My daughter started taking piano lesson right around her fourth birthday, which is much younger than anyone would have considered reasonable when I was a kid. Today, though, it is not uncommon, and this change is largely due to one man: Shin’ichi Suzuki, a Japanese who, rather affectingly, according to Wikipedia, “desired to bring some beauty to the lives of children in his country after the devastation of World War II.” Suzuki arrived at the notion that he could teach four-year-olds to play the violin by reasoning that if they are smart enough to learn language, they are smart enough to learn music. He was right, and he proved it when he stunned the world by producing a corps of pre-school violin virtuosos.
Today, if you take a young child for music training almost anywhere in the world, she will probably be trained through some version of the Suzuki Method. The central tenet of this approach is that kids learn to play by ear. In traditional music lessons, kids start by learning the formal machinery of musical notation along with “music theory–as embodied in learning scales and so on—which is a tedious process that seems far removed from what is attractive about music in the first place. This approach puts an enormous obstacle in front of the learner right at the beginning of her education. It’s no wonder that younger children are generally unable to learn this way—even many older kids who signed up for traditional lessons never got past the theory.
In the Suzuki approach, students learn to play songs that they can enjoy from the start, rather than waiting until they have mastered the written notation. They learn to compare what they play to the way the song sounds on a recording, or their memory of it. In other words, they are put in a position to observe the outcomes of their actions directly, and to learn from this.
There has been a little bit of backlash against the Suzuki approach due to the claim that kids who learn this way may struggle to learn musical notation later on, and so many kids, my daughter included, are now taught through a “modified” Suzuki method in which notion is introduced early even as the student is learning to play songs by ear. This approach starts learners out with an extremely simplified notation that they use as a mnemonic device while playing, and gradually adds complexity to the notation over time. The progression goes something like this:
1. Initially, the student plays with her hand in a fixed position on the piano while looking at a series of numbers telling her which fingers to use in what sequence (1 to 5 corresponding to the numbers on each hand from thumb to pinkie).
2. The numbers are then juxtaposed with whole-note symbols that move up and down on the page vertically to indicate whether the notes in the song are going up or down.
3. Rests, half notes and whole notes are introduced in turn, as the students learn pieces that have different rhythms.
4. The notes begin to appear on a traditional staff, but still with the familiar finger numbers next to them.
5. Numbers are only given for notes at the start of phrases.
6. The numbers go away.
There are two things about this approach that I think are clever. The first is that the notation is made useful. Young students need help remembering the pieces they are meant to play, and the notation provides this. As a result, the student sees the notation as an aid, rather than as something difficult that must be learned. Traditional music lessons, like a lot of old-fashioned education, push students to learn a lot of things in advance of being able to put them to use, and the lesson here is that it is better to wait until the utility is manifest.
The second, related point, which is somewhat more subtle, is that nothing is introduced in the notation that the student has not first learned by ear. For example, the student learns to hear and play half notes before they turn up in the notation, so that when the new notation is introduced, it relates to something they already understand. This seems to make all the difference in comprehension and 