ESSAY: A JOYFUL NOISE

	July 11, 2000
	Essayist Jim Fisher of the Kansas City Star considers the lessons of a violin lesson.

JIM FISHER: Remember Jack Benny playing "Love in Bloom" on the radio? Fingernails on a chalk board. For relief, try the old Carnegie Library here in Ottawa, Kansas. Listen: Vivaldi, Mozart, and Dvorak-- stringed music that's clean, pure, joyful. No simplistic resonances, no squeals nor squeaks, just kids, four-year-olds to teenagers-- kids who kids play violins, violas, and cellos with an expertise that astounds. Look at the faces and it's easy to understand why the music soars. What's here are disciples of the Suzuki method of instruction, created by a Japanese named Shinichi Suzuki. He figured if a child could vocalize two or three thousand words by age three, plus develop the manual dexterity to master chopsticks, surely he or she could play a stringed instrument by imitating music they heard over and over. He was right. In 34 countries, 300,000 kids now learn using the Suzuki method. Here in Ottawa, the method is so big that during three weeks in June-- wheat harvest and hay- hauling time for many here-- Suzuki's legacy has turned this usually bucolic community into a focal point of lessons, recitals, classes on music theory, composing, and performances by nationally known guest artists. Ottawa's transmutation into a place where the classics -- Bach, Tabor, and John Williams -- waft over downtown can largely be laid at the feet of this energetic, 57- year-old woman named Alice Joy Lewis. She evokes enthusiasm from the children and devotion from their parents. ALICE JOY LEWIS: Wild applause. (Applause) JIM FISHER: Want to see a teacher? Just watch. ALICE JOY LEWIS: More, more, more. Yeah -- JIM FISHER: But look past Lewis and her students. What do you see? Parents. When Suzuki, dead two years ago at age 99, laid out his methods, parental involvement was a seminal building block. The kids practice, the parents encourage; the kids play, the parents applaud; the kids perform, and the parents, no matter what it takes, are there. A little thing, but in this time in which media has somehow morphed children into fearsome beings on the nightly news or morning front pages, ones who drive by with guns blazing, who as six-year-olds shoot other six-year-olds, and who will be remembered for massacring part of a Colorado school just a year ago, isn't that little thing most of what it takes? Parents. Kids. Look past the instruments. Shut out the music for an instant. Look at the eyes of parents and children. The answer's there. It's been there all along. SPOKESPERSON: Good job. JIM FISHER: I'm Jim Fisher.

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