Suzuki's training for our times: fostering the ability to feel

‘Don’t think too much or the music will die’[1]

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One freezing January training day, my colleague was giving Matthew and his friend a lesson. She asked his friend to start playing ‘Short Story’. Matthew seemed completely distracted: he was moving around the room, trying to find the radiator. Once he had successfully located it, he absorbed himself in warming his body up as quickly as possible. Suddenly, my colleague stopped the other child and called upon Matthew to come to play the next part of the piece. He ran to the piano and played the next section without a hint of hesitation.

‘But how did he do that?’ I thought, ‘he wasn’t concentrating!’.

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Suzuki believed that like any other talent, intuition was not innate and was the result of training, either conscious or unconscious.[2]  He played games with his students to deliberately distract the mind with the aim of developing his students’ intuitive abilities. He would ask quick-fire questions as they played a Twinkle Variation ‘how many legs do you have?’, ‘how many noses do you have?’ and the students were expected to answer without interrupting their playing. [3]   These sorts of games are still used by Suzuki teachers with the same objective.

Personally, my talent needs more cultivation: my teacher recently asked me to spell my name as I played;

I managed two letters.

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‘The posture I take….the spirit I show’

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As his students progressed, Suzuki would ask them to ‘wind up your brain’ and listen as he clapped the melody of a piece. They would then play it together. More advanced still, he would ask them to watch him as he prepared to play the piece. They would intuitively start to play it, without hearing anything but ‘from the posture [he took]….from the spirit [he showed]’. [4]  Occasionally, some children would guess the wrong piece. He believed that this was because in that moment their mind took over and they started thinking rather than sensing the piece:

‘They succeed if they mindlessly join in with the sound I produce. If they set their minds free, they know the piece by intuition the moment they catch my first note. This is how our beings, our life forces, communicate with each other. We want to foster our children so that they are capable of this kind of empathy; this is what I call ‘education towards life’. [5]

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One of the first things that Suzuki students learn is how to bow. They do this by watching their teacher and the teacher in turn watches their student. Both teacher and student sense the other through their posture and their spirit. This subtle way of learning continues throughout the child’s musical education as they receive their teacher’s transmissions and their parent’s support. 

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Now almost 100 years old, the Suzuki method takes on new relevance today. At a time when human labour is being rapidly replaced by artificial intelligence, our uniquely human capacities of empathy and intuition that he so ardently cultivated – the ability to feel – is gaining value all the time. Today’s children will require this ability to find profitable employment when they reach adulthood, and its wide-spread cultivation is vital if we are to preserve our collective life force, our organic communication systems and ultimately the beating of our hearts.

[1] Talk from Caroline Gowers on 18/05/25 at London teacher training weekend – this quote is one of Caroline’s distillations of Kataoka’s transmissions when she studied with her in Japan.

[2] Shinichi Suzuki, Nurtured By Love Revised Edition, 67.

[3] Ibid, 128.

[4] Shinichi Suzuki, Nurtured By Love Revised Edition, 129-130.

[5] Ibid, 130.