Yesterday, during one of my usual Sunday charity and antique shop hunts around North London, I landed on a real musical gem!
My specific stop was the Oxfam Books and Music in Crouch End—a spot that rarely disappoints when you’re willing to dig through the stacks. Tucked away among the standard sheet music was a copy of Jakob Dont’s 24 Exercises, Op. 37. Every violin teacher knows these are key excercises to prepare students for the demands of Kreutzer and Rode. However, this wasn't normal edition solo violin score, as I flipped through the pages, I realised I was holding a full piano accompaniment score to the 24 exercises, an arrangement I had never heard of before!
Curious to learn more about this specific arrangement, I ran a series of searches online once I got home, expecting to find standard library entries or modern scans. To my surprise, nothing came up. Finding undocumented physical scores in the age of digitised global archives is remarkably rare. Whether it was a niche print run or a long-forgotten arrangement by a contemporary pedagogue, this score seems to be a genuinely unique surviving copy. And now you can download it for free here!
Dont - 24 Exercises Op.37 (Violin and Piano).pdf
While pedagogical etudes are almost universally practiced solo in quiet isolation, 19th-century publishers occasionally commissioned piano accompaniments for famous exercise books. They added harmonic context, made rigorous repetition more musically satisfying, and helped students develop better intonation and ensemble timing.
Some interesting videos of these studies:
The amazing Violin and Yoga teacher Rob Diggins has uploaded tutorials for numbers 1 to 9:
And Bochan Kang has recorded all of them and can be watched on his YouTube Channel:
Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIcJOrQKnxs3uPaPzTizuYVM0NWd8gsUt