she recalls. “His teaching style was to play with the student in harmony or counterpoint. If you were playing a concerto movement, he’d play the entire orchestral accompaniment on his violin. Even if you were playing an etude, he would join in and make it a duo. It helps you establish pitch centers, explore different rhythms, and listen to more than one thread of music at once.”

Hersh is an associate professor of string pedagogy and violin at the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam. Horozaniecki is a lecturer in violin and viola at Carleton, Macalester, and Augsburg Colleges in Minnesota. Together they’ve uncovered, among other things, a treasure trove of duos from the 20th century—real music by real composers that students can handle.

“A lot of great composers needed to eat,” says Hersh, “and that was great motivation for them to churn out some duos, which they could sell to a publisher more easily than concert pieces. While they were at it, a lot of composers used this as a testing ground for some of their counterpoint ideas. We’re talking about duos by Hindemith, Orff, Berio—some really cool composers.”

Hersh does suggest sorting through the material carefully, because some of these items aren’t as easy as their titles advertise. “There are some examples,” she warns, “where the composer said, ‘Shall I make it pedagogically cool or composerly cool?’ and he went down the composer lane. So you’ve got to watch out for that one fatal measure that can throw students way off with hidden traps.”

Hersh and Horozaniecki see no need to plead the case for Bartók’s 44 violin duos, because they are already so well known. What people might not realize, though, is that these pieces were commissioned for Erich and Elma Doflein’s five-volume Doflein Method: The Violinist’s Progress, published by Schott. “The Dofleins were musicologists,” says Hersh, “and they tried to use real stuff by real composers rather than write ‘The Submarine Goes Down’ or something wacky like that.”

They’re especially fond of item No.105 from the second volume, an untitled piece by Carl Orff, of Carmina Burana and Orff Method fame. Best for Level 5 students, it’s a solo with pizzicato accompaniment, and full of mixed meters.

“This business of being afraid of mixed meters, or having to rest and come in again, teachers have gotten over that,” says Hersh. “We have now enough of Kodály and Orff and Dalcroze and other ways to help kids with rhythms, so we shouldn’t back off and wait to tackle it if it’s rhythmically challenging.”

From about the same era as the Orff and Bartók duos comes an abundance of material by such leading figures as Bohuslav Martinu and Paul Hindemith.

“For adult students, this is a wonderful place to go,” says Horozaniecki. “The Martinu etudes are especially excellent. They have major seconds and little twists to the harmony that didn’t exist before.” Hersh and Horozaniecki advocate starting with the very first item in Martinu’s Études faciles, published by Leduc. It’s a pizzicato duo in first position, with many open strings and an ostinato figure of repeated eighth notes.

From Hindemith come the Fourteen Easy Duets for two violins in first position (Schott). Don’t take “easy” too literally, though; No. 13, for instance, contains many accidentals, including double sharps and C-flat.

Hersh and Horozaniecki also laud the work of Rebecca Henry and Mimi Zweig, who, like the Dofleins, commissioned up-to-date duos by contemporary composers, although in this case the composers tended to be less well known, sometimes even graduate students. But some of these 1990s duos introduce students to fairly avant-garde techniques without being over-serious or intimidating.