Why I am not Suzuki certified: The Science, Philosophy, and Practicality of the Suzuki Method

Shinichi Suzuki was a revolutionary music teacher whose students’ accomplishments have gathered a great deal of attention from educators over the last five or more decades. His surviving “Suzuki Method” is an extremely popular educational method that is practiced across the world. Associations of Suzuki teachers have arisen that offer training and subsequent certification to increase the outreach of the method as well as to ensure legitimacy of the teachers and keep them true to the method he prescribed. This article will examine the Suzuki Method’s pros and cons, as well as its relationship to science, philosophy, and practicality. 

The heart of the Suzuki method is training a student as if they are learning their “mother tongue.” Suzuki was fascinated with children’s ability to learn their native language, and reasoned that if we could teach other subject matter in the way that children learn their mother tongue, we would increase the quality of their education.

The backbone of the Suzuki method arises naturally from this - parent involvement. Parents speak and children just seem to pick it up like little sponges, even the bad words in just one shot. In the Suzuki Method, parents attend child lessons, as well as a weekly group session for both students and parents. Parents learn the material and practice with their student at home in order to ensure that the student is using what would be analogous to “proper grammar.” 

Last but not least, let’s call it the ‘soul’ of the Suzuki method. Children all learn to speak their mother tongue with great ease, whereas teaching reading and writing is a significantly more difficult challenge. Suzuki envisioned the child’s mind as a blank slate that, if written upon properly, would yield the results of true talent. The mother tongue is acquired without the obstacles of reading and writing, and is thus imparted in a more pure and natural way to the child. Suzuki seeks to model this by introducing musical reading only after the student has a clear grasp on playing the instrument. Learning is done by ear and rote demonstration. Students must develop sound physical fundamentals and the ability to be expressive on their instrument before introducing reading.

I will examine each of these three concepts, the heart, backbone, and soul, in theory and practice, with comments on their practicality for teachers and parents.

To the heart of the matter, let us join Suzuki in marveling at a child’s ability to learn their mother tongue. It is a fascinating phenomenon, especially when considering that children seem to acquire their native language without any formal education no matter where they are born or what native language they are born into. Extraneous circumstances such as adoption and trauma do not seem to inhibit the general ability to acquire basic language skills. Even most physical and mental disabilities are not enough to stop basic language acquisition. The first problem with the Suzuki method is that this incredible innate ability to acquire one’s mother tongue is perfectly at odds with the concept that the mind is a “blank slate.” The ability to acquire language is an endowment of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. I invite the reader to plunge into the scientific field of Linguistics, pioneered by Noam Chomksy and his concepts of ‘universal grammar’ and ‘nativist theory.’ Steven Pinker has written extensively about these concepts as well in his “language trilogy.” The long story short here is that the human mind is equipped with software that is specifically designed for decoding human language. It is baked into our biology, into our genome. Modern neuroscience has actually discovered how this software turns into hardware, as the brain develops very specific physical signs of language development.

So what does this mean for Suzuki’s concept of the mother tongue? There is a pro and a con both. The con is that there is no software in our genome that is designed to help us acquire musical knowledge, much less mathematical or scientific knowledge. We can’t simply try to teach everything as we teach a native language and hope that students will acquire the knowledge in anything like the same manner. The software just isn’t designed for that, and sadly we are resigned to a battle that looks much more uphill. The pro to this concept is we have an incredible software in our minds that has been crafted by millions of years of evolution to learn. To any extent that we can co-opt it into other learning, we would almost certainly be improving education.

