Clear Gratitude

By James Goldsworthy

My first time seeing Shinichi Suzuki in person was on October 17, 1983, in an upstairs room at the Saino Kyoiku Kaikan in Matsumoto. He looked out at all of us with a glint in his eyes and said: “Today I thirteen . . . eight . . . five.” The concise and verb-lacking English, I now realize, was a byproduct of Japanese insta-translation: “Kyō watashi wa jūsan . . . hachi . . . go.”

His mischievous child-like look was one of joy, greeting us with playfully concise wording. I knew at that moment that my journey from New Jersey to Nagano-ken was instantaneously fulfilled. With glee, he held aloft a birthday card that had arrived in the mail with the sole address of: “ Dr. Suzuki, Japan,” from a young child on the other side of the world.

I was immediately thrown back in time and space, four and a half years earlier, to my undergraduate art history class in Dallas, Texas with Alessandra Comini, one of the greatest professors of my entire college life. She had put up a slide of a clown that appeared to be the work of a child and asked the auditorium full of students who the artist might be. With her own glint in the eye, after a bit of time of silence, she said: “Picasso.” She went on to explain: “There is a difference between the child-like and childish perspective; someone with the eye of the child as opposed to an attempt to see or act like a child.” In this thunderbolt moment for me, I realized that I had a greater understanding and appreciation of the clear sparkling eye of someone with clarity of wisdom and spirit (no matter the age). You can find the drawing by Googling “Picasso L’homme au beret.”

Now, forty-plus years from that “Land of the Rising Sun” birthday, my reflections on where and who I am as a teacher are more indebted to Dr. Suzuki and his teaching than I have ever realized. Clarity, from the standpoint of lucidity, focus, light, and directness, has been a force at work in and across the evolution of my teaching throughout these twoscore years. It must be that he has been a powerful inspiration in the journey. In this article of autobiographical reflection, as a tribute to my six-month residency in Matsumoto and to Dr. Suzuki, I will present aspects of my own teaching that I recognize as part of a passionate pursuit to be more clear in lesson delivery and in my own and my students’ foundational understanding of life and music at the piano.

Feeling and Music

“What do you feel?” is most likely the question I ask my students more often than any other one. It is usually my first response to anything played in a lesson. Although one might think this relates to an emotional experience, it is my way of having a student be aware of physical feelings they experienced in their playing. This could very well have its roots in one of Dr. Suzuki’s favorite comments to students, “No think!” It is impossible to number the countless times I heard him say this, accompanied by an index finger pointed vertically aloft with a Camel cigarette in the opposite hand sourcing streams of smoke spirals. Thoughts, or “thinking,” emanate(s) from critical self-evaluation, action directives, self-doubt, or concerns in performance, and they clearly create internal neural traffic that can hinder a purity of physicality in one’s actions. 

Whenever that index finger would go up, one knew that some sort of wisdom would ring forth from him. Most times, it was those two words that arose: “No think!” There was so much in them that the feeling in the room seemed to change—he clearly was encouraging, if not cajoling students to get out of their heads and into their playing. I realize that my current repetitive adaptation or honorific manifestation of this teaching technique is to verbally prod my students into “feeling” (physical feeling as opposed to some sort of emotional one). Anytime one of my students begins a response to me with “I think,” “I believe,” “I wanted,” or “I’m trying,” I reply with: “Don’t think; feel,” or any other substitution of “feel,” “felt,” or “feeling” to the verbs of their own response.

While I’m not quite sure how exactly another one of my comments to students ties directly back to Dr. Suzuki, there is no question that it is about clarification and focus. Every one of my students now gets a hierarchical list of what is most important in music making and/or life:

1. Time flow
2. Meter
3. Rhythm
4. Pitches (melody and harmony [pitch relationships], and intonation [for a pianist, how they feel a G-sharp vs. an A-flat])

If nothing else, certainly the #1 aspect of time flow is an unyielding collective experience of Dr. Suzuki having an entire ensemble of beginners to advanced students playing works together as one from Book One, including, of course, the Twinkles. While Jean Piaget and/or Maria Montessori would applaud the multi-layered distinctive age levels at simultaneous interactive play, there can be no doubt that “tyranny of the bar line” or pausing in flow to get a correct pitch or the ideal intonation is engulfed by a tidal wave of time flow in action. 

One of my more recent discoveries in the hierarchy has been to recognize how often young musicians are unaware of the meter of whatever they are playing. While they are maintaining time flow and are rhythmically accurate, there is no real feeling of the meter. It seems that there is an assumption, or even “thinking,” that correct rhythm yields meter, as opposed to meter embodying the rhythm(s). This certainly is directly connected to “feeling” and is the inspiration for having students walk the meter of any piece they study, followed by walking the rhythms in the meter of the piece.

Just yesterday, having assigned a student a specific practice step in his previous lesson to develop a stronger and clearer feeling for the meter of his right hand against a septuplet figurative droning bass pattern in his left hand, I was shocked to hear how, as a byproduct of his work, he now had a lovely feeling for phrases in that same right-hand part. While his rhythm had always been accurate, he was now more fully connected to the meter in a way that it governed the rhythms. The lesson in all this for me was that he already had strong time flow, but he needed more sense of meter. With the greater sense of meter, lo, and behold, he got that, but also got a richer sense of phrase (pitch relationships coalescing into music sentences). The clarity of focus on one element in the clarified hierarchy of music-making considerations yielded a further unexpected point of focus!

By clarifying a hierarchy of important concepts, I feel one becomes much more fully connected and self-empowered. This most likely is a teaching technique of encouraging, if not facilitating “self-discovery” or “self-monitoring” for one’s students, with perhaps a direct link to “No think!” Our students become much more independently “in the moment” as opposed to seeking to fulfill a directive from someone else (namely, us). They definitely become much stronger independent teachers-learners in their practice sessions. Thank you, Dr. Suzuki.

One last teaching/learning clarification grows out of a quote I once heard attributed to the great pianist and teacher Béla Böszörményi-Nagy: “All great music must sing or dance.” Inspired by this thought, I believe all great music must sing and dance. From this, every first lesson with every student of mine includes moving around the room (physically feeling time flow, meter, and rhythm) and solfège singing. Again, through his requirement of ensemble playing, magnetizing collective feeling of time flow, meter, and rhythm, amid omnipresent encouragement of tonalization, I feel Dr. Suzuki’s teaching is in accord with the motion of pitch (vibration in space) within the abstract notion of motion in time. There is no question that there is a huge amount of vibrations (motion) in the air with a stage full of musicians playing in unison. No wonder this is such a moving experience for the players and audience members. A clear point of focus for myself and for my students is: “Music is motion” (as is life). In honor of all my students and teachers, and with this writing, especially Dr. Suzuki, I feel and am moved by an overwhelming focus of gratitude.

James Goldsworthy, Westminster Choir College of Rider University Professor of Piano, has premiered and recorded with Judith Bettina songs by Milton Babbitt, Mel Powell, Chester Biscardi, Christopher Berg, Tobias Picker and David Rakowski. His work reflects gifts of the teaching of Dorothe Lanning, John Price, Louise Bianchi, Lloyd Pfautsch, Louise Mueller, Larry Palmer, Barbara Marquart, Alessandra Comini, Shinichi Suzuki, Adolph Baller, Erik Werba, Margaret Fabrizio, Fenner Douglass, Susan Bindig, Wendy Hilton, Leonard Ratner, Lilo Kantorowicz-Glick.