Shinichi Suzuki believed that kids learned music not by drill and repetition but by exposure and instinct. “All you had to do to activate the music instinct was expose them early to the right input,” adamgopnik writes.
It is a scene by now observed by countless parents and many nonparents, from Tokyo to Paris and beyond. In a classroom or on a stage, a platoon, or sometimes a small army, of very young children are sawing away in unison at Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor, with maximum aplomb and some surprising musical skill. “Little geniuses!” the observers mutter, either admiringly or—universally, among the nonparents—sarcastically.
Suzuki’s return to Japan, in 1929, occurred amid the country’s long run-up to war, which seems to have been less internally noxious than Germany’s; not being racially coded against an internal group, it allowed you to keep your head if you kept it down. As Hotta shows, the eventual militarist takeover was not the result of some inexorable wave of Japanese authoritarianism set off by a reaction to Western imperialism. Nor was it a one-way vector within Japanese ideology.
When the war came, the liberals made themselves invisible, and the Suzuki violin factories were turned over to military production, with orders to manufacture seaplane floats instead of fiddles.
This dream of the ready-made musical child is to pedagogy what the perpetual-motion machine is to physics: always wished for, endlessly proposed, and never demonstrated. What was new in the Suzuki method was the insistence that musical children could be nurtured en masse, and the belief that doing so was the key to a broader revolution in human understanding. If children all over the globe were sawing away at Vivaldi, they would not make war with each other when they grew up.
Most linguists and psychologists these days are inclined to think that the direct connection Suzuki saw between learning language and learning music is not much more than an appealing metaphor. We are all Mozarts in our native languages—fluent, endlessly inventive, able to produce new sentences effortlessly and without conscious premeditation—but, Mozart aside, even the most dedicated of music students progress in fits and starts.
Something significant happened to the idea of the musical prodigy, derived in no small part from Suzuki’s example. In 1998, the year of Suzuki’s death, at the age of ninety-nine, a teen-age Hilary Hahn—one of innumerable violinists exposed to the mother-tongue method—was taking the stage at the Kennedy Center, while a recording made by another Suzuki-abetted performer, Joshua Bell, received a Gramophone Award.
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