Happy Summer!

I hope everyone has gotten a good start to summer and has a chance to relax and enjoy some free time!

I find myself with more free time during the summer when I'm not teaching quite as much. During this summer, I will be updating my website so I may be writing fewer blog posts in an attempt to get my new website up and running as soon as possible. Keep a look out for new posts and especially keep a look out for my updated website!!!

Book Report: Nurtured By Love

Nurtured By Love 

by Shinichi Suzuki

Nurtured by Love is the first book new parents to the Suzuki Method are encouraged to read. It's also a required reading for completing Suzuki training and I try to read it at least once a year. Below is a summary of the book with the major philosophical points as outlined by Suzuki himself. First, he details his background and experiences leading up to the founding of his method. Then, Suzuki describes many of the tenets of the Suzuki Method. 

About Suzuki

Shinichi Suzuki was born on October 17, 1898 in Nagoya, Japan. He was one of twelve children and his father owned a violin factory. Growing up around the violin factory, Suzuki and his siblings always believed the instruments were toys and never realized what beautiful sounds could come from a violin. When he was seventeen, Suzuki heard a recording of Schubert’s Ave Maria played by the violinist Mischa Elman. This listening experience changed Suzuki’s life thereafter; he brought a violin home from the factory and taught himself to play by listening recordings and imitating what he heard. He began taking violin lessons from a teacher in Tokyo and at age 22, Suzuki moved to Germany to study with Karl Klingler. While in Germany, Suzuki also met his future wife, Waltraud, a German pianist. They married and relocated to Japan in 1929, where Suzuki began to teach violin and play string quartet concerts with his brothers. At the Imperial Conservatory, Suzuki began developing his teaching ideas and philosophy for working with children, young children in particular. 

World War II, a catastrophe and devastating for countries all over the world, served as an impetus for Suzuki’s method and philosophy of education. Following the war and recovery from a long period of serious illness, Suzuki was determined to contribute to the renewal of hope in the world by reaching out to the children of Japan. Suzuki believed educating children could help prevent future disasters as well as give them hope for their future. After World War II, Suzuki, Waltraud and his sister’s family moved to Matsumoto, Japan where he devoted more time to his research in teaching children. He developed his method based on how he saw children learn their native language. He spent many years developing an appropriate sequence to teaching the violin to young children and in 1945, decided to name his method “Talent Education” based on his method of teaching children to develop ability. Other teachers travelled to Matsumoto to observe his teaching and study his method. Those teachers then established other branches of Talent Education programs in cities across Japan and Suzuki’s work in education spread across Japan. A film of a 1958 concert featuring 1500 Suzuki-trained students garnered the attention of American teachers. From there, Suzuki’s philosophy and method spread across the world; methods and sequences for other instruments were developed as well as the integration and implementation of the Suzuki philosophy into early childhood music and preschool general education.