Therefore Suzuki’s insight about the mother-tongue is nothing less than genius of course. Music in particular is in many ways directly analogous to spoken language. We can glean a lot of wisdom and guidance from this relationship. Problems arise however when we become too concerned with being true to Suzuki’s original philosophy. The mind is decidedly NOT a blank slate. While we should care a great deal about how language is acquired, the fact of the matter is that we have a long way to go before we can take the findings of linguistics and make them practically applicable to a music lesson. For teachers, we need to pay attention to the idiosyncrasies of language such as how we phrase basic sentences, and draw connections to musical phrasing. But we certainly do not need to be dedicating our entire lesson to merely “speaking” to the student with our instrument, as if the gestures will magically soak into their brain. Nor do we need to learn all that there is to know about the field of linguistics, though I highly recommend treading some of that water to the interested scholar. For parents, there is little to do on this front beyond understanding the basics of the philosophy you may be engaging with.

The backbone of the Suzuki method, parent involvement, I would argue has nothing at all to do with the Suzuki method. Consider if “Western Society” were to try to take credit for prohibitions on theft. What a farce this would be. All extant societies and all those that we have ever unearthed have had prohibitions on theft. No society in particular gets credit for banning theft. Similarly, the Suzuki method prescribes that parents attend student lessons, sit in on practice sessions at home, and attend group sessions with their child. May I be so bold as to ask - who is surprised that parent involvement at every possible level of student education has great beneficial effects? There isn’t a method on earth that would be ineffective if a parent followed through on all of this. To return to the mother-tongue analogy - children who have parents that read and talk to them a lot perform better on language-based tasks in school when compared to students who are not read to, and are parented generally by a television. 

There is absolutely nothing exceptional that the Suzuki method offers in this regard. I must say that it seems to be effective at getting parents involved - but that is mostly because of the precedent it sets for the parent at signup, and the culture in which it was born - post-World War II Japan. Think ‘tiger moms,’ but from the generation that survived the war. You can’t do the Suzuki method for real unless you commit to it like a kamikaze or a tiger mom would. And with that level of commitment, anyone would be successful at anything. This is certainly wisdom, but it should not be a revelation.

For teachers, this means that we need to get parents involved! Make them commit up front to attending lessons from time to time. Instruct them that success in lessons is a 3-way street. The teacher must be effective, the student has to actually care intrinsically and not be forced, and the parent will need to assist the student in forming proper practice habits. If you think that you can get a student to be successful without parent help, you are going to lose a lot of students. Teachers know that many of our best students are just-so in spite of their parents. It is unfortunate how many times I have seen parents reinforce bad habits and resign to the winnowing pressure of whining. But as teachers we have to understand that parents are the best allies we have in the journey of bringing up happy, respectful, and successful students. It doesn’t need to be the Suzuki method for this to be true.

For parents this means that you need to please get and stay involved. Never take for granted the importance of your nurturing - your time - your attention. Your real, undivided attention. There is no “right method” that is a silver bullet. No amount of money or philosophy could ever make up for an attentive parent. There are more things in heaven and earth, and a loving parent is one of them!

Last but certainly not least, we shall strike at the soul of the Suzuki method. Belaying musical reading and focusing on learning by ear for a significant amount of time. This practice is an extension of the concept of the mother tongue, and synthesis of the blank slate. We’ve already discussed how the blank slate is a red herring, so we can be sure that there are some problems with this approach. However, it must be said that once again, there is a great deal of wisdom to it. If you want a student to repeat a basic pitch or rhythm pattern, you will be much better off doing it yourself and having them repeat it back than trying to write it down, explain all the symbols, and have them perform it. Our ability to repeat back simple musical passages by rote is extremely similar to our ability to repeat back words. And more complicated musical passages are just like more complicated words that we have to “sound out” a few times before we can perform them with proper fluency. Teaching music in a way that challenges students to repeat back simple passages and “sound out” progressively harder ones is a recipe for very quick success.

Written music does not contain any of the bizarre inconsistencies of written language such as “ough” and it’s 900 different pronunciations. Rules are much tighter in music. But of course the symbols represent something much more abstract than most written words. All nouns refer to an object of reality that we can simply show to the reader to demonstrate the intended meaning. Verbs can be demonstrated, adjectives can be demonstrated. In music, most symbols just represent a particular pitch and duration. We can demonstrate this too, but it’s only sensory reference is auditory. There is no visual reference except for the abstract symbols the renaissance Italians invented. And just as you cannot give the definition of a word by repeating that word, we can’t teach you what a quarter note is by showing you a quarter note. You have to hear it, many times, in context and relationship to other notes. Likewise there is nothing tactile, nothing to smell, nothing to taste.

