Scholarship Award Report by ARS member Miyo Aoki, Bloomington IN
 

Thanks to a scholarship from the ARS, I was able to take Suzuki Recorder Unit 4 training in June and continue my progress toward Suzuki certification.  With only three teacher trainees this time, we had many opportunities to try out teaching techniques on each other and engage in in-depth discussions. The Suzuki repertoire at this level is particularly interesting to me because it includes pieces that are part of the repertoire any professional-track recorder player studies, and it has been enlightening to view the study of these pieces through a Suzuki lens.  An example of this is a practice technique I picked up in a Suzuki training that I have passed on to my own students and now use myself. When confronted with a passage that is tricky for fingers or is in an unfamiliar key, one can play a simple melody that one already knows by heart using the notes in question to build familiarity with the necessary finger patterns. A student of mine used this technique recently when they were working on a very high section of a piece and were getting their fingers tangled up around the alto’s high F and G. Instead of drilling the section over and over, they worked on playing Frere Jacques and Mary had a little lamb in that high register, and when they came back to the passage, it was suddenly significantly easier for them. By practicing in this way, they not only achieved their short-term goal of accurately playing a specific piece, they also built up their intuitive understanding of the geography of the recorder, which will help them more adeptly tackle similar passages they might encounter in other pieces.
 
In addition to gaining useful teaching skills through these Suzuki trainings, I have also built relationships with other recorder teachers and made connections with teachers I wouldn’t have met through the early music circles I normally move in. One of the other teacher trainees attending this recent course is someone I met last year – a music teacher in Chicago who is also active as an Orff teacher trainer and plays recorder beautifully. After meeting her in a Suzuki training last year, she began taking occasional online lessons with me, and we have been discussing ideas for collaborating on workshops for kids in Chicago and Bloomington. It has been so wonderful to join forces with other teachers who have similar teaching philosophies, are enthusiastic about teaching children, and who appreciate the recorder as a beautiful, expressive instrument!
 
These Suzuki trainings also continue to help me shape a teaching repertoire and method book I am working on, which will be accompanied by recordings and published by Seattle Historical Arts for Kids, and have connected me with teachers who are willing to try out my materials and give me feedback – an invaluable part of the process of creating an effective method book.
 
Thank you, ARS, for the amazing support you have given to me and the rest of the recorder community. In every Suzuki training course I have taken, the ARS website is referenced multiple times by multiple people (I among them) as a great resource for recorder players at every level!


A screenshot of the class