My Beef With Suzuki

Today I would like to talk about two of my beefs with Dr. Shinichi Suzuki’s string education method. In order not to be a complete bummer, however, I’ll start with what I love and admire about Suzuki.

Firstly, the “Mother Tongue” approach. Young children have a limitless potential to learn, and it makes sense that nurturing and developing this potential from a very young age is going to have far-reaching and lasting effects. This philosophy also opens the door nicely for Edwin Gordon’s MLT research.

Secondly, the idea that children learn music as a way to foster a “beautiful and exceptional humanity” (Suzuki, Nurtured by Love). Music learning is valuable in and of itself, but when you couple a child’s musical development with the fostering of higher values and ideals, all the better :)

Now to the BEEF.

Suzuki places great emphasis on children listening to recordings of the pieces that they’re either learning and going to learn to play. While I find this valuable, I also find it limited.

You would never teach a child to speak by repeating only the select sentences that you want your child to learn. Rather, you speak with a rich vocabulary and diverse sentence structure, expanding the breadth and depth of what your child hears and absorbs.

The same goes with music. Instead of prioritizing repetitions only of Suzuki repertoire, pedagogical emphasis and support should be placed on listening to a rich and diverse set of repertoire - different tonalities, meters, cultures, styles - within which are the pieces that the children actually learn to play.

Secondly, I’m SOOOOO over the Suzuki repertoire. It’s limited musically - the first twelve songs in Violin Book 1 are in major tonality and duple meter - and it’s limited culturally - all of the songs in Violin Book 1 are either Western folk tunes or Western classical compositions.

Can we not find (or create!!) a pedagogical canon that remains sequentially appropriate while being musically and culturally diverse? We become aware of what something is by learning what it is not. Likewise, we shed more light on the nature of tonal music by introducing our children to a diverse canon of repertoire than we do by pounding in A-major-duple-meter. Over and over and over.

In summary, the Suzuki method has many great ideas and tools to offer, but as music educators, we can do better. We can no longer follow it blindly because of its brand appeal. We can no longer sustain ignorance of new pedagogical knowledge and research. We can no longer hear Twinkle Variations without wanting to rage-smash things.

So here’s my suggestion: Let’s take Suzuki’s essence, its inherent love and long tradition, and use it as a platform to create something new. Something more diverse, more responsive, more representative, and more active in its approach to the next generation of musical development.