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Playing as speaking, or education through music
 The Suzuki Method
was
conceived and
perfected in many years of research and experience by
Shinichi Suzuki
(1898-1998), a Japanese violinist who had the possibility of broadening his
knowledge of the musical culture of Europe where he lived from 1920 to
1930. Frequenting the homes and concert halls of Berlin, where he met and married
his wife, Waltraud, he he
came in contact with the great pedagogues and
artists of his time. He became a close friend of Albert Einstein and
became familiar with the new educational ideas of Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget.
It was on his return to Japan, upon a request to teach a
young child to play the violin, that he had his great intuition that is the
essence of the method and that is that in the same way that children
learn to speak their mother tongue language, they can learn to play a
musical
instrument. Therefore the necessity to codify this infallible learning
model and to reproduce it.
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The Suzuki method has as its essential characteristic that it is not finalized to the study of an instrument, but
has a more general
educational approach: the ultimate end is not for the child to learn
to play an instrument, but that through music and
the practice of instrumental playing, the child will develop his own
personality in a harmonious and complete manner.
While recognizing the principle of the genetic heritage of humanity, Shiniki Suzuki affirms that every person is
a product of his own specific environment and that talent is not
something that is inborn, but a capacity that can be developed in
every human being.
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At the heart of the Suzuki method , also called the "mother
tongue" method,
is the principle of imitation. In mother tongue language learning,
the child listens repeatedly to the
parent who uses the same repertoire of sounds and words and very slowly
he begins
to distinguish them and to repeat them. In the same way the Suzuki
teacher proposes a series of musical sounds and "words" to the
parent and child, and helps them to decifer the musical message in order to make it comprehensible and
accessible.
A positive musical environment is created in early childhood filled with
the sounds of the pieces of repertoire that are heard on the recording,
that will successively be sung and then played. Using many games
that are patiently and continuously repeated, one technical difficulty
at a time is overcome. We arrive this way in being able to play
the first piece in the repertoire, that the child already knows from
having sung it, and heard many times on the reference recording. In this
method, one learns first to play the instrument and then to read music,
exactly in the way that one learns to speak and read the spoken language. |
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