What we are all about
Whether participating as Suzuki, traditional, or chamber music students, the principles remain the same. All students can learn and find ease and beauty in their music and in themselves. Done within a supportive and accepting environment, music and the study of music can nurture joy, deep engagement, aliveness, empowerment, and a heightened self esteem. All students thrive when their teachers, families, and communities support them unconditionally in both the struggles of learning and the joys of success.
more below about how We use music to enrich a life
All students have the capacity to learn
At all levels, young beginners, advancing, and advanced students, begin where they are. Wherever the students are in their musical studies, that is where their growth begins. In this program their are no auditions, because we hold firm to the belief that all students can grow and all students deserve the attention that allows them to grow. The only request is participation. Participation in the strategies that allow success and honor the student’s true potential.
“Where there is artistic excellence,
there is human dignity. ”
Building the ability of beauty, ease, and success
With the belief that all students can develop new abilities at the for front of the educational perspective, the strategies by which each student is taught are chosen specifically to enable each and every student to grow based on and regardless of their previously acquired abilities and skills. We start with the abilities they do have and use the strength and facility with those skills as a jumping off point for acquiring the new skills necessary to learn new repertoire. Material is broken down into small doable morsels so that the skill involved is doable. When a new skill is doable, accurate repetition is doable and that leads to more efficient and empowered learning. For this reason, students in the studio expand on their skills and progress through repertoire in a sequence carefully chosen to allow for the most easeful building of skills and navigation of their music. Whether young Suzuki students following the sequence offered by Dr. Suzuki in the Books or students engaging in repertoire outside or beyond those books, when foundational skills are mastered with unconscious competence, these skills bolster a students ability to learn more advanced skills and repertoire. Success means many different things to many different people. In this studio success can certainly mean a beautiful performance and that beautiful performance can do all sorts of things to empower the student. But even more important than a beautiful performance is the ability for students to maintain their alive engagement, learn to work through challenges and failures, keep a strong self esteem and sense of empowerment through even a challenging process of learning, and recognize the beauty of their contribution in whatever form it comes in.
“When love is deep, much can be accomplished. ”
Balancing the gift of music with the gift of the child
The beauty and aliveness of music is an amazing gift to experience and to share. Children able to explore this art are deeply enriched forever by it. Dr. Suzuki’s initial motivation to develop his educational method was as a strategy to bring beauty into the life of children effected by World War II as a way to help them heal their hearts. He believed that through the exploration of music, children would develop a “happy heart and noble soul.” We believe that the process of exploring and mastering music is not just in service of the music, but most definitely in service of the child. Music has the unique capacity to touch hearts, awaken the spirit, stimulate the mind, and work with the body to bring all aspects of being together in service of beauty and contribution.
But playing a musical instrument, especially well, is hard work. Navigating the hard work in a way that still allows the child to still feel a sense of aliveness is very important. In this program we recognize the importance of mastery and beauty as a tool towards building a child’s deeper connection to the music, but also recognize a child’s need to play and connect with the music and those around them joyfully. For this reason we work to find that balance by asking students for consistent and wise efforts while simultaneously helping students see the beauty in their playing, progress, and effort, and giving them time and space to connect with their peers and enjoy a few laughs along the way.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers in yourself that you have built against it.”
It takes a village, or at least a parent and a teacher
For younger kids in the context of the Suzuki method, students work as part of a team that supports them and allows them to learn what would otherwise be a task too big for young children. Parents work with the teacher to acquire the tools to explain, assist, and stimulate the conscious attention so that repetitions needed for an accuracy that allows success to come sooner rather than later. They are give tools and strategies to make the process doable and hopefully nourishing, meaningful, and fun for everyone involved. With parental participation students remember what to practice and how to practice at home. Through that consistent process students gradually develop their own ability to self monitor, direct their practice, build belief in their abilities to grow, and trust that practicing actually does pay off. As students develop these skills, parents stop doing the thinking for them and, in a sense, become the scaffolding by which they support the child while the child is given the space to navigating on their own. As students spend more time without a practice parent to help them, the past support children experienced translates into a stronger trust in their unconditional worth, a confidence in their ability to work through challenges, and skill and ownership that they can bring into their independent practice. In effect, it is the parental support, whether helping them practice, adjusted based on age and skill, or giving them the unconditional emotional and logistical support from the sidelines, that gives students the power to find their own direction for accomplishment, be their own person, to love themselves, and to take ownership of whatever they choose to do.
“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art-enriched, ennobled, encouraged- they then act in a way that may affect the course of events..by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”
to learn more about some of these ideas…
Please visit the recommended reading list under public resources in the menu or reach out if you have any questions.
Registered students also have access to many written materials going into more more details on each of these topics.