What the Suzuki Method Really Taught

Excerpted from a New Yorker article of the same name by Adam Gopnik; the full article reviews a recent biography of Shinichi Suzuki entitled, Suzuki: The Man and His Dream to Teach the Children of the World by Eri Hotta.
The Music Academy has several copies of the book that families may borrow. They are located at the front desk!

New biography of Dr. Suzuki. Check out a copy from our front desk!

Dr. Shinichi Suzuki was convinced that children could learn music the way that children learn language, becoming fluent with maximal exposure and minimal overt instruction—an idea that vibrated with American dreams of instant, just-add-water accomplishment. “When adults guide their infant children toward language fluency, they bring to the task not just knowledge but also a spirit of love, patience, and self-reflection,” Hotta writes. “If that same spirit were brought to all education, Suzuki thought, then every child would know the delight of learning throughout their formative years and beyond.”

There was a built-in ambiguity in Suzuki’s approach, which persists to this day. On the one hand, he didn’t think that musical prodigies were a special class of children, with some special innate gift. On the other hand, he believed that kids learned music not by drill and repetition but by exposure and instinct. All you had to do to activate the music instinct was expose them early to the right input. This ambiguity proved fruitful as a public-relations tool—he could point to this or that wunderkind who had been trained by his method as proof that it worked. But he could also insist, in the face of all the kids who would never play at the concert-hall level, that the point was not to make wunderkinder but to make kids wonder, to allow the power of music to expand their emotional repertory. No bad result was possible.

Something significant happened to the idea of the musical prodigy, derived in no small part from Suzuki’s example. In 1998, the year of Suzuki’s death, at the age of ninety-nine, a teen-age Hilary Hahn—one of innumerable violinists exposed to the mother-tongue method—was taking the stage at the Kennedy Center, while a recording made by another Suzuki-abetted performer, Joshua Bell, received a Gramophone Award. We no longer treat such performers as freaks of nature but as examples of what kids are capable of, given the right encouragement and environment. That is largely Suzuki’s doing. Even today, Hotta reports, some four hundred thousand students are learning to play in the Suzuki way.

Suzuki student, Alex Schirger engaged in a Suzuki Workshop.

However, what matters most is not making music but finding meaning in music. The range with which we extend our experience of music horizontally may help explain its extraordinary vertical depth. The more connections we make to music, the more significance music has. What we do know is that early exposure to art and music gives kids a longer familiarity with art and music. The sooner you start, the more you sense. It’s a self-evident truth, but self-evident truths can be, for children, essential to independence. The parents and nonparents may worry loudly about what the kids sawing away up on the platform are doing and where it will get them, but the kids don’t hear them. They’re making music.

For the full article, please visit: What the Suzuki Method Really Taught | The New Yorker

Enjoy some real Music Academy examples of what early Suzuki lessons look like: joyful, encouraging, self-driven, and filled with music-making.