|
The Suzuki Method |
||
|
This page is my own description of the Suzuki Method (or the Mother Tongue Method), and how it works. I will admit that the tone is a little casual; I wrote this years ago, and I haven't found the time to fully revise it. Every Suzuki teacher is highly aware of the misconceptions regarding the Suzuki Method, so I have dedicated the last section to dispelling the most common ones. If you have any more questions about these topics, please give me a call.
Also Check Out:
Information for
New Suzuki Parents
The Suzuki Method - A Brief Overview (In My Own Words)
NOTE: This short biography of Dr. Suzuki and explanation of his method is not intended to plagiarize or replace the publications sold by Summy-Birchard, Inc., such as Nurtured By Love, Ability Development From Age Zero, or similar works. It has been compiled not only from my memory of these books but from numerous conversations and first-hand anecdotes about Dr. Suzuki from his former friends and students. Any and all visitors to this site are in fact encouraged to purchase Dr. Suzuki's books--all of them, as soon as possible. It was only to Dr. Suzuki's great dislike that Americans began calling his method "the Suzuki Method," both because he was a very humble man who did not like the pursuit of fame, and because he thought it took the focus off of the method itself and placed it on his name. But, as is the way of things in our society, the name that was the easiest to remember got stuck. Dr. Suzuki always referred to his method as either "the Talent Education Method" or "the Mother Tongue Method," and it was referred to by these names in Japan--his school in Matsumoto was called the "Talent Education School." I personally prefer the term "the Mother Tongue Method," because I feel that it most accurately describes the application of his theory, and this is the way that I will refer to it from here on. The story goes that Dr. Suzuki was in Germany, walking around on the street, when all of a sudden it hit him. Hard. He realized, "Oh, wow--German kids speak German!" The immediate reaction of any normal person would be a slight chuckle and the word, "Duh." Dr. Suzuki, however, was not a normal person. He saw deeper. Partly because of his experience as an adult Japanese trying very hard to speak German, trying with all his might to be understood by all the fluent native speakers around him, he noticed that three-year-old German children running around on the street had mastered the pronunciation of their local dialect to a degree that he probably never would. Even if he spent years at a university studying the regional tongue and the details of its inflection, he might never be able to get his muscles to form the words precisely--and yet these kids had mastered their distinct accent to the point that anyone from out of town, maybe even the neighboring town, might stand out as a foreigner. How could it be that something so incredibly difficult, something requiring so much precision, could be possible for these kids who had never had a course in language? The conclusion he eventually came to was that they had, in fact, had a course in language--the best possible learning environment in the entire world--and he sought from then on to find a way to replicate it. This was the first realization that led to the Mother Tongue Method, that children can learn things adults can't, when given the proper learning environment. Because Dr. Suzuki's throat muscles had spent so many years being fluent in Japanese and no other language, they had lost their ability to change with the same ease as a child's. This is a realization about "development" that we take completely for granted now, but it was partly because of Dr. Suzuki that we do so. The second realization was that all of the children, even the ones who might be considered slow learners at school, were fluent in German to a degree that Dr. Suzuki could never imitate. How could this be, that kids who were having trouble with addition and subtraction could perform such a dizzying physical feat as saying "schrecklich" correctly? The more one studies just how complicated language really is, the more respect one has for the skill it requires--and yet all of these kids had those skills. All children who speak have those skills. For Dr. Suzuki, something didn't add up. Either children have an ability to learn that is greater than previously imagined, or else children can be taught regardless of their initial ability. These two concepts ultimately lead to the same point, which is that children have potentially infinite ability. Whether the ability is "given" through Talent Education or brought out from nature is, I think, beside the point. All children can learn. And so Dr. Suzuki devised the Mother Tongue approach to education. He did this with great success in Japan, and parents from all over the country would send their children to his Talent Education School in Matsumoto to be taught not only music, but all of the other things that were taught there as well. It's important to note that although Dr. Suzuki was a musician and applied his theories initially to the teaching of music, he believed that the Mother Tongue method was applicable, and should be applied, to all of human learning.
