By James Hutchins
This past February, my mom joined my late dad in their next otherworldly adventure. Saying goodbye to her prompted me to share the story of my Suzuki Mom and how it shaped our lifelong relationship. Reflecting on our past experience as two sides of the Suzuki triangle—along with my current experience as all three sides—seemed to fit with the SAA’s fifty-year anniversary, especially because our Suzuki story also began around fifty years ago.
The Suzuki Triangle Side One: Student
When I was five, my mom asked me if I wanted to do ballet or violin. Violin was my five-year-old self’s choice, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.
Over the next thirteen years, she faithfully took me to weekly lessons with my fabulous teacher, Teri Einfeldt, and practiced daily with me for the first eight or nine years. Even during those last four years, she often stayed within earshot of my practice sessions. She demonstrated how effective listening can be (and in this case, make me nuts) when she’d tell me to work on my intonation or stop rushing from three rooms away—all while making dinner. Little did I know then how lucky I was, as one of four children, to gain those many hours of one-on-one time with her.
She also took me to workshops, many of which she volunteered to help plan, drove me to youth orchestra, took me to summer institutes, and eventually to college auditions.
Looking back, the best part of those years was the time I spent with her. It wasn’t always practicing going on in that room, it was parenting too, teaching me compassion, patience, lots of love, and humor.
I went on to music conservatory and had a dreadful time. I decided I was going to quit playing and find something else to do. “You need to go to graduate school,” my Suzuki Mom said, and this twenty-one-year-old kid sarcastically replied: “They would have to pay me to go back to school!”
The Suzuki Triangle Side Two: Teacher
I played in the 1990 Brevard Music Festival for what I thought was going to be my final violin experience. There I met Derry Deane, a wonderful teacher from the University of Tulsa (TU). She told me not to quit, but instead, “Come out to Tulsa, get a master’s degree, and I’ll teach you how to enjoy making a living playing with the violin.” She added that there was a fellowship available.
I asked, “What’s that? And she replied: “We’ll pay you to go to grad school.”
At that moment, I remembered what I said to my mom about having to get paid to go back to school, so out to Tulsa we went to check it out. I ended up going to TU for graduate school, meeting Shelley, who became my bride eight years later, and not only began enjoying violin again, but remembered why I loved it during those school-age years—it was the Suzuki philosophy.
I began my Suzuki training the first summer after graduate school, and eventually got my first teaching job with the outstanding Nan Freeman in Hickory, North Carolina. I lived with my parents for that first year—they had moved to Hickory when I was in college—and enjoyed the home-cooked meals and getting to know my parents as an adult. I bought my own place eventually, but even after that, I regularly went over for free dinners!
Reconnecting with my Suzuki Mom led to her picking up the violin and getting to reverse our roles by me giving her some lessons. I remember how happy I was to tell her stories about those early teaching experiences—meeting Dr. and Mrs. Suzuki at their home in Japan and participating in classes at the Kaikan in Matsumoto—just a few of the beautiful highlights from those first years.
The Suzuki Triangle Side Three: Parent
I eventually moved to the Washington, D.C., area to get married, start my own studio, and years later start our family. I’ve lived here and taught—and been a Suzuki parent to my now college-age son—for about thirty years.
We adopted our fabulous son from South Korea in 2004. Days after picking him up, we traveled with our new six-month-old to Singapore and Malaysia so I could teach a Suzuki workshop. At the final concert, a kid in front of me snapped his E string and I gave him my extra. Several weeks later, my family and I, along with my mom and dad, flew out to Tulsa where we baptized our son in my bride’s grandmother’s church. I was about to play a piece for the service when my own E string broke.
My Suzuki Mom and I had a deal growing up that when I made a mistake, if I smiled, we never had to talk about it because she knew I knew what I did and would correct it next time. My mistake that day was not having an extra string (which she regularly reminded me to carry around) because I never replaced my backup, which was on a child’s violin in Singapore!
I proceeded to play Gavotte in G minor, because I could swing that without an E string and when I looked out at my mom, she had the biggest smile on her face. We never discussed it, but I still tell all my students and their parents the “smile” rule.
A few years later, my mom took my toddler son to classes at the Virginia Suzuki Institute where I was—and still am—teaching. I could hear him screaming all the way across campus when she took him, but a few minutes later, he’d be fine, and at the end of the week, she proudly claimed he finished the Twinkles on her watch. I happily let her have that one!
About seven years later, my mom took her ride on an airplane to see her grandson play at the SAA Conference in a student orchestra and a giant group class with kids from all over the Americas. Not long after, her memory started to fade and once my dad passed away in 2015, it really took a nosedive.
The Suzuki Triangle Side One, Second Movement: Mom and Me
One day, my bride, son, and I took my mom to lunch. When we got back, she immediately asked when we were going to lunch. To distract her, my son played for her. When he finished, she looked at me and said: “Jamie, that’s the first movement of the Handel F major Sonata in Book Six, and I remember when you played that in the basement of the Corning United Methodist Church and Carol Pierpont was your pianist.” I wouldn’t have been able to pull that pianist’s name if my life depended on it. Definitely shows the power of music.

When I visited my Suzuki Mom in various memory care homes over the following years, I got to see the wonderful sparkle in her eye that we had shared since I was five years old. I saw the look most often when my son and/or I would play our violins for her, she would dance in her chair and sometimes name the pieces, and always said “Bravo!” when we finished. Even during the pandemic, we got to play for her through the glass doors of her final home and see that beautiful smile and look of recognition the music brought to her face.
On the day she passed, she was surrounded by her four children. At the very end, she would stop breathing for a few seconds and then start again. This went on for quite some time, so I asked my bride to bring in my violin. I played her favorite song, Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro, which she used to tell me sounded to her like the opening of Heaven’s gates. When I finished, she took her last breaths in this world.
In the fifty-two years I’ve been playing since that five-year-old kid chose violin over ballet, I’m hard pressed to find a day gone by where I haven’t thought of my Suzuki Mom. A big part of those wonderful memories are the ways she filled me with the philosophy that informs my teaching, and showed me how to be a Suzuki Dad to my son, which has given me years of joy.
To all of you Suzuki parents, students, and teachers out there, I hope for the years to come, you all feel the same joy my mom and I shared, and my son and I continue to share. Because: “Where love is deep, much can be accomplished.”