Today, we are looking at just one environment created by one teacher, and finding themes that can be applied to good teaching everywhere such as generosity, powerful observation, and warmth.

Recently I was introduced to a series of recordings—interviews made a number of years ago with people who studied with Shinichi Suzuki in Japan in decades past. I feel like I’ve had a little trip to Asia in the 1970’s.

In episode 1, we heard similar stories with Winifred Crock about her time studying in Matsumoto. This batch of interviews are stories from people who had been playing and teaching for years…maybe decades, but went to meet and study directly with Dr. Suzuki. In their voices, I hear their curiosity and admiration as they remember their experiences. Also, I hear the inspiration, wisdom, and gratitude that they’ve kept with them since they left.

So…. this episode is a little different than previous ones. It’s just simple storytelling, straight from the people who were there… Lightly edited for clarity, without narration. Occasionally in the future, we will release more of these simple interviews, more Matsumoto Memoirs. Next episode we will return to our regular format with stories, commentary, and music.

Welcome to this Matsumoto Memoir from Helen Higa.

Music

Sun Up

Transcript

This is Building Noble Hearts, a production of the Suzuki Association of the Americas. I’m your host Margaret Watts Romney.

Today, we are looking at just one environment created by one teacher, and finding themes that can be applied to good teaching everywhere such as generosity, powerful observation, and warmth.

Recently I was introduced to a series of recordings—interviews made a number of years ago with people who studied with Shinichi Suzuki in Japan in decades past. I feel like I’ve had a little trip to Asia in the 1970’s.

In episode 1, we heard similar stories with Winifred Crock about her time studying in Matsumoto. This batch of interviews are stories from people who had been playing and teaching for years…maybe decades, but went to meet and study directly with Dr. Suzuki. In their voices I hear their curiosity and admiration as they remember their experiences. Also, I hear the inspiration, wisdom, and gratitude that they’ve kept with them since they left.

So…. this episode is a little different than previous ones. It’s just simple storytelling, straight from the people who were there… Lightly edited for clarity, without narration. Occasionally in the future we will release more of these simple interviews, more Matsumoto Memoirs. Next episode we will return to our regular format with stories, commentary, and music.

Welcome to this Matsumoto Memoir from Helen Higa.

Helen Higa.

When the Suzuki tour group came through Hawaii and I went to hear the concert of the ten children who were touring and my parents were both music teachers, so and at some point they went to visit Japan and they visited his school. So they noticed that there were American teacher trainees there as well as the Japanese.

I was all set to go to college and when that didn’t come through because the violin teacher that I wanted to study with got sick and the conductor, he went to another school. My parents remember that there was this possibility to go study with Dr. Suzuki at his school, so I right after graduating from high school instead of going to college I went to study with him in Matsumoto.

I had never played a Suzuki piece in my life. I had – it was such, talk about dumb luck is what I say! I just, you know here I was, never had a Suzuki lesson in my life and just graduating from high school in Hawaii and then I started studying with the man himself. It was just unreal!

I like to tell the story about when I first arrived at the train station, I was met by two teacher trainees and they took me right away to school and I was sitting there, dressed pretty weirdly because being from Hawaii I had no idea about winters, and so they said, when we got to school Dr. Suzuki wanted to meet me and to go right upstairs to his office.

So I was seated across from him and being served coffee and being treated like an honored guest – so I thought, you know I think there’s a big mistake here, and they – I’m not who they thought I was!

I had heard the tour group and I just marveled at how—their sound and their bowing and they’re so free and musical. So I decided before things got out of hand I would talk to them and tell them the truth. I said, Dr. Suzuki you know, I’m a terrible violinist and I’ve heard five year olds play better than me, so you probably don’t want to waste your time with me if you’re too busy, I’ll understand, I’ll study with whoever you recommend.

And he just smiled and nodded and kept smoking and I thought, oh no, he doesn’t understand English, but of course he did so I was so lucky and was able to study with him for about two and a half years in Matsumoto.

Growing up in Hawaii, we didn’t have Suzuki Method. Although my parents were teachers so I must say that that helped me a lot because it was a Suzuki environment in that we had music going all the time and even though I started very late about nine years old in the public school, my father was a music teacher so they helped me get started and I, we listened to music a lot at home.

In kindergarten I took one of those album sets of Mozart Symphonies for show and tell, because I thought those were great. And so it was not Suzuki Method but in a way it was Suzuki Method that I grew up in.

But none of my teachers had ever spoken to me about tone – none. Yes, it was get the right notes in the right time, in the right pitch and I had played musically, I mean I tried to play musically, but I never listened to recordings of what I was expected to play and I never reviewed and I never – it was like learn a piece, memorize it, play it on a recital, be nervous like crazy because it was my newest piece and then go to the next piece. So I never built up anything and if my uncle asked me, can you play something and I was in between pieces, I just couldn’t play anything. So it was just like that. So that’s why I would say I was not very good!

The first class I remember was Monday class where we went through the repertoire piece by piece, so everyone else in the class grew up in the Method so we were doing Book Five, Country Dance, and this was the first time I had ever heard or tried to study the piece. And I thought I had it down by the time I was going to play it, but when I got up on stage I was just so nervous with – I just froze and I just dit, dit, dit, dit, it just all – my bow started shaking.