The Mother Tongue method was devised for these reasons: 1. To revolutionize childhood education and make it more effective. 2. To give children the gift of music as early as possible in their lives, creating noble, peaceful souls. 3. To demonstrate that we are all special and all equal. 4. To ensure that all children, and all people, have the means to acheive the highest levels of human ability. Dr. Suzuki realized, as most kids who go to school realize on their own, that if they are capable of such amazing things and yet have trouble learning addition and subtraction from their teachers, then there is something very unnatural and ineffective about the way kids are taught in school. The Mother Tongue method seeks therefore not to modify traditional school education but to instead replicate the ways by which children do naturally learn. The theory is that if an educator can harness and replicate the ways that humans naturally pick up information, the possibilities are endless. Imagine learning math the way you learned to walk...
The Mother Tongue method therefore seeks to teach music to children as closely as possible to the way they learn their native tongue. On a basic level, it is comprised of these elements: 1. Creating an environment of music that surrounds the student and from which he can pick up information through observation, without pressure and without an externally-imposed time frame. (We now jokingly call this "learning by osmosis.") 2. Centering the learning environment around the nuclear family. 3. Emphasizing repetition and review. 4. Ensuring that only positive encouragement and emotional support are used to inspire.
Following these basic principles, the teacher of the Mother Tongue method, whether in music or in any other discipline, must therefore: 1. Completely disavow the notion of "inborn talent" as a determining factor in learning. (Sorry, folks.) 2. Form a partnership with the student's parents so that the student's education is constant. 3. Work to create a musical environment both in the studio and in the student's home world. This includes group lessons and source recordings. 4. Devise ways of teaching that harness as much as possible the student's natural tendencies and avoid negative reinforcement. You can throw away your Suzuki Violin Books and still be a Suzuki teacher. There are plenty of people who use the books who are not the slightest bit Suzuki teachers, and there are plenty of people who do not use the Suzuki books but employ the same basic principles of the Mother Tongue method. (Most martial arts teachers are in effect Suzuki teachers.) I become tired of hearing teachers say to each other, "I'm Suzuki because I like the songs in the books, but I don't do group lessons." The books were designed in such a fashion that young children can learn to play the violin in the Mother Tongue way, because the technical progression is so ingeniously set up as to be almost effortless, and because the songs chosen have such intuitive melodies and are so easy to remember. But the books are ultimately only an accessory.
The Private Lesson This is where the student and the teacher have exclusive personal contact. Not only does the student receive individual attention to all of his unique needs, but he learns from watching and listening to the way the teacher plays the violin. This is the element that is most like traditional, non-Suzuki teaching, except for two things: first, the student is typically very young at the beginning, between three and five; second, the parent is present in the lesson. This is very important because it helps to establish the connection between lessons and home. The parent remembers and takes notes on which assignments to do at home, and knows how to do them correctly so that there is no confusion during practice. Many teachers of the Mother Tongue method go so far as to teach the parent to play the violin for the first several weeks, and then teach both during the lesson. This works very well because the parent can relate to the student's difficulties in learning the instrument. In general, even if both parents are involved in the student's musical education, there is only one parent who comes to the lesson, and this is so that there is continuity in the practice session at home. Until the teacher feels the student is ready, there will be no note-reading during the lessons--all the songs and exercises will be memorized. The learning of new songs is mostly from the student "choosing the notes" based on the melody he has heard from the source recording. In general, students of the Mother Tongue method are not asked to play anything in a lesson that they have not heard before. Contrary to what one might expect, this is the biggest confidence-builder in the whole system. When a student can pick out the notes to a piece for the first time, his self-esteem fills up like a balloon. He feels that he can do anything!
The Group Lesson This element is very important. It is actually not a new concept to education at all--any school teaches children in a group. Any martial arts class teaches its students in a group setting, any sports team learns as a group, any dance class is taught with everyone together. The list is endless. In this sense, it is no different from a second-grade class meeting together in their classroom in front of a blackboard, except that the blackboard is replaced by a violin. The group lesson is where the students are placed in an environment of musician peers. They are grouped by level but not necessarily by age, so they will be exposed to some people who are slightly older or younger than they are. They will also see students who are a few songs behind them, and they will have to sit down when students play songs they haven't yet learned. This is an excellent environment for observation. The group lesson is a chance to reinforce what has been learned in the private lesson and also to add new information. Some activities are more effective when done in a group setting, such as dynamics games and duets. It is also the students' chance to feel part of a society, which encourages them and gives them emotional support. And the last purpose of the group lesson is review. The group lesson is a chance for a teacher to reinforce old pieces by going back over them and playing them together, and it also necessitates review at home because these pieces have to be ready at a moment's notice. This does wonders for the student's development as a musician. As Donna Nordstrom-Ngai is fond of saying, "Review builds strength." This refers both to a student's confidence and a student's physical strength when playing the violin--the more times we do something, the better at it we become.
