How the Suzuki method changed my life

Do you ever wonder, as your little darling balks at doing her violin or piano practice again, what all the pain is for? All those battles, and then when she escapes your clutches she’ll give it up. In later life the blanket of amnesia will fall over those childhood years and it might be as if she’d never played at all.

I learnt the violin by the Suzuki method from the age of three until about 14. It was a newish fad back then in London, although Shinichi Suzuki, the movement’s founder, was in his eighties and had been teaching in Japan since the war. Suzuki’s idea was simple and had come to him as he watched toddlers learn to speak: start a child young enough and he will learn music the way he does language — naturally and easily. The ‘mother tongue’ philosophy, it was called.

The ideal Suzuki child is immersed in music. He spends his first year without a bow, simply holding a tiny violin under his chin, listening. When he gets his bow, the ideal Suzuki child is so keen to practise he often chooses to do more than his mandatory hour a day. I was not an ideal Suzuki child. My mother still bears the psychic scars of dragging me to practice. Sometimes even now, she murmurs as if traumatised: ‘Open A string, Mary please, open A.’ I remember more than once standing, bow dangling from a finger, thinking darkly that I would never, ever speak to her again.