Essential Reading for Parents of Music Students

Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education

This is such a wonderful book that details the life of Shinichi Suzuki, the man behind the Suzuki method of music education.  It is more than just a nuts and bolts, but shows how his epiphany on early childhood education came about and why music should be essential to every child’s education regardless of their future careers.  Highly recommended.

Talent is not inherited.  The first month in a nightingale’s life determines its fate…I had always thought that a nightingale’s incomparable song was instinctive or inherited.  But it is not so.  Nightingales to be used as pets are taken as fledglings from nest of wild birds in the spring.  As soon as they lose their fear and accept food, a “master bird” is borrowed that daily sings its lovely song, and the infant bird listens for a period of a about a month.  In this way the little wild bird is trained by the master bird…It is not a matter of being born a good singer or a bad singer…the life force has a wonderful power to adapt to environment.  If it has a good teacher, the infant bird will, through physiological transformation, learn from experience to produce tones as beautiful as those of it’s teacher.  But if a bird is brought to such a teacher after being raised by wild nightingales, there is always failure…for the sake of our little ones, therefore, I stress as much as I can the need to provide the best influences in rearing children. – Shinichi Suzuki from Nurtured By Love.