About the Method

• Environment of the children is very important to their education “All Japanese children speak Japanese”
• Ability Training: all children can be well-educated, not just the “talented”, with patience, repetition and love. 
• He saw the enormous capacity for children to learn 
• Talent is not inherited, it is developed. “[I]t does not exist at birth but has to be created”.
• Ability grows as it is trained...” and “[p]oor training produces poor ability”. 
• Talent is not inherent and accepted students based on their willingness not their talent.
• Developing ability “depends on action and the directing of our attention to doing things”
• Also has a deep connection to the Zen Buddhist philosophy of actively participating in philosophy and religion
• Language learning & environment => Talent Education/mother-tongue method
• All children can learn when they are in a good environment for learning
• Character first, ability second: he believed that people raised in his method would grow up to be great people, not necessarily great violinists. 
• “First character, then ability” was the motto of Suzuki’s alma mater, Nagoya Commercial School. 
• Repetition: once a skill has been learned, it should be “thoroughly mastered by repeating it again and again”. 
• “Do the thing over and over again until if feels natural, simple, and easy”. “[R]epeat and repeat an action until it becomes a part of ourselves.” 
• Develop excellence through repetition - it is not good enough to simply be able to play all of the pieces. One must be able to play with a fine interpretation and musical sense. 
• Constant repetition: “If we cannot be patient but stop a project halfway through-then later state again, drop it, start again, and so on- this kind of repetition will not bring good results”. 
• Practice: if one practices consistently and correctly, superior ability and skill will develop. 
• Koji: a student of his spent time working with his uncle in a bar and after he left the bar, he lost his good manners and respect. Instead of reprimanding him, Suzuki and other members of the household surrounded him with love and care and spoke kindly to each other. Koji eventually regained his respect for others and his manners 
• IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENT
• Encouraged his students to be surrounded by great music by going to concerts and listening to recordings.
• Principle of Talent Education: ‘ No one will be left behind; and based on love; it will foster truth, joy and beauty as part of a child’s character. If nothing else, it will at least teach children....to be warm hearted and to enjoy doing kindnesses to others.” 
• Imitation first will lead to creative development as a process to learning. If children are learning by imitation and they are imitating a great violinist, their own playing will be at a higher level because of who they are imitating.
• Suzuki wanted to inspire human beings, not just musicians but human beings to be good people to have a good heart. 

Happy Memorial Day!

Happy Memorial Day!

I hope everyone is having a lovely day off and enjoying the day relaxing!

I'm in Atlanta this weekend but looking forward to seeing everyone this week especially as we prepare for the final concert of the year!

Happy Summer!!!

Book Report: The Talent Code

If you haven't heard of this book, I highly recommend you at least read this book report. Daniel Coyle spent a considerable amount of time researching 'talent' and how it's developed to write The Talent Code. The book is fantastic, fairly easy to read and has many major implications for music learning and learning, in general. A large portion of the book discusses music learning and teaching in a number of different situations. The book even opens with a description of a student practicing and the process in which she undergoes deep learning.

That's what this book is about: deep learning and motivation. And how to achieve 'talent' or thorough skill development. How this book differs from other books or writings about learning is that it discusses learning and how to tap into 'talent' through a basic neurological mechanism we all possess. It involves scientific research and study on a specific neural insulator called myelin. Myelin is what helps us acquire skills, any skill. 

But first, what is myelin? 

Myelin works like insulation wrapped around a wire. It protects the nerve fiber and makes the firing electrical impulse stronger and faster. When we practice executing a skill, any skill, myelin responds by wrapping layers of this insulation around the nerve fiber and each layer adds more speed and skill. The thicker this myelin layer becomes, the fast and more accurate our movements and thoughts become. 

The biggest take-away: it does not discriminate. The growth of myelin enables all skills, both mental as well as physical. 

The below graphic depicts how myelin works, wrapping itself and insulating the nerve. The more myelin around the nerve results in a faster and stronger execution of skill, any skill. But what does that take? You guessed it: lots of sustained practice. 

The discovery of myelin has huge implications for 'talent' because it shows us talent is grown, not born, as the subtitle of the book declares. 

Under the right circumstances, talent is developed, which is really what Dr. Suzuki has been saying all along. Now we have scientific research to back up Suzuki's philosophy and method and a specific neural mechanism that we can study. 

The book is divided into three parts, all of which have great implications for skill development as it relates to music learning. However, the most applicable music learning is the idea of deep practice.

***

Deep practice is built on this simple paradox: struggling in certain, specific ways makes you learn the skill better and better. The experience of struggle - making mistakes, figuring them out - makes us learn deeper. The more we encounter difficulties, the more we fire impulses, the faster we learn. So, making mistakes is okay! 

Then, more of this kind of practice we do, the more we develop the neural skill circuit and the easier the skill becomes. In addition, this type of practice fosters automaticity. After we've sufficiently built up this network of intricate brain circuitry, we actually forget about it! Which first, enables the skill to feel natural and second, enables the skill to function in the background without our thinking about it.