All this amounts to the fact that Suzuki was dead right in that you have to teach this stuff by rote. For all the hate rote learning gets from modern educational talking heads, it should not at all be a dirty word. It is an especially important part of learning, particularly any performative skills such as sports and music. It is incredibly unfortunate that this bit of Suzuki’s wisdom is one of the least enduring and most derided in modern education.

But don’t let's forget that there is an inherent flaw in this ‘soul’ of the Suzuki method - delayed reading. The problem generally surfaces after several years into the student’s learning. While rote learning and learning “by ear” are extremely effective ways to get students to perform basic musical patterns, when it comes to more difficult passages, we have to rely on reading. Just as Dumas had to write down The Count of Monte Cristo for us to really enjoy it, Beethoven elected to write his music down for us. Surely he played a great deal that we will never know or enjoy, but his most sophisticated pieces were literally penned.

And it doesn’t need to be Beethoven’s most sophisticated works to become troublesome for a student who is learning entirely by ear. I shall explain by analogy. Ask a young student to tell you the story of the “3 little pigs” and in most cases you’ll get a fairly accurate, and perfectly intelligible version of the story. Ask a young student to tell you the story of Harry Potter and you’re going to get a wild mish-mash of out-of-order events that are missing important details. We will ultimately get from the beginning to the end, but not without some bizarre turns.

First of all, we’d have a hard time NOT teaching students the Three Little Pigs as long as we read it to them more than once. It is a perfectly respectable activity, and teaching them to get the details of the story correct is a worthwhile effort. But the effort has diminishing marginal returns. Are we really going to quibble and correct them if the student says “I’ll blow your house down” vs. “I’ll blow your house over?” When Suzuki teachers demand that their very young students play a simple Bach Minuet with stone-cold perfect phrasing, this is basically what they are doing. We should absolutely be teaching Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by rote, and we should absolutely be expecting our students to play or sing the right notes at the right time. And we should also expect it to be imperfect - they are very young after all in this analogy.

Second, you can’t really teach Harry Potter by rote. Material of sufficient length and sophistication simply can’t be learned this way. (Notice I’ve chosen Harry Potter and not The Count of Monte Cristo. The analogous level of music to early chapter books is where this problem presents for Suzuki students.) “But wait!”, you say… “I read Harry Potter to my kid and they know the story completely by heart!” or “I could never get them to read those darn books but they know the whole story from watching the movies.” These statements are of course true - but in music we aren’t just getting the gist or outline. We are performing the story back in its entirety, word for word. How much of a chance does your student have of performing the entire Harry Potter book back word for word? None. The only way to do this is to actually be able to read. They will need the words in front of them and the skills to decipher them. And when it comes to Sonatinas and Etudes, musicians will need the notes in front of them and the ability to decipher them. 

Failing to build the background knowledge of quarter notes, half notes, musical alphabet, staff reading, and other music literacy basics is like choosing to raise your child completely illiterate. It’s like electing to NOT talk to them about the alphabet until their vocabulary hits a certain number of words. I hope it is relatively obvious that this is abject madness.

