Dr. Suzuki with Karen's daughter, Sarah.

Shinichi Suzuki, violinist, philosopher, educator and humanitarian, was born in 1898, the son of Japan’s first violin manufacturer. He began playing the violin at age seventeen, studying in Japan several years before going to Germany in the1920s for further study.

Upon returning to Japan, he formed a String Quartet with his brothers that toured extensively. He also taught violin at universities in Tokyo and elsewhere. After World War II, Suzuki saw a great opportunity to enrich the lives of children through music. Noting that children around the world learn to speak their native language with ease, he applied the basic principals of language acquisition to the learning of music. He called his method the mother-tongue approach, or Talent Education.

In 1945, Suzuki was invited to teach at a school in Matsumoto, Japan. He accepted with the condition that he could try this new method he had developed to teach very young children. Within a year, Suzuki presented some of his young students at a concert in Tokyo. Listeners were amazed at the performance of the children, and the Talent Education movement began to grow.

Over the next 30 years, Suzuki did extensive research to develop his series of repertoire books. He chose his pieces carefully so that they present musical and technical points in a logical, sequential manner.

Other teachers studied with Suzuki and began to teach throughout Japan. Haruko Kataoka moved from Tokyo to Matsumoto to study with Suzuki and to accompany his violin students. She worked with Suzuki to develop the technique specific to the piano and also to build the repertoire for volumes 1 through 7 in the piano literature. The volume 8 book and CD are now available in Japan only, compiled by the teachers at the Talent Education Institute in Matsumoto.

Introduction to the United States, a film of the first National Graduation Concert in Japan was shown at Oberlin College in 1958. Since then, teachers from many countries, including myself, have visited Japan to learn more about Suzuki and Haruko Kataoka.

Suzuki’s idea of teaching peace and understanding through music has gradually gained acceptance. His active leadership for more than 50 years until his death in January of 1998 brought thousands of parents and teacher in many countries to join his effort to nurture loving human beings through the mother tongue approach to music education. Thousands of children the world over are now able to gather and play together, overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers through the language of music. The dream of Dr. Suzuki is coming true.