However, it takes work, lots of hard work, to do this for a sustained amount of time. Think back to learning to hold the bow. It's a pretty intense process that can take weeks of sustained practice. But fast forward two year: holding the bow has become a skill we don't even need to think about. You pick up the bow and *bam* you have a bow hold without even thinking about it. Same with holding a pencil, driving a car, swinging a baseball bat, etc. These skills aren't easy at first but after practicing, firing those circuits and building myelin, they become easy, effortless and natural.

Things to keep in mind: 

• Struggle is not optional - it's neurologically required. In order to deeply develop a skill, we need to make mistakes, pay attention to those mistakes and teach ourselves how to not make those mistakes. 
• Practicing and continuing to practice is necessary to keep building myelin and, as a result, make things easier.
• Myelin is universal - it only cares about what you do
• Myelin only wraps, it doesn't unwrap. This is why it's really hard to break bad habits. In fact, you can't break a habit, you have to build new habits by building more myelin. 
• Skill is a MUSCLE. You build it, grow it, work it. And never stop doing this. 

Three Rules of Deep Practice

• Break it into meaningful chunks. 
• First look at the thing as a whole, for example, Perpetual Motion. Absorb the whole thing. Also known as, in Suzuki Land: LISTENING. Listen to music all the time, absorb the music, learn to imitate the great players. 
• Then divide it into small pieces, say, 4 notes at a time. This is called chunking. 
• Lastly, practice slowly, then going a little faster to learn everything about it. 
• Repeat it.
• Repetition is invaluable and irreplaceable. Repetition builds myelin. Repetition strengthens our brains. 
• Feel the burn. 
• Learning is uncomfortable because you are reaching just beyond your abilities. We didn't learn to walk by giving up after one or two tries. We struggled. Fell over. But got back up again and endured despite failing.

***

Learning is messy and it's going to be bad before it gets good. That's just the nature of it. It's hard to watch someone struggle but more often than not, we just need to learn to take the back seat and embrace it. Embrace the uncomfortable and realize that the struggle actually enhances learning and skill development. While we try to keep our students from making mistakes (and sometimes this is necessary), it's actually more beneficial to allow them to make mistakes, muddle and figure it out on their own. This also helps create independent learners. So keep in mind, when things sound rough, "[t]o get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad."

All About That Tone

In a previous post I discussed the bow, how it is in charge of our sound and why it's just as important as our left hand. This post is about our tone, or the quality or characteristics of sound we produce on the cello. Focusing on the tone quality is a very important aspect of playing the cello because it is our musical voice. It is our means of expression. Often times, we get bogged down with the current piece but what students (and parents) need to realize is that a piece isn't truly beautiful and 'done' until the tone is beautiful. And this comes from a lot of hard work on tone. Of course, first the notes, bowings, dynamics, etc., need to be in place but until the tone is also present, the piece isn't complete.

We as cellists must understand clearly what goes into producing a good tone, what exactly a good tone is, and identify what is causing the unpleasant sound. Several factors go into producing a truly great tone:

Contact point. Also known as the good sounding spot. The bow must be in between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge. The bow also must be parallel to the bridge. When it's is, it creates a letter 'T' with the string ('T' for TONE!). If it's not straight, it makes the letter 'X'. Not good!

Tricky part about this: the bow doesn't look straight when the cellist looks down at it! When it is straight, the bow looks crooked from the player's point of view. And the reverse is true - when it looks straight from the cellist's perspective, it's actually crooked. If you child doesn't believe you that it's crooked or creating an 'X' bow, use a mirror to show them that, no it's in fact crooked. Either tucking in the arm or reaching out will straighten out an 'X' bow.

Contact point is important because it impacts the quality of sound. Too close to the fingerboard yields a fuzzy, unfocused, tone. It's often pretty squeaky, too. Too close to the bridge results in a super scratchy, crunchy sound. However, the middle, well, fits just right - and we get a great, solid, deep tone.

