Comprehensive String Pedagogy & Curriculum (CSPC) presents time-tested principles, approaches, and techniques in a highly original manner that challenges and empowers teachers and conductors of both conventional youth orchestras and sistema-inspired ensembles.

Volume 1 provides in-depth “tools” for teachers, conductors, and administrators of Sistema-inspired and traditional youth orchestra projects. Rather than offering an impersonal “one size fits all” recipe, it describes in detail a myriad of possibilities that inform, inspire, and challenge instructors, young and old, as they address the daily responsibilities of teaching young people.

Volume 2 provides the most essential "technique fundamentals" for each string instrument, presented in easy-to-reference bullet points.

Some may be tempted to simply pluck certain pieces from the list of 73 classical and popular selections in CSPC, but ignore the written materials in Volumes 1 & 2. But in so doing, they’d be missing out on the very things that are most likely to expand their own horizons in their work with young people. CSPC doesn’t tell anyone how to teach. Rather, it expands their vision of how it might be done with even more vitality and imagination, while insuring that there’s always a solid technical foundation. According to Roger Chase, esteemed teacher and former acting principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic, “The words here carry practical and spiritual weight. In every sentence there is advice… but never a hectoring moment… on how to attend to the very small details of instrumental technique, always specific to the piece being studied, but never too much. It’s always gently suggested, giving us clues, leaving the doors open so we can see more clearly what might be possible – always always making sure there is a musical justification, a reason beyond the merely reasonable. Indeed, the entire CSPC is a monument to the rational joining hands with the magical.”

-Richard Young