Ed Kreitman broadly thinks about Suzuki Book 1-4 with the following overarching goals.

Book 1: Balanced Posture
Book 2: Tone
Book 3: Musicality
Book 4: Virtuosity

So for in my teaching career, these guideposts have been incredibly helpful.

To think about Book 1 through the lens of posture allows me to stay focused, easily assess my success, and give appropriate feedback to my students. I know when to move on because I’ve assigned (or borrowed Kreitman’s assignment) purpose to the book. If I don’t accomplish balanced posture in Book 1, there is no way I can layer tone, musicality, and virtuosity onto my student’s sets of skills.

As I’m nearing the end of Book 1 and approaching Book 2 with a student, my teaching mind swings to the lens of tone production. With posture set, I invite students to listen to their instruments differently, understand ringing tones, practice new exercises, and use the Book 2 pieces as tonalization playgrounds. Musicality might enter our work in the lesson, or I might reach back to tweak a thing or two about posture, but my primary focus in Book 2 is tone.

As we enter Book 3 I swing to developing my students ability to manipulate the tone they created with excellent posture to serve musical ideas. We discuss phrasing, idiomatic figures, bow divisions, characters, moods, and historical styles in great detail. Their exercises now develop expression alongside technique, and a piece isn’t ‘mastered,’ despite excellent posture and tone, unless it communicates their musical decisions.

Book 4 brings together posture, tone, musicality, and new technical prowess to develop consummate musicianship. Here we work on flash, pizzazz, stage presence, and the ‘wow’ factor. If I’ve taken the time to prioritize posture, tone, and musicality up to this point, virtuosity manifests itself in the masterful pieces of Seitz, Vivaldi, and Bach. This is where it gets ‘real.’ If the teaching prioritization has not happened before this point, a student’s playing can completely fall apart in the jungles of Vivaldi and the mazes of the Bach Double. But if teaching prioritization has happened, and students are prepared, this moment can stand unparalleled in empowering young musicians.

I think many teachers knew they were teaching posture in Book 1, tone in Book 2, and musicality in Book 3, but I think we traditionally think of our sequence from Book 1-4 as one of general ‘progress.’

When we progress from 1-4 generally, we might allow ourselves the out of teaching posture in Book 2 or musicality in Book 4. Perhaps you thought you taught tone in Book 1, but did you really interweave it into every fiber of your student’s playing as they moved from Chorus to Boccherini? Maybe you established a ‘stage presence’ in Book 1, but is your student’s performance of the Vivaldi concerto really virtuosic? How do you know when to move on? How do you know if your student is on track? Is general ‘progress’ really a guide?

Kreitman’s guideposts aren’t the only guideposts you could use, but they are well thought out and time tested. By centering your effort on one theme per book, and layering on skills with each book graduation, you have the clarity of mind to keep your standards high and the mental capacity to develop every possible tool to teach aspects of posture, tone, musicality and virtuosity to the unique student in front of you.

I know teachers do this all the time. They distill their philosophy of teaching into as bitesize a chunk as possible to make communication efficient and to give themselves thinking space.

• Carrie Reuning-Hummel recently described her two (just two) following goals for a group class. If she does accomplishes those goals in any group class in any way, shape, or form, she considers the class a success.
  • (1) making sure every child is seen, and
  • (2) communicating to the class her love of their own active learning process.
• Lizzy Simpkin, a professor of cello at Ithaca College, recently taught us the maxims of her teacher, Janos Starker. To his students he would say, “Beat the hidden beat,” and, “Don’t let your ‘ands’ be ‘ends.'” On these two phrases hangs all of the work Lizzy does in teaching her students how to shape melodies.

Considering a deeper, philosophical example, Zen Master Takuan, a writer on swordsmanship, broke down all skills into two categories. Those of technique and those of principles.

“Even though you know principle, you must make your-self perfectly free in the use of technique. And even though you may wield the sword that you carry with you well, if you are unclear on the deepest aspects of principle, you will likely fall short of proficiency. Technique and principle are just like the two wheels of a cart.”

A student of Zen, Takuan devoted himself to the art of No-Mind, or of not fixating. Ironically though, it is in mentally distinguishing while also coupling the skill of principle and technique that he enabled himself as a teacher to develop his students’ abilities holistically.

Like Takuan we must keep our minds on the complex whole while attending to the individual parts. Guideposts like Kreitman’s ‘tone,’ ‘posture,’ ‘virtuosity,’ and musicality allow you to do just that. I encourage you to borrow his, like I have, or to stake out your own for reference.