Bow weight. I dislike the word 'pressure'. I especially dislike using it when it comes to describing the bow. Using the word pressure often results in 'pushing' or 'muscling' your way to a good sound. This isn't ideal because it creates a lot of tension in the body. So instead, I use the word 'weight'. The bow is heavy, the arm is heavy, the shoulder girdle muscles are heavy - all of this weight contributes to the weight we pour into the string, much like pouring water into a glass. Later, finesse and dexterity with the bow hand help control the weight but at first, we use the natural heaviness of the arm to pull and draw sound out of the instrument. It isn't easy but it's a lot more comfortable on the body than pressuring sound out of the instrument. Don't fight with your cello! Work with it!

Bow speed. This is relatively simple - how fast or slow is the bow moving. This has an impact on the sound. Too fast = shallow, fuzzy sound. Too slow = crunchy. More importantly, the speed of the bow has to be related to the amount of weight. Bow speed and weight go hand in hand.

Left hand.  Many times, we assume a bad sound comes from the bow. Understandable - the bow produces the sound! However, sometimes the fault is with the left hand. The fingers must be firmly placed into the string and need to hold the string down all the way. If the fingers are too light or are not holding the string down enough, the sound will be squeaky, fuzzy or inconsistent.

***

Dr. Suzuki's Tone Classes

Dr. Suzuki used different types of water animals to describe tone and to identify the most desirable tone.

Water Spider Tone. Water spiders barely get their feet wet in the water. They just barely skim the surface of the water and skips across. On the cello, this sounds slippery and is caused by too much bow speed and too little bow weight. There is very little control of the bow. Not an ideal sound!

Hippo Tone. Hippos love to soak halfway in the water, with his head above the water and his body sinking down. On the cello, the tone is very heavy at the frog but too light at the tip. While playing in one part of the bow sounds good, the other part does not, resulting in an inconsistent tone. Still not the ideal sound as we want a consistently beautiful sound, not just at the frog.

Goldfish Tone. Goldfish are small fish that enjoy swimming in shallow water. The bow is 'in' the string but the sound isn't very big. In fact, it's pretty small, like the goldfish. This is a great sound for softer dynamics, but not for all occasions. More bow and a faster bow speed is necessary.

Tuna Tone. Tuna fish are large fish that swim deep in the ocean. This is the most desirable sound. The bow is definitely in the string and the bow is moving at an appropriate speed to yield a big yet effortless sound. The Tuna Tone is never forced but is the deep, rich, chocolate-y cello sound.

Learning about, identifying and distinguishing the different tones can help students achieve the coveted tuna tone and avoid a less desirable sound. 

***

Not all of these classes of tone are particularly bad. Some pieces of music do require a water spider tone. Some music needs a heavy, rich sound at the tip that fades away, or the hippo tone, most notably when we do a decrescendo. As mentioned above, the goldfish tone is great for softer dynamic levels. But the sound we strive for every time is the tuna tone. It's the most beautiful and pleasing sound and fully embodies all the wonderful characteristics of the string instrument sound. This sound takes time to develop but it's worth the effort to achieve the highest class of tone on the instrument. From there, we can do many other things with the tone and explore other sounds but always come back to our beautiful and rich tuna tone.  

The benefits of year round practice: avoiding the summer brain drain

With summer right around the corner and summer vacations and camps being planned, something else keeps popping up...

Summer brain drain.

Summer brain drain is simply the loss or decline of skills and knowledge over the course of summer vacation. While this often refers to academic knowledge and skills (reading and math, specifically), I'd like to address it from the perspective of cello knowledge and skills as it's slightly different. 

We all need a break and summer is a great break from school and the usual routine. But summer doesn't need to be a break from learning completely. 