But weekly experiences of getting up on stage and playing for others and then memorizing and reviewing, by the end of two and a half years there I could learn a Mozart – movement of a Mozart and memorize it in a week, you know concerto. It just grew with you as you studied more.

There weren’t that many of us, there were only maybe twenty, and maybe mostly Japanese and some Americans and there were many funny experiences. Like the first national concert I went to, there was a huge picture made of it with all the three thousand children. So I showed my mother this picture and I said, Mom, can you find me in this picture? And she looked and said, oh yea that’s you right there. And I said how did you ever figure that out? And she said, well Helen you’re the only one – your arms are crossed, your legs are crossed, you’re leaning on the wall, like this and no self-respecting Japanese would ever stand like that! And so I – as those things you are unconscious about it in your own culture and then you become very aware when you’re in another culture.

So, Dr. Suzuki – I remember one of the first things he told me was Helen, you play very well, but you have Hawaii tone, because Hawaii is this little, tiny island in the Pacific and your tone is really tiny! And so, he’s very funny and very warm and never – he treated everyone with respect, you know like the way he treated me when I first arrived at Matsumoto, a high school student. I mean he was just there and we were just talking and I mean – so you never, I never became close to him, but I certainly saw him everyday, we had school everyday, we had not classes maybe, but we observed and our lessons were not assigned times, we had morning, Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon and we’d show up at nine and just watch each other’s lessons and we might have a five minute lesson, or we might have a twenty minute lesson, or we might have an hour lesson, and it just depended on what he wanted to do.

Meanwhile he observed all morning and if we didn’t get our lesson in the morning, we’d break for lunch and come back in the afternoon and then if we didn’t finish in that afternoon, people would come back on Wednesday. So it was just that kind of life, it was just very natural and daily and it was no set curriculum, I’d say – and so no set graduation time either.

Many teachers asked, when is a teacher trainee able to graduate from your course? And he would joke and would say when they’d bring an ashtray before I’d have to ask for one! Did you hear that? He’d laugh and he’d joke, but that’s pretty much the way it was, there was no curriculum.

His legacy and it’s not about what, doing what Suzuki said, or holding the bow a certain way, or low elbow, or high elbow. His legacy was for us to be aware and respectful of others and to be sensitive to each other and to continue to grow in consciousness so that we would become better people. So that was the emphasis that we had to kind of always be thinking about others and it was a very nice atmosphere then, because no student was kind of competing against another student, we were all like together and we were all helping each other and there was a very nice feeling of family between the Kenkusai, and we, we helped each other.

Like, the first night he told the person who’s house I was staying in, take Helen and show her this exercise and so I tried to the exercise he showed me to cure my Hawaiian tone!

You know, I have to bring up at this point I think that the thing that helped me a lot, looking back was to study the Alexander technique. Dr. Suzuki says… so, I feel like his method was observe and reflect and then act. very much to be aware and fully present in the moment and to try and just address the students needs.

My Alexander teacher told me, Helen, never make demands on students that they cannot satisfy, otherwise you will be frustrated and they’ll be frustrated. Dr. Suzuki says teaching is like throwing a ball to a child, you wouldn’t throw your fastest ball, you throw the idea in such a way that they can catch it. And you’d throw it, you’re going to throw it so that they’re successful in catching it. And this is exactly what it means to just try to stay in the moment and address what that child or student needs right then and to be observant and to have some clarity of vision as to what is this child actually doing, what is this student doing? And this is where he was a genius, he could see exactly what you were doing, he could see how you were doing was impacting the sound and he was the first one to make that link for me between my actions and how that affected the sound.

And so we worked that way, it was just very in the moment and it was just very him watching and observing and then trying something out and it would work or it wouldn’t. I think that’s his legacy, that if we stay constantly in the moment and we constantly are observing and reflecting and thinking, we’re going to come up with new ways and fresh ideas and this is what he wants. He doesn’t want it to – I never felt like he was set in his ways, it was always changing and so it doesn’t matter to me whether, at some point when I was there his elbow was not that low and then later on after he broke his collar bone it became quite low, so his technique changed.

I always tell people, like it’s not what a person says so much, sometimes, I think not so much what a teacher says, but how they say it, how they get their ideas across. That’s what we – if you watch, how does that teacher get his ideas across? And how successful is that teacher in getting ideas across, and that’s what you want to pay attention to, not so much what Dr. Suzuki said, because he kept changing and you know I saw it in my lifetime, how he changed.

Well he just said, if a person wants to become a finer artist, you have to become a finer person. So I think I’ve tried to keep looking and not be satisfied with common sense, with the status quo and to just keep on searching and thinking and looking. In my own teaching and playing that’s what I’m doing a lot and I guess learning about the Alexander Technique helped me to get rid of some of my physical habits that were getting in the way of my, my tone production, so I think I’m much more successful at producing the sound that Suzuki wanted which is this like a bell – ringing bell and this idea of tonalization to try to a play with the most beautiful tone that you can and that that tone will touch other people’s hearts. And that’s what I try to do with my students too.

Everyone of us are sharing in this legacy. It’s not just me or him, all of us are sharing this legacy and that legacy I think is this idea of being conscious and aware and to constantly try to learn and keep learning.

Thank you to Helen Higa for permission to use her interview.

Our theme music, “Sun Up” is composed by Steven Katz and Derek Snyder and performed by the Snyder cello army.

Thank you to Methusaleh Podcast Productions for production support

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