In Book 1 teacher training with Dr. Laurie Scott four years ago I took my first stab at writing a coherent teaching philosophy. It spoke to who I was at the time and how I was developing as a human being. For my Suzuki degree with Carrie Reuning-Hummel at Ithaca College I was again tasked with distilling my teaching philosophy down into words. The following  essay is my response.

In an interview with Mountain Record, composer and singer Meredith Monk states, “The inner voice has both gentleness and clarity.” She continues, “To get to authenticity you really keep going down to the bone. To the inevitability of something.” The deeper I dive into violin playing, the more this feels true. The further I master the instrument, the more playing violin feels like being my authentic self. And the more time I spend focused in a practice room, devoid of orchestra chair ranking anxiety and chamber quartet politics, the more I feel I embody gentleness and clarity. It is not, as far as I can tell, because I have some magical connection to the violin, but because having a deep, authentic connection to anything gets at the truth of what it means to be a human being.

Meredith Monk is not the only artist to recognize that going “down to the bone” of something gets you to an inevitable, clear truth. Experts of chess, martial arts, writing, meditation, surfing, painting, and many other disciplines have shared the same discovery. In The Poetry Writer’s Handbook, poet Mary Oliver describes writing a poem as, “a kind of impossible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” Her daily ritual of writing as she strolls through the natural world of Cape Cod, described in an interview with Krista Tippett, allows her heart and conscious mind to meet and then transcend merely her own experience. She says, “Many of the poems are ‘I did this. I did this. I saw this.’ I wanted them — the ‘I’ to be the possible reader… Rather than about myself. It was about an experience that happened to be mine but could well have been anybody else’s…  It enjoined the reader into the experience of the poem. I became the kind of person who did the walking and the scribbling but shared it.” Like Oliver, chess master Joshua Waitzkin experienced a sort of self transcendence as he transitioned to become a world class Tai-Chi push hands competitor. The deeper he moved into the heart of Tai Chi, the more he realized it was fundamentally the same as chess. In his book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin describes the sensation of performing a Tai Chi meditation while he was actually playing chess, or deconstructing the attacks of his martial arts opponent with chessic analysis. In the last chapter he states, “The real art of learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.”

I began taking Suzuki violin lessons with my mother at the age of four. I don’t remember much about our lessons in the beginning, other than the fact that it was part of what we did as a family. Just like I attended school, brushed my teeth, and read books, I also played the violin. I took a journey with my mother from my first bow hold all the way through college auditions. She attended every lesson and concert, and stayed engaged in my development throughout. My mother negotiated with me the difficult way that is mastery — from violin being something we did as an activity, to something I could do, to something that was annoying, to something that was intriguing, to something that was utterly soul fulfilling. She never doubted playing the violin was something I would continue to do, even when I faced challenges.

Having worked alongside me, I think she sees why this work is so important. I think she sees that my relationship with violin is really my relationship with life. Her decision to guide me through the learning process on the violin all those years was really an intimate opportunity for her, along with my Suzuki teachers, to teach me valuable life lessons. I know that my ability to problem solve, trust, move past fear, respect others, set up rich environments, and learn from experiences was shaped by my time spent practicing violin. Violin totally influences the way I communicate with peers, approach school work, spend time in nature, and live spiritually. In other words, studying violin through the Suzuki Method has fundamentally shaped who I am.

From reading his writing and watching Dr. Suzuki’s teaching, it is clear that he also believed in the connection between mastery and the development of human character. In Nurtured by Love Suzuki suggests, “Every single human being’s personality–his ability, his way of thinking and feeling–is carved and chiseled by training and environment. It shows in each persons (sic) face and eyes. His whole character becomes visible. The stamp of history changes day by day, matching the steps of man’s living. This is life’s delicate working.” The Talent Education movement is Suzuki’s attempt to use violin as a vehicle for the development of children’s character. Learning to play an instrument was merely a byproduct of the real effort to “help make all the children born upon this earth fine human beings, happy people, people of superior ability.”

Suzuki took huge strides in making his dream of character development into a reality by modeling his education system on the method children use to learn language, a strategy which has come to be called the Mother Tongue Approach. Discussing the approach in Ability Development From Age Zero, Suzuki states, “If a child speaks his language fluently, he has developmental possibilities. Other abilities should therefore develop according to the way he is raised.” The beauty in modeling a method of education on language learning is two fold. The first is it centers the education practice on something that is not contrived or intellectual, but utterly natural. Just as children learn to walk and eat and play games with each other, they learn to communicate with language. Therefore, something  as complex as violin playing or mathematical calculations or haiku recitations can be internalized as naturally as breathing. The second beautiful aspect of the Mother Tongue Approach is the profound recognition that every child who can speak is capable of development to an incredibly high level. Genetic predisposition is immaterial in the context of a rich, nurturing environment. Suzuki’s conviction that “every single child, without exception, is born with… possibility,” motivated him to work tirelessly to bring Talent Education to children all over the world.

