What is the Suzuki Method?
Dr. Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998), Japanese musician and educator, founded the Suzuki Method in the 1930s. It began in North America in the 1960’s, and is known worldwide today. The main principle of the Suzuki Method of musical instruction is: Just as children learn to speak their native tongue, they will learn how to play a musical instrument. Dr. Suzuki observed that children hear the sounds and rhythms of their native language from birth, and parents always encourage and celebrate their children’s efforts at learning to speak. There is no doubt that they will succeed. In this natural process, all children experience delight and joy in acquiring their “mother tongue.” Likewise, the Suzuki Talent Education Program of St. John’s applies the Suzuki Method by creating an environment, both at lessons and at home, which stimulates the child’s desire to learn to play the violin, viola or cello.
In the 1950’s the late Japanese violinist and educator Dr. Shinicki Suzuki recognized the parallels between young children learning to speak their native language and learning to play a musical instrument. For that reason the Suzuki method can also be called the “Mother Tongue Method.” Suzuki teachers develop motor coordination and train the ear before the eye: students are first taught basic listening and playing skills before note reading is introduced, in the same way children learn to speak and comprehend before they learn to read. Parental involvement in the lesson is essential to the success of the Suzuki learning method.
… It is a methodology based on the fact that children can learn to speak their native language by listening to the surrounding sounds of the language repeatedly as they grow. The method uses several key ingredients: parent involvement, weekly lessons, daily listening, love, encouragement and praise from the teacher and parent, group activities, repetition , imitation of superior examples, etc. Parents are considered as “home teachers”, and they are the examples that a child follows. It is well known that a parent often learns to play before the child, attends the weekly child’s lesson and both practice at home. It is important that children should start listening to music at birth and training lessons at 3 or 4. However, is never too late to begin. A child should be exposed to the music on a daily basis and also by attending recitals and concerts. Daily listening to recordings of the music being studied is encouraged. With this method, the student repeats the pieces that has learned,
History of Suzuki Method Dr Shinichi Suzuki was the founder of the worldwide music education movement known as the Suzuki Method. Born in Nagoya, Japan in 1898, he was the son of Japan’s first and largest violin manufacturer. Although he worked in the factory as a child, he had never learnt music formally. Inspired by a recording by Mischa Elman of Ave Maria, Suzuki began to teach himself to play the violin. Over the next few years, he dedicated himself to the study of the instrument and then, at the age of 22, travelled to Berlin to study with the renowned violinist, Karl Klinger. It was here in Germany that Suzuki became a friend of Albert Einstein and through him, associated with many of the world’s leading artists and thinkers. Suzuki met and married Waltraud Prange, a concert soprano and they returned to Japan in 1928 where he began teaching and performing with the Suzuki Quartet. Suzuki was asked by a colleague at the Imperial Conservatory to teach his young son and became stimul
