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After thirty years of teaching in Winnipeg, and forty years of teaching in total, one local music teacher is saying farewell to the studio.
Earlier this month, Laurel Howard, a string instructor and Suzuki music teacher in the Wolseley area, hosted her final studio recital at St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, closing out a career that has touched countless musicians and lives.
The path to being a Suzuki instructor was not a clear one for Howard. An aspiring musicologist during her post-secondary schooling, she found herself wanting do something more practical with her musical training, which began in earnest at the University of Saskatchewan. That’s when she was encouraged to pursue the training for the Suzuki method, which she began doing in Edmonton, and later in Winnipeg.
“It was a revelation and it was humbling,” Howard recalls about the transition from academia to wholistic musical education, “because even though I was an accomplished musician, my learning by ear was not at the level that my young students are capable of doing.”
The Suzuki method, in contrast with more conventional music study techniques, involves students learning their music as if it were a language, entirely by ear at the outset, and incorporating group classes alongside individual lessons to create a community-oriented musical environment in which students can be nurtured in music.
“It’s the thought of developing music from the inside out,” says Howard.
“I was taught – and, you know, by beautiful teachers, I’ve had a wonderful musical education – but it was very visual. “So, you’ve got music in front of you and you’re learning... rather than if you have absorbed the work by ear, you can produce it from an internal place.”
Over the course of her career, Howard has watched this method of music education transform students not merely in musical ability, but in life as well. “I do see that this sense of community and nurturing that the children have been offered does manifest... in a self-awareness, a self-confidence, and a kindness and an openness towards the world,” she smiles. “In this time that we live in when other values are being propagated and promoted, it’s so important that we get back to the fundamentals of what an arts education provides.”
Howard says that she looks forward to continuing her freelance career as a violist in Winnipeg with her time, but also to enjoy more time at her cottage and following the musical careers of her children, cellist Xander Howard-Scott and soprano Elena Howard-Scott. At the same time, she will miss many of the community elements of the Suzuki experience.
“It’s the weekly contact,” she explains. “It’s the joy that these little people bring, the energy, the interaction, the little drawings, the wonderful Duplo creations that get made in my foyer... it’s the love of the children themselves.”