Even though his ultimate aim was to bring Talent Education to all of the world’s children, his start was in Japan. The Talent Education movement began in Japan in the 1945, in the wake of World War II. After being separated from his family, living on a diet of river moss, and working very hard in the miserable conditions of a lumber factory, Suzuki began to teach violin again in Matsumoto– this time starting young children with his new Talent Education philosophy. From a young age Suzuki spent time playing with and observing children, and believed that they had pure spirits that should be preserved and maintained as they grew. Children of four and five didn’t self deceive, doubt, hate, break rules, or fear, and he “played with children so that [he] could learn from them.” The Talent Education method, which used the mother tongue approach, was designed by Suzuki to maintain the character of young Japanese children coming of age in the devastating post war times. He wanted Japanese children to have the opportunity to see and perform the beauty that he experienced in Germany in his 20s. Utterly inspired by the soulful playing of his teacher Klinger and the upright character and artistic sensibilities of academics such as Einstein and Dr. Michaelis in Germany, he wanted children in Japan to be inspired by the same.

What Dr. Suzuki did to heal his community was, in many ways countercultural and quite radical. In a country recently devastated by war, he preached love. Instead of competition he valued harmony. He set the example of tirelessly working toward mastery, and yet remaining patient and having fun. Suzuki believed in nurturing character and artistic sensibility in a time of rapid industrial change. In Japan, fifty years ago, his singular goal was to teach children how to see beauty. Once they were able to see beauty, they would learn from that beautiful environment. By learning beauty (music, art, poetry, etc.) to the point of mastery, students would become beautiful. Music would change the world.

Over seventy years later, and living in the United States, my work as a Suzuki teacher needs to evolve to meet the needs of the children I work with. From my time spent with four and five year olds, I perceive their need not to see beauty, but just to see. Where Suzuki taught in a war devastated community, we teach in an attention devastated community. The children of our society are not in want of food, shelter, activities, and opportunities, but space and silence. At a time when children can spend time doing anything (music, sports, foreign language, cooking, drawing, swimming, nature school, etc), what they need is time with their own selves. At any given moment a child can reach the external world through the screen of their iPad, but few have an awareness of their innerworld.  It is rare today that an adult, let alone a child, knows what their gentle and clear, authentic voice sounds like. The process of mastering the violin can teach this skill, which I feel is now more important than ever.

Just as Suzuki’s method did radical, counter cultural work in the 1940s to teach beauty to the children in Japan, we now need to do radical, counter cultural work to teach introspection and self awareness. I have the opportunity to set up a studio in which the modern values of our capitalist, materialistic society are turned on their head. In my studio depth is valued over breadth, space valued over excess, harmony valued over competition, and mastery valued over quick results. In my studio, parents are an integral part of the learning process. In a unique learning environment when parents spend time one on one with their child, I hope to draw parents’ attention not to what their student is accomplishing, but what their student is discovering moment to moment. Our studio will be a place where success is not measured by ranking our points, but by steadfastness and courage.

Because music is one of the few “activities” where winning isn’t the goal, I’ll make sure there is no ‘racing to the finish line’ in our studio.  When we play together, our goal is union with each other. When we play soloistically, our goal is union with ourselves, our audience, our violins, and the composers of our pieces. We find ourselves unified with the whole legacy of music makers, of artists, of humans. In a way, becoming a musician can mean a path toward systematically dismantling the ego, the constructed self. It means mastering the cosmic oneness, the harmony between each and every thing– becoming familiar with the relational versus independent worldview. The essence of my hope to help children to truly see themselves and see beyond themselves is best articulated in a passage from Eugen Herrigel’s classic, Zen and the Art of Archery.

In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality. The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconsciousness is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art.

Like Herrigel, Suzuki spoke to this complex issue of the transcendent self as it relates to world harmony. He said, “The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off, it was right inside my ordinary self.” Notice that he said the ordinary self, not the constructed self. I think ‘ordinary’ could be interchanged with the ‘child-like self’ or ‘the beginners mind.” I believe Suzui saw the art inside of himself, and he saw it in the heart of every child. I too see their artistry, and in this frenetic, technology ridden 21st century I want every child to recognize it within themselves. I want children to see themselves, and their relationship to the whole universe, through the work of mastery on the violin.