Suzuki Violin Parent

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Suzuki Violin Parent

A mother's diary of a six-year-old's violin lessons: practice charts, group class, and Twinkle. So much Twinkle.
by Anne-Marie Fischer

My daughter Claire is six, and she has played the violin since January. That's eight months. In that time we have gone from a cardboard box with a ruler taped to it to a real (tiny) violin, from "Mississippi Hot Dog" to the actual Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, through one recital, roughly two hundred practice sessions, one snapped E string, and, I would estimate, eleven crying jags, four of them mine. I started this page for the other parents in our group class, who kept asking me "is it like this for you too?" It is. Here's how it goes.

[ What Suzuki Is | Before Twinkle | Twinkle | Practice & Stickers | Group Class | The Recital | On Tears | Diary ]

What Suzuki is, in one page
Shinichi Suzuki was a Japanese violinist and teacher who noticed something obvious that nobody had made much of: every child learns to speak their own language, fluently, without being "talented" at it. They do it by hearing it constantly from birth, by imitating, by being praised for every little "mama," and by repeating things thousands of times before anyone hands them a grammar book. He called it the Mother Tongue method and set out to teach the violin the same way. He taught for decades, and he died last year at 99. The book that explains his ideas is called Nurtured by Love, and our teacher asked me to read it before Claire's first lesson. I'm glad she did.

In practice it means:

The parent is the home teacher. I go to every lesson. I take notes. I learned to hold the violin and the bow myself the first month, badly, so I'd know what she was going through. At home, I run the practice. The teacher sees Claire for thirty minutes a week; I see her the other six days.

Listening, every day. Suzuki students learn by ear first and read music later. Every Suzuki family owns the recording of the Book 1 pieces, and it plays in our house every single day: in the car, at breakfast, at bedtime. Claire knew how "Lightly Row" was supposed to sound long before she could play a note of it. (I also know how it's supposed to sound. I hear it in the shower.)

Start early, start small. Children start at three, four, five. Claire started at five and a half. Her violin is a 1/8 size; it looks like a toy and it is not one.

Review. You never "finish" a piece. Twinkle is played by the beginner and by the kid on Book 4, and it's played beautifully by the kid on Book 4. Every piece learned is a piece kept.

Group class. Once a week, all the students play together, at every level. More below.

Every child can. That's the motto. Not "every gifted child." Every child. I was skeptical. I'm less skeptical than I was.

Before Twinkle: the box violin
Nobody warned me that for the first several weeks there would be no violin. There was a "box violin": a small cereal box covered in brown paper, with a paint stirrer for a neck, that our teacher had us make at the first lesson. Claire's has stickers on it. She named it Beatrice.

With Beatrice, Claire learned: rest position (violin tucked under the right arm, feet together, bow to the teacher); playing position (feet on the little foot chart the teacher gave us, a paper with two footprints on it); how to bring the violin up to her shoulder and hold it there with no hands, which is harder than it sounds and involves a lot of giggling; and the bow hold, with a pencil first and then a real bow, thumb bent, pinky on top, "bunny ears." We practiced the bow hold in the car, at the dinner table, in the grocery store. Then we did it all again with the real violin, which arrived in February and which she was not allowed to play for two more weeks, only hold. That was a hard two weeks.

The point, the teacher explained, is that if you fix the posture before there's any sound to worry about, you never have to unfix it later. I have since watched an eight-year-old try to unlearn a bad bow hold and I believe her now.

Twinkle, Twinkle, and its Variations
Book 1 opens not with Twinkle itself but with the Twinkle Variations: the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" played in four different rhythms, and then the plain melody. Each variation teaches the bow arm something new. Every teacher gives the rhythms nicknames so the kids can say them out loud; ours uses these (yours may be different, and that's fine):

Variation A: "Mississippi Hot Dog" - four quick notes and two slow. This is the one everyone starts with, and it's the one you'll hear coming out of your child's room, and your own head, for months.
Variation B: "Ice Cream Cone" - with a little rest in it, which teaches the bow to stop.
Variation C: "Run Pony, Run Pony" - fast, at the tip of the bow.
Variation D: "Peanut Butter, Jelly Jam" - long-short-short, long-short-short.
Theme: just Twinkle, plain, long even bows, which turns out to be the hardest of all.

Claire played Variation A on the open E string first (no fingers), then learned to put fingers down one at a time. The first time she played "Mississippi Hot Dog" on the A string with the fingers in the right places and the bow going straight, in March, I cried in the lesson. The teacher was very kind about it and said everybody does.

The whole Twinkle set took her from February to June. Since then: "Lightly Row" (learned, and now under review), "Song of the Wind" (learned this month; it has a hard string crossing at the end that we are still fighting about), and we've just started listening seriously to "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." After that come "O Come, Little Children," "May Song," "Long, Long Ago," and a piece called "Allegro" that Claire is desperate to get to because the big kids play it fast.

Practice, charts, and the sticker economy
"Only practice on the days you eat," Dr. Suzuki is supposed to have said, and our teacher says it every week. We practice every day, including Christmas, for about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes with a six-year-old is a long time. Here's what makes it work in our house, most days:

The chart. A sheet of paper on the refrigerator with the days of the month down the side and the things to practice across the top: bow hold, rest/play position, open strings, the current variation or piece, one review piece, and "listening." Each one she does, she gets a sticker. A full row of stickers is a gold star. Seven gold stars in a row and she gets to pick the Friday dinner. It is not sophisticated and I don't care. It works.

