Listening, Review, and Attention to Tone are the three actions at the heart of the Suzuki Method. Listening is the fundamental and most important of these. If practice or learning is happening without listening, the approach can’t be called ‘Suzuki.’

WHY?
Listening is SO important for two reasons.

LEARNING VS. PLAYING
The first is that intensive listening breaks up the ‘learning’ and the ‘playing’ part of the music making process. In traditional music lessons students learn the piece at exactly the same time they are working out how to play the piece. The architecture and emotional intention of a piece is set up while the student is also building up the techniques and coordination it takes to play the piece.

Overlapping learning and playing can lead to a messy, frustrating time where something, either technique or the accuracy of the notes played, will be out of place. Lessons become a downward spiral of patching up and trying to force student and parent to memorize what is ‘correct’ even is.

Consider, on the other hand, a student and parent who are intimately familiar with a piece before they ever begin working on it. They hum the piece, it gets stuck in their head, they begin to recognize their favorite parts. They ‘learn’ the piece entirely, even though they don’t play it.

Just as nearly everyone ‘knows’ the Happy Birthday song and playground rhymes without ever playing them on an instrument, your student and their parent ‘learn’ Allegro and Gossec Gavotte before you ever begin to talk about it.

CONSCIOUS VS. UNCONSCIOUS
The second important aspect of listening is that it trains the unconscious mind, not the conscious one.

Most learning programs target the conscious intellectual process, but Suzuki acknowledged that masterful artistry happens when violin is performed without conscious effort at all.

Consciousness is not the enemy, but it is a far less powerful tool than the unconscious. By feeding the unconscious a moderately sized, daily dose of Book 1 listening, the unconscious mind absorbs all sorts of information about piece structure and form, pitch, dynamics, tone, flow and countless other things.

Bring to mind the difference between eating a meal with friends and reading a detailed description of that meal. Think of how different the experience of riding on the back of a bicycle and someone describing how to balance a bike while you ride it.

This is the difference between a teacher EXPLAINING a piece, and a student truly, intimately knowing a piece through listening.

What we aim to do as teachers is to allow an architectural understanding of the piece to be downloaded into the students unconscious mind so they become their own teachers. As they later figure out how to play the piece on their instrument they are constantly comparing their playing to the reference structure in their unconscious— and not just the ‘right’ notes, but the intonation, tone, feeling, rhythms and flow.

The student begins to understand, too, the the unconscious mind is a resource to be trusted. It deserves respect and attention. The unconscious mind IS miraculous and magical, when viewed from the perspective of the conscious mind.

In violin lessons and practice we bow to the unconscious mind’s genius, and humble the conscious mind which always (inevitably) thinks it can do better.

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By listening daily to the CD students learn their pieces by heart before they ever play them and they learn how to harness the power of the unconscious mind.