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My prayer for the musicians of tomorrow
May you always have a tune to play
at your best mate’s wedding
in the pub when you’ve had a few
or just to hear yourself
alone in a silent room
in rapture or despair
May you be proud of your gift
blast out Bach on station pianos for weary commuters
hold the crowd
become a Youtube sensation with thousands of ks of views and likes and followers
May you make old people cry and young people listen.
May you always know that you’re so beautifully, exquisitely talented
and remember that you weren’t born this way.
that you are part of a web
a rich, devoted community
who showed you
who listened to you
so you could hear the most intricate of details
May you bow gracefully, receive and give in equilibrium
and if the seesaw must tip one way, may it be towards giving
project the melody that was given to you,
that gives back to you
lighting up your body ready for you to sing it all again
May your music be a channel to your original sound
the vibration of your cells
the beating of your heart
the ancient,
gentle hummmm
that loved you into living
Suzuki's training for our times: fostering the ability to feel
‘Don’t think too much or the music will die’[1]
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!’.
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.
‘The posture I take….the spirit I show’
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]
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.
The Suzuki Twinkle Variations: A Pianist’s Primary Series
I quickly learnt that Ashtanga is a distinct form of yoga because it consists of set sequences of asanas (postures), called ‘series’. The first one - the primary series - takes around an hour and a half to do and is considered the foundational sequence for the other five more advanced series. As a practitioner, once you’ve mastered the primary series, you will begin the other series. However, the primary series never loses its relevance: even the most advanced yoga practitioners continually come back to the primary series. It aligns the spine and the postures it contains maintain the foundational strength and hip flexibility needed to complete the other series. The primary series is known as Yoga Chikitsa – ‘yoga therapy’.
For me, a beginner, the primary series is a FULL workout: the practice starts with many vinyasas, in a row to build the heat of the body. Then there are challenging standing balancing poses, twists that require the arms to bind around the body, arm balances, inversions – shoulder stands, head stand. Nothing stays still for long – in between every posture, there’s a demanding movement to reset the body: either a full vinyasa or a ‘drill’ (pushing hands on the floor and lifting body up). It will take me a lifetime at least to master all the postures in the primary series alone.
A year and a half ago, I entered my first Ashtanga yoga class. I didn’t know anything about Ashtanga at the time – I knew I wanted to go to a yoga class and this was the one nearby that took place on a Friday morning when I was free.
After many weekly classes, Ashtanga is becoming one of my staple physical practices. Since I started, I’ve noticed the range of movements available to me in my daily life has grown: I can twist more, it’s far easier to bend from my hips, I can sit cross-legged with ease. Obviously. But more recently, the postures themselves have started to reveal information about how my body is performing on a particular day: a balance feeling more wobbly than last week, a twist that is easier to get into. And sometimes my progress with postures has happened rapidly after seemingly no changes for weeks. My teacher has made a tiny adjustment and within a few moments, my body can do it.
I have started to notice parallels between Ashtanga as a movement practice for living and the repertoire of the Suzuki method for playing the piano. Both contain a set initial sequence of material (The Twinkle Variations) which we all practise – even teachers – regardless of our level of ability. There are several reasons for this:
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Initially, each new posture or piece must be practised to master its basic form
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Practising the entire sequence of pieces/postures retains our ability to play/do it
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The first sequence acts as a foundation for mastering more advanced postures/pieces
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Problems with challenging postures/pieces can be fixed by returning to the ‘therapy’ of the foundational sequence. Since it both addresses and teaches the core skills, the foundational sequence allows us to identify exactly what the problems are and gives us an opportunity to fix them: Problems with fast scales ---> We play Run-Rabbit. Problems with Run-Rabbit --->We fix Run-Rabbit [and we may get creative about how we do that].
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Progress though the pieces/postures in the sequence can be linear, but it is not always. This depends on the developmental pathway of the individual and there is no ‘right’ way to progress.
Then as we mature:
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Because we practise the sequence regularly, we can start to compare how we are executing it on different occasions. This gives us feedback on our playing as a whole: Pepperoni pizza feeling stickier than last week?---> How much I have I been moving my fingers lately?
In this way, Ashtanga and Suzuki both encourage a deepening of awareness and hone reliability of skills, to support advancement.
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Traditionally, Ashtanga practitioners will do their own yoga practice Sunday-Thursday. Each Friday, regardless of their level of advancement, they come together for a class of the primary series led by a teacher. This helps to fix any bad habits that have developed during the week and helps reset the nervous systems of those who have been practising the more advanced series (the primary series focuses on grounding and forward folds). In other words, it’s important for everyone to do but the reasons for this may be different depending on each person’s level of ability.
And there’s the community of it. There is nothing that physically motivates me in the same way as spending an hour and a half in a room of people moving and breathing at the same time. In the class I attend, it’s usually the same core group of students who come every week. I learn as much from them as I do from the teacher and I am deeply inspired by what some of those bodies are capable of, whilst mine is not yet.