About

Who Are We?

Fran Messenger left the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, in 1982 as an A.G.S.M. For several years she played professionally while also working as a Peripatetic Violin and Viola teacher. In time she decided to concentrate wholly on the teaching and became very involved in individual, group, sectional and orchestral teaching.

In her teaching experience she has worked with pupils playing on a wide range of instruments. She found that students often struggle to produce a good tone, due to the poor standard to which the instruments had been ‘set-up’- if indeed they had been set up at all.

To M.E. Strings, Fran brings over 40 years’ experience of working with student and intermediate standard instruments. She holds the philosophy that the student requires an instrument that has been prepared to a high standard for ease of tuning and playing and in order to produce sound that is pleasing and encouraging.

Peter (Fran’s husband) has a long standing admiration of the skills of craftsman working with wood. Being surrounded by stringed instruments  and players inspired him to learn to make and repair violins. He joined the Cambridge Violin Makers, and later found a highly reputed maker and restorer to mentor him and to teach him skills of repair and restoration.

He shares Fran’s belief that students deserve to learn on instruments that have been prepared to a high standard in order to give them the most encouragement possible from the sounds that they produce.