Seychellois music master retires after 37-year teaching career

Seychellois music master retires after 37-year teaching career
After nearly four decades of promoting music in Seychelles, a Seychellois music teacher at the National Conservatoire of Performing Arts is retiring.
Jerry Souris, 60, has been an instructor and recently administrator of the National Conservatoire for 37 years, where he has mentored and taught several generations of music students.
“As a teacher, I have taught children as well as adults, and some have become musicians. Michel Farabeau was one of my students who became an accomplished musician and a teacher at the school,” Mr Souris told the Seychelles News Agency (SNA).
The former instructor said that many years ago, students who came to the School of Music, the former name of the national conservatoire, came to learn how to play instruments like the violin, guitar, accordion, trumpet and saxophone.
“Nowadays students don’t like wind instruments such as trumpet and saxophone. So we are trying to promote these instruments and we are finally getting some students to learn them,” he said.
The Seychellois musician added that “this is a result of the way the media promotes musical instruments and how parents motivate their children to learn how to play the instrument.”
Mr Souris was introduced to music in the early 1970s by an English man who had started a small music school. He started with playing the trombone -- a brass wind musical instrument sounded by lip vibration against a cup mouthpiece. Mr Souris also learned how to play the double bass violin -- the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra.
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