The Home Practice This is the most important part of the learning of any skill. Everything assigned in the lesson must be done every single day. There is much written about the importance of consistent practice, and I have dedicated a section of this site to it as well. Parents who understand the difference between intellectual learning and physical learning will have students who succeed at the violin. Intellectual learning only has to be understood and remembered. Physical learning must be repeated in its entirety day after day or the skill will not be built. As Dr. Suzuki said, "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 times is skill." This is sometimes difficult for us to understand given the world we live in, where everything exists in a point-and-click universe and we no longer have to wait for anything. We really have to do things thousands of times for our muscles to get the idea. As Dr. Suzuki said, trying something for three days and then quitting does nothing. Many people will try a new thing once and then say, "I can't do it. I don't have the talent." I have a rule in my studio: a student is not allowed to tell me he can't do something until he has tried one hundred times. If after one hundred tries he still can't do it, then he is allowed to tell me he can't. This has never happened. Persistence is noble, but consistency is the real goal. Doing something every single day has a magical effect upon the mind and the body. Even missing one day can disrupt the process, like throwing mud into a stream of pure, clear water. This is because our bodies adapt to the way we use them. If we use our bodies to play the violin, they will adapt accordingly. If we use our bodies to not play the violin, they will adapt instead to whatever we do instead--watching television, etc.
The Source Recordings The Suzuki literature has been recorded to cassette tape and CD for the purpose of daily listening in the home. When a student is ready to move on to a new piece, he or she must have heard the piece many times. Not only does this help the student with the basic elements of music, such as rhythm, pitch, tone, and phrasing, but it makes learning the songs unbelievably easy. I can't count the number of times I've asked a student to play the first notes of a song, and the student goes on to play the first two or three phrases, and then jumps with joy. The recordings also create a bridge between the lesson and the home. Bringing violin music into the home makes it less of an imposition and more of something that is "ours." It also allows the student to learn by observation, which is the key to the Mother Tongue method. I personally am not opposed to other types of music being listened to in the home. Not only other types of Classical music, such as symphonies, arias, and string quartets, but rock music, Hindustani, gamelan, and bluegrass are all welcome. We know so much more about music now that to limit our experience to only one type seems unwise. I learned most of what I know about string quartets by listening to heavy metal with earphones and following each instrument in every song.
The "Suzuki Triangle" The balance of authority in the lessons shifts during the student's development. The "Suzuki Triangle" consists of the teacher, the parent ("home teacher"), and the student. In the beginning, the teacher is first, the parent is second, and the student is third. Over the years, the student and parent eventually become equals under the teacher. As the student becomes older (usually teenage years), the student moves up to second under the teacher and the parent is an occasional help rather than a figure of authority. It is important for older parents and students to recognize where they are in this progression and be very honest with each other about it. For many students, by the third lesson they're convinced that they're at the last step in the progression. This is never true. But it's important for parents to recognize when the second step has been reached, because it's detrimental to treat students like they're helpless for too long.
