In Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, the hero, Bobby Dupea, abandons a career as a promising concert pianist to live life as an itinerant labourer. His belligerence is as deeply rooted in him as is his innate musicality. We’re left to understand it wasn’t music Dupea rebelled against but how it was delivered. Despite his skill, he turned away from the environment he associated with music, an environment he found distasteful and antithetical to his being.
I think of Dupea when I remember my childhood violin lessons. I loved music, but something about the methodological lessons rankled me. I was a pupil within the Suzuki method, which values learning by ear, memorization, and parental involvement. Through his program, which is now taught to some 250,000 students in seventy-four countries, founder Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) sought to change the way musical aptitude was understood. Talent, he suggested, is not inborn but something anyone could develop, given the proper training. His solution was nurture over nature; his evidence was language—an infinitely complex skill learned naturally by almost everyone. If there were a secret to mastering an instrument, it was only “practice and practice of the right things.” The approach was designed to be competitively passive, meaning no grades, no examinations. Instead, students work at their own pace through a series of books filled with music of increasing difficulty, beginning with variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in book one and ending with Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 4 in D Major in book ten.
