My spirit has no age. I live thanks to my deep passion for life and belief that it will never stop".

Shinichi Suzuki was born in 1898 in Nagoya, Japan. His father owned a factory which manufactured violins. Since he was a little boy he observed the process of producing a violin but he had never heard a sound of it, until he was seventeenth years old he chanced to hear a beauty of the instrument. It was a recording of Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, as played by a famous violinist Mischa Elman that gripped him to begun to teach the instrument himself.

He would listen many recordings and try to imitate what he heard. Eventually, he started to study the instrument with the violin teacher for few years in Tokyo. At the age of 22, Suzuki moved to Germany where he continued his studies privately under a famous teacher named Karl Klinger. Finally, he moved back to Japan, where he begun to teach violin and play string quartet concerts with his brothers.

Soon after he made a discovery which he was intrigued by. He realized that all children could learn to play a musical instrument through similar way as they learn its mother tongue.

This would mean learning music from very young age and focusing on factors which he noticed in native language acquisition, such as learning material by hearing, imitating examples, repeating and making improvement by small steps. Suzuki believed that each child has great musical skills which if developed and encouraged to improve through proper and good practise can lead to high level of musical performance.

In an environment where a child is exposed to music, music becomes internal part of a child's process of learning as it is similar to the process of learning mother tongue, where child is exposed to language.

During this period, when it was common to believe that only children who are talented are able to learn to play an instrument. Most people who happened to see young Suzuki's violin students concerting technically very good, couldn’t help to wonder if those children are real geniuses.

It takes some period of time to understand Suzuki message which says that each child has ability to learn to play a musical instrument if properly taught.

For many years Shinichi Suzuki continued working on his method. He searched for the right music compositions which would help his very young students to learn violin. Later on, he started composing. He wrote e.g. Twinkle Variations, Allegro and Etude. He also made it clear that children who listen and play music have chance not only to become good musicians but also great human beings with noble hearts. Shinichi Suzuki had strong belief in the“noble hearts”, he believed they could bring a peaceful World and its understanding.

Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of Mother Tongue Method, died 26 January in 1998 in his 99th year. He is remembered as a man who was always full of beans, had deep happiness and loved all human beings and the world.