Now accusing a Suzuki teacher of not teaching their students to read music would be a gross injustice. The Suzuki method absolutely does introduce musical reading, and many Suzuki teachers do so very effectively. But part of the core philosophy is to deliberately delay the skill. Paul Pimsleur actually takes up this logic in his teaching of secondary languages and he has a very similar reason for doing so. When you read foreign languages you apply your own intuitive accent and pronunciation to the words. For example an American has to do some significant amount of mental work to make sure they read the following in the proper accent - fleur de lis - and if you’ve never read it, you are very likely to have mispronounced it. If you learn an entire new language while reading and applying your parochial accent, you will have poisoned your accent in the new language. You can avoid this by simply NOT reading the new language and learning it entirely through spoken communication. Similarly the contention from Suzuki is that reading music is a barrier to a proper musical accent, or phrasing. I actually heartily agree with him here, but it is not because of any preconceived accent a student brings into the learning. The mind is composed of a working memory and a long-term memory. Working memory has very limited space and so when you occupy it with decoding musical symbols, there is little space left over to pay attention to musical phrasing. But the problem is not innate to the music reading itself - it is innate to the mind. We have no analogous obstacle to Pimsleur’s in learning music literacy - there is no previous conception of the symbols that we will accidentally bring into play, thus poisoning our accent. The problem is actually when we overwhelm working memory, and if we overwhelm the working memory at any point, we are engaging in poor teaching. So once again Suzuki had the right of it - sort of. Yes we need to take time to focus on phrasing, but if we deliberately delay the skill of reading, we are electing an unnecessary impediment.

So how do we square that circle? How do we teach music reading and phrasing both? There is no easy answer, we have to make time for both. If we don’t we end up with a lopsided skill set that is impractical and frustrating. I cannot tell you how many times I have had a Suzuki student transfer into my studio or come to one of my ensembles and be nigh non-functional on a great deal of literature. Too many Suzuki studios wait too long to teach their students functional reading skills. Imagine a 2nd grader who can recite an entire chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, word for word. What an incredible show that would be! But the reality is that when you sit down with the student-behind-the-curtain and just open the next chapter, they can barely make it through the first paragraph without assistance. A lot of work went into helping them memorize that chapter. A lot of work that should have been spent on teaching them how to actually read. We would never teach reading this way, and we should not teach music this way. And of course the kid who is reciting whole chapters is the one on display. Suzuki kids put on an incredible show - but you have to be careful that it isn’t just a show.

For the sake of predicting criticism let me repeat that the Suzuki method is NOT prescribing that we do not teach music literacy. Many Suzuki studios teach reading very effectively. But there are extremely common problems that Suzuki students run into after a few years of progression. It is incredibly frustrating to be capable of playing a Bach Minuet by heart, but you can’t even read the Violin 2 part in your school orchestra. Kids in this situation understandably want to quit. It “isn’t their thing” and they want to “try new stuff” in middle school. Which is just code for - they are super frustrated because their skills are completely out of balance. For sports lovers, one final analogy. Your parents put up a basketball hoop in your driveway and you practice shooting the basketball relentlessly for years of your early life. You are indomitable at P-I-G, and when on a real court you can shoot from just about anywhere and make a hoop. But you can’t dribble or pass to save your life, and you are slow as a snail. You join the middle school team and the opposing kids steal the ball from you nearly every time you get your hands on it. You are a liability to your team and thus spend most of your time on the bench. You only last one season before quitting. And after years of investment in basketball, now it “just isn’t your thing.” What a tragedy. Let’s avoid this tragedy for our young musicians.

In summary, 3 defining traits of the Suzuki method have been examined here. First, the concept of the “mother tongue.” This concept has wise roots and is based on a beautiful analogy that is very relevant to music education. But it has been outdated and partially supplanted by modern scientific research, and ultimately is not directly applicable to most aspects of a music lesson. Second, parent involvement. This is a no-brainer that Suzuki’s methodology can claim no right to. As a teacher, one must expect parent involvement and as a parent, one must be involved no matter what method your child happens to be learning from. Third is the concept of delayed reading. There are practical applications of this concept from moment to moment in a student’s learning - we need to pay constant attention to the capacity of their working memory and not overload them. But by choosing to delay reading, we are handicapping our students unnecessarily. We begin teaching the alphabet to our toddlers, and we should begin teaching the musical alphabet to our youngest students as well. 

Great wisdom has been bestowed upon us by Shinichi Suzuki and we do him the greatest honor not by teaching his method as a creed, but by learning from what he got right and continuing to improve our educational practices with scientific inquiry.