What is the theme then? The name of the conference is BACK TO THE FUTURE, alluding to the fact that our community is radically changing in terms of language and communication. The IT-revolution certainly is a revolutionary force that affects the work of all sorts of music teachers, string teachers not the least. It is harder than ever to motivate young people to work patiently with playing technique as well as musical form, but at the same time it has become more important than ever. This calls for our knowledge.

Sweden is at the forefront in regard to IT development, and social and democratic development as well. This means that, at an early stage, Sweden must tackle new challenges arising from changes in these areas. Many other European communities, including educational systems and especially the teaching of musical instruments, are currently facing problems that we already are familiar with, and that many inventive Swedish string teachers have already given a great deal of thought.

We would like to gather experiences of how the Swedish municipal music school, with its well established, broad anchorage in society, has altered its way of working in order to meet the new challenges. Hence, the name of the conference in Falun could be interpreted as a wish to help young people recapture faith in artistic values and the importance of meeting others through music. We were brought up with, and formed by, this faith. Just as intended, however, there are alternate ways of interpreting the name as well The content of this conference has been vividly discussed in the work group since we met for the first time a couple of years ago. Work is in full progress, but we are keen for Swedish string teachers, and later on teachers from other ESTA-countries, to express their views to us. Naturally, ideas relating to the issue mentioned above will attract our interest. For instance, showing the advantages of working with string classes in compulsory school could be one topic. Another could be how to use traditional music as a pedagogical aid. To sum up we will focus on pedagogical methods that have proved successful in encouraging children to really enjoy playing - methods that may not be so common in the rest of Europe, at least judging from previous ESTA-conferences. In addition we would like to make everyone see that children having fun while they are playing is also the key to achieving top quality. Sweden has an exceptionally high number of extraordinary musicians in proportion to its population. We would like to show this connection. As usual, parts of the conference program will be based on proposals from the other ESTA-countries. But we will choose among these so that the other countries’ contributions will reinforce the defined theme of the Falun conference.