Playing by Ear

"Won't you play a piece for our American visitor?" asked the teacher. Shinichi Suzuki's violin pupils scurried into formation against the walls of a bare Japanese room, swung their instruments under their chins, and played Bach and Handel minuets with surprising style. "It was really amazing," said the visitor, John D. Kendall, music director of Ohio's Muskingum College. "I was so touched I could feel tears welling up in my eyes." It was amazing indeed. The 30 musicians he had heard were only four years old--and they were students at the Matsumoto School of Music, which is the talk of Japan's music world for its unorthodox methods. Matsumoto's pupils dispense with all scales. They learn by listening and repeating, as a child learns to converse.

Founder-Director Suzuki hit on his system by watching babies imitate their parents' speech. A concert violinist who studied at Berlin's Higher Institute of Music, Suzuki was on the staff of Tokyo's Imperial Music School when a mother brought her four-year-old son for violin lessons. Too young, said Suzuki at first. Then he discovered that the youngster had acquired a working vocabulary of 1,500 words by listening to his mother repeat them, decided that "it should be the same with music." He experimented with the four-year-old, finally started a school in his wartime home of Matsumoto, 110 miles northwest of Tokyo.

Soft Like a Mouse. Suzuki's method is simple sound repetition. His youngsters get accustomed to the sound of a violin by sitting in a classroom where advanced students practice. The beginners learn to recognize and hum simple tunes, are made to associate the melodies with the movement of a bow and fingers. No technical terms are used; differences are conveyed through analogies--"Loud is like an elephant," "Soft is like a mouse." In the third month of school (two 30-minute sessions a week), the tots are guided into games that teach good playing posture. Finally, the children get violins and are taught to play the melodies they already know. "Never force children," warns Suzuki. "Persuade them."

Today, at 60, Teacher Suzuki personally coaches some 20-odd preconservatory students, supervises a nationwide network of extension classes with a total enrollment of 4,800 students. Suzuki tries to limit his pupils to children under twelve, encourages most to go on to more advanced schools when they reach their teens. By then, the youngsters have mastered all ten manuals in the three-part course. After the first (Book 3, age 6) part, a student is expected to play simplified Bach gavottes; after the second (Book 7, age 8), Bach's Concerto in A Minor; after the third (Book 10, age 10), Mozart's Concerto in A Major.

Play for Pleasure. The method works so well that quite a few of Suzuki's students go on to become concert violinists. His very first pupil, Violinist Toshiya Eto, played at Carnegie Hall in 1951, is now an instructor at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. Another graduate, Koji Toyoda, 25, won Geneva's Concours International d'Execution Musicale last year, is studying in Brussels with famed Violinist Arthur Grumiaux. But that, says Suzuki, is not his biggest goal. "My object is not to mass-produce concert artists. I just want to have as many people as possible enjoy playing the violin for their own pleasure."

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