By Valerie Hewson - Saint John's, Newfoundland

The Suzuki Talent Education Program (STEP) of Newfoundland and Labrador has felt like a construction site over the past year, as we restructured our program to build a more stream-lined experience for families, teachers, and staff. To help lead our restructuring, we hired a consultant to get some outside perspective and expertise.

For the life of our program, we had struggled with not owning our own facility and the scheduling challenges that came along with holding classes at a site with other competing bookings and events.  Every year, our 18 group classes from September to June were held on whichever Saturdays the facility could accommodate. While this irregular schedule was less than ideal, we had accepted it as our fate. 

With the help of our consultant, however, we re-organized the 2019-2020 season into three, 11-week trimesters — fall, winter, and spring — each with nine Saturday morning classes in a three-on, one-off pattern. In order to implement this new, regular schedule, we found an alternative location for those weeks that couldn’t be accommodated at our regular venue. While we were initially nervous about families having to relocate for these few classes, the benefits of having consistent group classes have far outweighed the inconvenience accommodating a second location.

The new spring trimester will allow the program to offer an additional trimester of our Music with your Baby classes, an Introduction to Viola class, and allow the STEP Fiddlers, our performing fiddle group, to meet to prepare for summer performances. 
Along with this new trimester structure, we’ve also reorganized our staff structure, offered spring registration, and added more social events for families. Most importantly, we’ve revived our Institute to offer flute and piano teacher training in order to financially support the Institute (due to dwindling numbers) and help expand the program generally.

Musicianship Changes 

About 10 years ago, we introduced a Musicianship curriculum to supplement the foundations of music theory and sight-reading. This curriculum is rooted in the Suzuki philosophy, having parents participate in activities alongside their children. 

Originally, Musicianship classes started at age 6, but this year, we began a Dalcroze-inspired Music and Movement class for ages 3-6. From there, students will progress through levels following the order of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, and Green. After graduating Green, students are eligible to join our Reading Orchestra, which is the ultimate goal of our curriculum. Ideally, after completing the Musicianship program, our students will be ready to join our small orchestral performing group, the Young Virtuosi (Book 6 violin, Book 5 cello/viola).

We have revamped the curriculum by adding a “purpose” to each level, creating a general structure of each class, and ultimately breaking down the curriculum into five concepts: 

Ensemble = playing together
Ear Training = learning to identify by ear
Pitch/Rhythm = identifying pitch and rhythm
Writing music = writing/notation
Practical Application = applying learned concepts to the instrument 
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While we’ve taken off our hard hats — for now — the program is already reaping the benefits our constructive changes, and I look forward to more improvements and progress with our fabulous STEP team!
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By Jennifer Johnson —St. John’s, Newfoundland
author of What Every Violinist Needs to Know About the Body and Teaching Body Mapping to Children

Musicians Move!
There is a story about Jascha Heifetz being greeted backstage by an admiring fan after a performance. She gushed to him “Your violin makes such a beautiful sound!” Still holding his violin, Heifetz held it up to his ear and said “Funny, I don’t hear anything!” His point, of course, was that regardless of how wonderful a violin is, no sound will emerge from it at all until the player sets the strings vibrating, and that it’s ultimately the skilled movements of the player that make it sound beautiful or not. 

As a movement specialist for musicians, I love this story. As obvious as it may seem, some musicians miss the point that the skilled movements we perform in order to create sound is of the same category as that of dancers or other athletes. The vibrations that we call music can only be created through us moving our bodies. Furthermore, the quality of our movement will determine the quality of our sound. 

Body Mapping
My research found that recent studies showed that as many as 75-90% of all professional musicians are regularly playing with some kind of pain, injury, or discomfort. To address this high rate of injury, Alexander Technique (AT) teacher Barbara Conable, founded and developed a method of teaching healthy movement through developing awareness of accurate anatomical information. For the last 30 years, professional musicians studying Body Mapping have recovered from injury by learning to move according to the true anatomical design of their bodies.

Our world needs great beauty and artistry now, perhaps more than ever; we can’t afford to keep losing musicians to injury, especially when those injuries are preventable through putting good information into action! 

Suzuki Method and Body Mapping
Because Suzuki teachers start children at such young ages, we have the unique opportunity to protect a young child’s natural-born movement patterns and prevent injury from ever happening!
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Suzuki was one of the world’s greatest pioneers in early childhood education; he helped to unlock human learning potential. Until his theories of Talent Education were shown to be universally successful, it was widely believed that some people were born talented and some were not. In scientific terms, Suzuki found a way to train the auditory cortex from a very early age, to prevent his young musicians from ever feeling limited in their talent. Teaching Body Mapping in the Suzuki studio is the next logical step in removing limitations from young musicians. Body Mapping provides a systematic way to train the motor cortex from a very early age so that young musicians never feel physically limited in their talent. By giving our students a firm understanding of how the body is anatomically designed to move, we can improve our students’ motor capabilities and prevent limitations and injury from developing.