Although I've saved this section for the end, it is not the least important. There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the Mother Tongue approach, so many that they far outweigh the real information that is out there. If you're here reading this, chances are you've heard most of these already. Even among teachers who call themselves "Suzuki teachers," there is not enough real information about just what is supposed to be going on, or what the important elements are. Here are some things that you may have heard:
Suzuki students don't read music. - False. There is a wonderful story about the time that Dr. Suzuki signed two of his young students up to play a double concerto on live radio in Japan, and didn't tell them until the day before. On that day, he handed them the music and asked them to learn it, and of course they did fine. If he didn't teach his students to read music, this story wouldn't have been possible. It's pretty impressive even to non-Suzuki teachers who start their students reading from the first lesson. Suzuki teachers do delay the reading of music for the first few years. Dr. Suzuki had several reasons for this. First, when Dr. Suzuki was in Japan, his students learned how to read music and play the piano in their normal public-school education, so it was something that he never had to integrate into the method, and this led to misconceptions about his priorities. Second, students who start at age three are not reading their native tongue, either. Suzuki students frequently do in fact start reading notes before they start reading books, and well ahead of their non-Suzuki counterparts who have not even started lessons yet. And, third, perhaps the most important, is that the Mother Tongue approach works to train the ear first. This is for several reasons, most of them musical. It helps the kids be independent and self-correcting early on, it begins the development of the musical ear as early as possible, it ensures that the students are free to focus attention on their playing posture (big reason!), and it helps to divorce the "music" from the notes on the page. It is a great tragedy that we refer to printed musical notation as "the music," when the real music is the shapes in the air and the expressions felt by the performer and the audience. College professors are frequently infuriated by their students' lack of musical imagination. If it can be taught right from the very beginning that the music is not on the page, isn't that great? It's a musician's paradise. The last reason, which is not entirely musical in application, is that Dr. Suzuki felt that the development of memory was crucial to a person's development and must be nurtured as early as possible. This is hardly a new or radical idea--Erasmus believed that memory was the key component of intelligence, and he got his ideas from Plato. What makes the delay of note-reading complicated is when students begin learning at a later age, perhaps six or seven, and follow the same course as a three-year-old beginner. These students do in fact lag behind in their reading skills compared to their peers, and since most public schools start teaching "Suzuki" students at this age, it's easy to see how the myth has been spread.
Suzuki students merely copy the person on the recordings. - Hopefully false. One must understand that the true purpose of the source recordings is to create as much as possible a constant musical environment. It does three things: first, it helps the students learn their pieces in a natural and easy way, just as they learn words by listening to the conversations of their parents around them; second, it ensures that they are constantly surrounded by the sound of a violin, with good intonation and beautiful tone; and, third, it brings the violin world into the home world and mixes the two, drawing upon the powerful connection between learning and the nuclear family. It is true that frequently a student will come to a lesson and imitate a certain phrasing or articulation from the recording without realizing it. This is the teacher's responsibility to make the student aware of these basic tendencies and correct them when they are undesirable. I am usually thrilled when I hear a student come back with a "CD trill," because this means that the student has practiced--but one must remember the purpose of the source recordings. The ideal situation in the home would be to have Itzhak Perlman in the living room, Gil Shaham in the dining room, Maxim Vengerov in the kitchen and Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Mozart at the top of the stairs. Since most home musical environments are not so fortunate, the recordings are intended to come as close as possible to that.
When students play by rote, they're on auto-pilot. - Again, hopefully false. There is an important distinction to make between "playing by rote" and "playing by ear." A piece of music should not become a dry physical process that has no conscious involvement. The Mother Tongue teacher must try to steer the student away from this kind of playing; but it must be understood that a large number of traditional, non-Suzuki students also play mechanically! When a student plays from printed music and not from memory, he goes from the brain to the page to the brain to the hands. When a student plays from memory, he goes from the brain directly to the hands. This is much easier and more reliable. And when a student can incorporate musical details such as dynamics and articulations into a piece from memory, then he or she has an understanding, I believe, that far outweighs that of a student who merely reads and obeys but does not retain.
Suzuki groups are robotic imitators. - Quite the opposite. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to be able to play together, as any musician will agree. If you're not thinking consciously and trying very hard, it won't be possible; mindlessness certainly will not help the results. In the groups, students learn about how to phrase as a group and how to achieve extreme dynamics as a group, thus basically ensuring beyond a doubt that they will be excellent orchestra players. If the members of the New York Philharmonic are robotic imitators, then a Suzuki group is just as guilty. The groups are intended to--again--create a musical environment, this time drawing upon not the power of the family but the power of society, helping kids become interested because their peers are interested; to help facilitate review by necessitating it; and to keep the students motivated.
© 2008 Neil Bakshi |