I always encourage my students to continue taking lessons throughout the summer and, if possible, take more lessons. Here's why:

More time. Summers are relaxed and way more casual. There's less rushing to and from school, to and from activities and this allows simply for more practice time. Also, brains aren't already fried from the school day so practices can be longer and more focused. In general, a lot more can be accomplished! I've see a great deal of progress happen in just 2 and a half months with focused, regular and dedicated practice. More lessons can happen in a week - when I was in high school, during the summers I took lessons twice a week instead of once a week. I learned more that summer than the entire previous school year. A number of students choose this as well, regardless of age or level. 

Maintenance & deepening of skills. Even if huge amounts of progress aren't made, at least maintenance, refinement and further deepening of skills can occur with regular practice and lessons. Recall back to why we review - it's the same concept. Just by continuing to practice what you already know, you further deepen and strengthen those skills. 

Retention. Similar to maintenance of skills, more retention of skills occur with a regular practice and a continuous lesson routine. It's really annoying and frustrating when 3 months ago you could play Go Tell Aunt Rhody and now you can only play the first few notes. And it's not even your current piece - it's a review piece! You know you know it but it's just not coming back! Regular practice guards against this loss of skills. It's just like lifting weights - you can't expect yourself to lift the same weight previously when you've gone 3 months without lifting anything. Same with musical skills. You can't expect to play Go Tell Aunt Rhody flawlessly when you've not even hummed it in the last 3 months. 

Motivation. This is a big one. Regular and continued practice, even just practice not lessons, fosters motivation and drive. I’ve seen this happen all too often not only with students but with myself.

When you aren't able to recall how to play a piece, you lose the drive and inspiration to practice because you've suddenly hit something uncomfortable and frustrating. This repeats a few times. Then you stop trying to practice because the whole idea of playing the cello is not fun. Decline in motivation increases the longer this avoidance behavior continues.

When it is time to return to a regular lesson schedule at the end of summer, it takes a while, usually 3 months, to build back up the lost skills and, more importantly, the motivation. Sometimes, it takes even longer because the whole process is, again, frustrating. You know these pieces but your brain and body can't recall how to do them because it's been so long. It takes a while to get back in the groove of playing, learning and practicing because motivation is low. You don't want to practice because it doesn't feel good, sound good or you can't remember and it doesn't feel good, sound good and you can't remember because you don't practice! This continues in a cyclical fashion.

Motivation is linked to retention in that students are more likely to be motivated to practice and play when they can play pieces because they've retained them and can recall them easily. It's a feedback loop. Retention (and progress) fosters motivation and motivation fosters retention (and practice).

The loss of motivation is a frustrating process especially because regaining the drive and desire to practice requires buckling down and dealing with the problem: lack of practice. This means committing to a regular practice routine. The best way I know to get back into a regular practice routine and be motivated to practice regularly is to establish that routine and stick to it no matter what. Make practice a habit and don't fall out of that habit, even during the summer. 

This is also what regular, daily practice is necessary. One, we need it to develop skills. Two, this regular practice fosters motivation and drive. But these also work in a cyclical manner. When you see how quickly you learn things with regular practice, when you see the success you're experiencing, you want to keep doing that thing and achieving that success. Conversely, it's hard to envision that success when you are only faced with frustration and disappointment. 

We experience dips in motivation like this in other aspects of life. We get busy and stop going to the gym. Then when we have time again, going to the gym is hard. It's not fun. You can't do the things you could before. It's frustrating. That feeling of weakness is discouraging and you don't want to do anything because you feel behind. But you push through and eventually you can achieve what you were reaching before your hiatus and then some more beyond that. Then your motivation rises again. 

Our brains are no different from our muscles. Learning and repetition strengthen our brains. When we don't work them, the neural connections we've developed weaken. Then we have to work even harder to build that strength back up to its original level and then keep going to achieve new levels. 

***

Summers shouldn't be any different from the school year. In my mind, it isn't any different. Our schedules are a little different. We go on more vacations or have more free time. But learning shouldn't stop and shut down with the arrival of summer. All learning, not just cello, should continue to maintain and continue strengthening our brains. 

