Waltraud suzuki biography examples
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By Thomas May | From the September-October 2023 issue of Strings Magazine
A quarter century has passed since the death of Shinichi Suzuki, yet the global success story of his namesake method shows no sign of fading away. A New York Times obituary in 1998 described the Suzuki Method as “a world-wide phenomenon, with 400,000 students at any one time in 34 countries.” More or less the same pattern has continued into the 21st century, according to the Matsumoto-based Talent Education Research Institute that Suzuki founded in 1948.
Indeed, Suzuki’s vision—that providing children with the tools to foster their natural creativity and ability to communicate holds the promise of encouraging future social harmony—seems more resonant than ever in this era of intensifying polarization. “If every child is educated, then you can save the world,” as Suzuki put it, with characteristic idealism, in a talk while visiting the United States in 1976.
“What Suzuki is really about is
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Selections from Nurtured by Love
For more than three decades, Kyoko Selden was deeply involved in the Talent Education (Sainō kyōiku) movement, as a parent of three string-playing children and the translator of major books and articles on the Suzuki Method. Developed in the thirties and forties bygd the violinist Suzuki Shin’ichi (1898-1998), the Suzuki Method teaches children classical music as a means to enrich their lives while also enhancing their motor skills, koncentration, memory, and self-discipline. Suzuki, who had studied the violin in Germany in the twenties, was one day träffad by the capacity of children to master their native languages. Against the conventional wisdom that only certain people were graced with the talent to master musical instruments, Suzuki declared that anyone who could speak a language with facility had the potential to become a refined performer—whether amateur or professional—of music.
The Suzuki Method, having attracted hundreds of instruct
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There was a built-in ambiguity in Suzuki’s approach, which persists to this day. On the one hand, he didn’t think that musical prodigies were a special class of children, with some special innate gift. On the other hand, he believed that kids learned music not by drill and repetition but by exposure and instinct. All you had to do to activate the music instinct was expose them early to the right input. This ambiguity proved fruitful as a public-relations tool—he could point to this or that wunderkind who had been trained by his method as proof that it worked. But he could also insist, in the face of all the kids who would never play at the concert-hall level, that the point was not to make wunderkinder but to make kids wonder, to allow the power of music to expand their emotional repertory. No bad result was possible.
When the war came, the liberals made themselves invisible, and the Suzuki violin factories were turned over to military production, with orders to manufacture seaplan