Same time, same place. After breakfast, before school, in the living room by the window. If we skip it in the morning it doesn't get done, or it gets done at 7:30 p.m. by two tired people, and that's when the crying happens.

The 100-bead string. A hundred pony beads on a shoelace. Each repetition of the hard spot, she slides a bead across. Ten beads a day of the hard bit. It turns "do it again" into a game, sort of, some of the time.

Games. Play it for the stuffed animals. Play it with eyes closed. Mom plays it wrong on purpose and Claire has to catch the mistake (this one is a huge hit and I am not sure it's good for my authority). Play it standing on one foot. Roll a die to decide how many times.

One thing at a time. If we're working on a straight bow, I don't say a word about the fingers. The teacher was firm on this. One correction per repetition, and it must be followed by something true and specific that she did well. "Your pinky stayed round that whole time" beats "good job" every day of the week.

Stop before she's done. The best practices end with her wanting one more. The worst ones end with me insisting on one more.

Group class
Saturday mornings, in the church hall where our teacher rents space, all of her students stand in a big half-circle, littlest in front, and play together. About fourteen of them right now, from a four-year-old with a box violin up to a girl of twelve who is somewhere in Book 4 and to whom Claire gives a look of pure worship.

They start with Twinkle, all of them, all variations, and it sounds like a hive of very earnest bees. Then the beginners sit and the pieces get harder and the circle gets smaller. The little ones watch the big ones and see where they're going. The big ones remember where they came from. There are games (freeze when the teacher stops playing; play "Lightly Row" while marching in a circle), there is a snack, and there is a half hour afterward in the parking lot where the parents compare notes, which is where most of this page comes from.

For Claire, group class is the reason she practices. She would not practice for me alone; she practices so she can stand next to the twelve-year-old. That's the whole idea, I think.

The June recital
June 12, 1999, church hall, folding chairs, about sixty parents and grandparents, a table of cookies at the back. The program went from youngest to oldest, so Claire was third. She walked up in her blue dress, feet on the foot chart the teacher had taped to the floor, bowed (we practiced the bow more than the piece that week), and played Twinkle Variation A and the theme with the teacher playing along on piano.

She played Variation A perfectly. Halfway through the theme she lost her place, stopped, looked at the teacher, and the teacher just nodded and kept the piano going, and Claire found the note and came back in and finished. Then she bowed again and walked back to her seat and said, out loud, "I did it."

I have no photograph of this because my hands were shaking too badly to work the camera. My husband got it on the camcorder. I have watched the tape more times than I will admit here.

The twelve-year-old closed the recital with a Bach gavotte, and Claire didn't blink the whole time.

On tears (hers and mine), honestly
I promised the parking-lot mothers I'd put this part in, so here it is.

There has been crying. There was the day in April she threw the bow. (It's fine. The bow is fine. She was sent to her room and the violin went in its case for the day and the next morning she asked to practice, which the teacher said would happen and which I didn't believe.) There have been days when "one more time" was the wrong thing to say and I said it anyway. There was a Tuesday in July when I realized I was correcting her fourth finger in a voice I would not have wanted anyone to hear, and I put the violin away and we went for ice cream and I sat in the car for a while afterward.

What I've learned: the tears are almost never about the violin. They're about being tired, or hungry, or six. When I get it wrong it's almost always because I wanted the practice to go well more than she did, and she could feel it. The teacher says the parent's job is to be the calm one, and that if I can't be calm, we stop, and nothing is lost. Nothing has been lost yet. She still says, most days, "can we do violin now?" That's the whole ballgame. I try to remember that on the other days.

If you're a parent a few months behind us and it's hard, e-mail me. It's hard for everyone. It's also, on the good mornings, the best fifteen minutes of my day.

Diary, most recent first

September 23. "Song of the Wind," the string crossing at the end, 10 beads a day all week. Today she got it clean four times out of ten. The teacher says that's a piece that's "in her hands now" and just needs to settle. Group class Saturday; she's asked to stand next to you-know-who.

September 14. Snapped an E string mid-practice with a noise like a cap gun. Both of us screamed. Nobody hurt. Learned to change a string, which our teacher showed me in January and I'd forgotten completely. Keep a spare set in the case. I do now.

September 7. First day of first grade, and we practiced before school anyway, which I count as a small triumph of routine over chaos. Playing "Lightly Row" for the class at show-and-tell on Friday. She has decided this on her own. I have been informed.

August 30. The teacher told Claire that Twinkle theme was "beautiful" today. Unprompted. Claire told everyone in the grocery store.

August 18. Listening report: the Book 1 tape has been played so many times this summer that it's started to warble. Ordered a replacement. We now own the tape and the CD, and the CD stays in the car.

August 3. Back from a week at my parents' with the violin in tow. Practiced every day but one, on Grandpa's porch. Grandpa, who is not a music person, listened to Twinkle every morning with a cup of coffee and said "well, I'll be" every single time. Claire played for him one last time before we left and he had to go inside for a minute.

Still to come: a printable practice chart (as soon as I figure out how to put a file up here), our group class games list, and pictures once the roll from the recital is developed. Yes, June's roll. I know.

Other music parents and players on GeoCities.us: Carter Piano Studio | The Community String Quartet | Bow Rehair & Violin Repair (where the E string went for its replacement, and for the bow's check-up after The Throwing) | The Amateur Cellist | Vienna neighborhood

Visitors since May 1999:

For Claire, who did it.