Keep those brains strong all year long!

Reading Music, part 5 - Fluency

Recognizing the symbols and understanding their meaning in relation to playing the cello isn't all there is to reading music. The next step in reading music is gaining enough knowledge, skills, experience and flexibility to put it all together so that the skills are executed easily. This yields fluency.

Just as we learn to speak and read language fluently, we learn to read and play music fluently. This only comes from...you guessed it, lots of practice. This aspect of music reading is perhaps a little bit more nebulous, little less clear. We can clearly see and evaluate understanding of note names, rhythm and symbols. But fluency? Putting it all together and getting beautiful sounding music from the page? How much practice does it take? Who knows exactly but it's a lot of frequent and sustained practice over a long period of time.

But it also develops from properly scaffolding music reading. Trying to read music in Suzuki Book 2 even if you are at a book 2 level is simply too hard. Go back to the basics. Practice reading Suzuki Book 1 level music even if you are in Book 3. Again, to make a comparison to reading language, although children can speak fairly complicated sentences with mastery of grammar and inflection, reading those same sentences is challenging. Even when I first introduce the symbols that make up music, we start from the basics even though children have quite a lot of experience playing the cello already. Of course they know where the D string is and how to play it, but recognizing what it looks like, picking it out and playing the correct note is a different story. Same with rhythm. Then we have to put everything together - rhythm, notes, symbols - to make a song! It's a lot.

Even though students know the early pieces, they've likely never seen them before so it's a totally new experience much like reading a book for the first time that you've heard read to you many, many times. You know the story but the experience of reading the words off the page involves completely new skills and experiences. But a totally necessary experience - it helps connect a lot of dots. Music is no different.

***

The whole music-reading process switches from learning to read, to reading to learn. This all boils down to experience. Over time, students will have had plenty of varied music reading experiences, each one building on their current and substantial background knowledge. And each time a student reads a piece of music, they get better and better at reading the information, digesting the information, producing the information on the instrument accurately and adding musical inflection that makes listening to music enjoyable. It all becomes more automatic, which is our goal. But this doesn't happen at first. There is simply way too much information on a given page for students to take in all at once in the very beginning. When all the skills become easier, then more attention can be devoted to dynamics, bowings, etc.

But again, like learning to read words and read words fluently, this is a complex process. Fluency and automaticity varies from student to student. Some students 'get it' almost instantly, others struggle and slowly chip away at it and then others struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle until *ding!* it all clicks. And once music reading has started, we don't stop. We will read everything! And I will challenge your child to read and learn more and more pieces from the music rather than 'spoon feeding' every note or musical phrase. This helps build the knowledge and skills needed to be a fluent music reader.

***

Frequent practice of music reading is necessary to developing fluent music reading. It helps strengthen the brain circuitry that governs these processes and further solidify the skills of reading music and executing it on the instrument. A lot of dots of information need to be connected in order for all this knowledge to be readily accessible, usable and applicable. Students need to be able to take in a lot of information, translate it to meaningful knowledge and use that knowledge to produce sound. This means juggling, sorting through and interpreting a lot of information. For example, the page will be a note on the staff and a finger number, which students need to figure out what that pitch is and where it lives on the instrument. Also, students will have a sound concept in mind of what that pitch should sound like, much like singing a tune in your head. Then there's a physical skill attached to make the sound happen that involves placing the indicated finger down in the right spot, on the right string and hearing whether or not that is the correct pitch.

But again, there are many skills involved in developing fluent readers and if any one of those skills are flawed, the whole reading process is compromised. Reading may be a slow process but I'd rather it be a slow process and make sure we cover all the bases and fully develop knowledge than zip through it all and miss a couple of steps along the way only to discover it later when tackling a much more challenging aspect of music. What feels like slow-going is really just fastidious development, so enjoy the ride. :)