Suzuki Method

Method Man

The teaching system developed by Shinichi Suzuki is much more than just a way of learning a musical instrument. As TIM HOMFRAY discovers, its inventor considered it a way of civilising the world.
There is a conventional wisdom that children have particular innate talents: while one might be a born musician, another might be predisposedtowards science or mathematics or craftsmanship. Another philosophy, however, views talent not as an accident of birth, but as something that can be created in every child. This is the abiding principle behind the teaching of the Japanese pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki, who died at the age of 99 ten years ago last January. His method, originally for teaching violin but now applied to a wide variety of musical instruments and also to the voice, has become well established in many parts of the world.The Suzuki method, as it is now known, was not so called by its inventor. He preferred to call it the 'mother-tongue' method or 'talent education'. It originated in Suzuki's attempts to learn German in the 1920s, while studying the violin in Berlin. He came to realise that all the children who had been born when he arrived were speaking fluently six years later without having made any conscious effort, while he was still struggling with the language. This accomplishment, he reasoned, arose from their environment and the stimuli they received. If these factors worked for learning language, surely they could help to develop other skills as well.Applying this insight to children's education took 20 years of thought and attempts to find support, but by the end of the Second World War he had taught his first pupil, Toshiya Eto (who died in January; see his obituary in The Strad, June 2008), according to his new principles. Before long, Suzuki was applying them to groups of young children learning a variety of subjects, from calligraphy to gymnastics. In 1950 he founded a music institute, primarily for teaching the violin.Gradually, his ideas spread abroad, mostly through the efforts of teachers who were impressed with the method and its results. In the 1960s he was invited to visit the United States with a group of students. "No one could believe it," says Helen Brunner, a Suzuki teacher-trainer who was one of the pioneers of the Suzuki method in the UK. "There were 60 children aged six or seven playing the Bach 'Double' Concerto."A project was set up to try the method in three places - a city centre (Manhattan), a suburb and a university town - to see where it would flourish best. As it turned out, it was successful in all three locations. From there, according to Brunner, "it spread like wildfire". One of those impressed was Brunner herself, whose children were taught by a Suzuki teacher while the family was living in the US. On her return home she set about introducing the method in the UK.