Why we should make space for music in our lives

To see Suzuki kids in action was both awe inspiring and impossibly frustrating.  How did those kids learn to play music so well?  And why couldn't my kid do it? Becoming a Suzuki mom has answered the first question and rendered the other one irrelevant.

We stumbled into Suzuki violin through a combination of my motherly ambition and pure serendipity. Our small house would not accommodate a piano. If we were to learn music, we needed a portable instrument. Flute didn’t seem appealing, and guitar didn’t cross my mind. I googled violin and Suzuki lessons came up.  

From the very beginning of our participation in the Suzuki method, his mother tongue approach — the analogy between language acquisition and learning music — made sense. My mom had used the method instinctively. She sang to us at bedtime. She put on old vinyl records or listened to the radio while doing house chores. An extensive collection of campfire songs and entire passages of Beethoven, Chopin, and Dvořák had melded into me early on.

After my children were born, I adopted her habit of playing good music at home and in the car, singing together for fun and during family prayers, and – our favorite – singing Christmas carols during the liturgical season. Adding Suzuki recordings to our playlists only felt natural.  

As an overachieving mom, I entertained visions of my children standing up with other Suzuki prodigies to play their Vivaldi and Bach to the audience’s amazement.  A month into formal lessons, I knew better. Learning music challenged and humbled us. For Suzuki’s gentle approach does not replace the rigor of hard work students, teachers, and parents invest in weekly lessons and daily practice. Each new piece or aspect of technique stretched our capacity for perseverance, patience, and self-control.

After a couple of years, we reached a point of exhaustion.  When Covid struck, we quit.  But music was already in our veins.  Several months into the pandemic, my daughter heard on the radio a Handel melody she had learned.   She took out her violin and played it.  We both knew that was our ‘sign’.  We resumed the lessons. 

By then I was also a wiser parent.  Taking the power struggle out of music instruction, I turned over the responsibility entirely to my children. We realized that improvement would come slowly, with many hours of practice.  Suzuki kids are not geniuses. Whether they possess innate ability is up for debate. Mostly, they work hard.  Talent, Suzuki insisted, emerges with diligence supported by suitable conditions. He used to joke that students should only practice on the same days they eat.  If they play well, it’s because they eat frequently, I guess.

I ceased to expect spectacular achievement and simply made ample room for music in our lives. We worked steadily, but I now focused on the wider purpose of music education: not to produce wonder kids, but to awaken wonder.   

We have persisted because we finally grasped the heart of Sinichi Suzuki’s pedagogy. By holding the bow the right way, by curving the fingers over the string just so, by letting a note resonate, we participate in something beautiful.  Enlarging this capacity to apprehend and create beauty has become one of the most cherished fruits of our musical adventure.  To ask whether my kid will amount to anything is both insulting and beside the point, Suzuki wrote in Nurtured by Love.  A child is not a ‘thing’. The only question a parent should ask is whether the child is growing as a fine human being.

To this end, Suzuki took great pains to never compare students to one another or force development.  Rather, he emphasized mastery of every successive element, however simple or complex, without haste and without dawdling.  Thus, at the annual recital at our music school, we hear toddlers who proudly demonstrate their correct bow hold while singing an amusing ditty with gestures that help to practice the hold and subtle motions of the hand.  A teenager might play a single movement of a string concerto.  The advanced students — grouped by ability, not age — hold a separate concert, showcasing pre-professional repertoire they perform on national and international tours.

Yet even for these advanced musicians the point is not to dazzle, but to do one thing, then another, then a million others joyfully and well.  Improvement is not measured by the number of pieces or level of technique attained in a year, but by purity of tone and musicality.  This reduces competition among students and parents.  It also circles back to the heart of the Suzuki method, which aims to foster a child’s human formation.

Some of Suzuki’s protégés and those taught by people he inspired have, in fact, become renowned artists. We seek them out at the local philharmonic. (Concerts are not expensive, by the way. Student season passes cost less than a restaurant meal!)  Listening from the high balcony, we admire them all the more for we now share a fundamental understanding of their craft. Yet I have also heard ordinary Suzuki kids and been moved to tears.

Eavesdropping on a lesson where my daughter examines a score with her teacher, deciphers rhythms, develops articulation, and practices shifting patterns, I witness a world of knowledge and skills so specialized that smoke pours out my ears. I’m glad of our progress. I also look beyond it. I have learned that music is not just an accomplishment, but an education. It is, as Suzuki would say, a calling forth of personality, sensibility, and ability. A way to ennoble the soul.