The Suzuki method has an international reputation as a preeminent and proven approach to teaching students, especially preschool children, the fundamental discipline and technical exactitude required to embark on a life-long study and career in classical violin and other instruments.
A. Philip Kashap, the current musical director of the Huntsville Suzuki School of Music, was certified as a “Suzuki Teacher Trainer” on March 21, 2025 — the first person from Canada to achieve this designation since 2016!
“This title is conferred by the Suzuki Association of the Americas, which oversees Suzuki teachers in North and South America,” Kashap explains. “Since 2015, a total of 40 people on all instruments have been named Suzuki Teacher Trainers in North America, and only 16 people, since 2020, an average of 3-4 per year.
Kashap explained that there are only eight people in the country who are violin teacher trainers.
“I can teach, and train them live, or I can teach them online. It’s also significant in that it’s the highest level of certification in my business. It’s unusual to have somebody in a small town with that certification, almost all of them are in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary— just all in big cities.”
As a major pre-requisite for the prodigious title, and rare position, a teacher must have taught many students for a long period of time. Kashap has directed the Huntsville Suzuki School of Music since 2012, assuming the role, upon the retirement of founder and former director, Linda Drennan. https://www.huntsvillesuzuki.org/
Kashap has been teaching violin using the Suzuki Method since 1986 as a teacher and then director of the Saskatoon Suzuki program. After graduating from Yale University, where he met his wife, Martha, an accomplished performing violinist, Kashap vacillated between a career in performance art or teaching, deciding to take an offer to teach at the University of Saskatchewan, leaving North Carolina, where his wife was employed and moving his family to Canada. Not only an extremely busy teacher, Kashap and his wife also played in the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra.
Kashap, who trained as a youth with the Suzuki Method, was one of the first generations of Suzuki kids.
Invented in Japan by Shinichi Suzuki, a trained violinist whose father built the very first violin factories in the world, Suzuki had this overwhelming feeling that he wanted to do something for children, who through no fault of their own, had been left with pretty much nothing after World War II. He developed a way of teaching children the violin, which has since been adapted for many other instruments, based on listening and the insight that children learn more or less the way they learn how to speak, by being surrounded by specific classical music from a very young age.
Suzuki was an excellent violinist, as were the associate teachers that he trained. They realized that very, very young kids could actually be taught the violin, using smaller instruments, showing them how to stand and hold the instrument, even if they were only three or four years old. They experimented with how young children actually could be taught and found that children can learn violin before they can read words or understand symbols or music notation.
The main thing that Suzuki discovered is a different, unique understanding about talent. They believe that everybody has the ability to play well and just needs to be taught correctly. It’s not that talent is just reserved for a few people.
By the early 1960s, an American delegation verified that Suzuki could, in fact, teach anybody to play the violin well, not just specifically gifted people but everybody who walked in the door.
“That is one of the fundamental differences between Suzuki and other ways of teaching. Everybody who walks in the door is talented. We just bring out the person’s talent,” says Kashap. “Suzuki is unfailingly positive.”
This successful methodology of encouragement, reinforced by surrounding students with strong practices techniques, including listening to music, has made Suzuki Schools a revered standard in the world of music lessons. Using both private lessons and group lessons, integrates a social, communal element. Playing in groups is an integral part of the studies, allowing students to experience a broader and more enriching musical palette.
On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, at the Algonquin Theatre, Kashap will conduct a concert of his students, along with the Muskoka Philharmonic Orchestra and the Huntsville High School Concert Band as guest artists, in an exciting program of classical music, including several jazz, folk, rock, and fiddle numbers. Tickets are available at a reasonable price.
Kashap regards achieving the rank of a ‘Registered Teacher Trainer’ as the pinnacle of his lengthy career – a lifelong pursuit of the highest excellence.
“I had a feeling that every generation is going to need new people to be able to do this. They’re really only a small number of people who do this. I just had the feeling that it’s something that needs to carry on,” Kashap notes and says it is his reason for pursuing such a designation at this point in his life, and, “People were asking me informally to show them how to teach.”
Perhaps the most compelling characteristic of the violin, among the variety of instruments humans play, is its deeply resonated emotional expressiveness, particularly in the hands of a player conversant in its secondary or higher octaves. The instrument lends itself to a heartfelt artistry that can sound like angels weeping or children laughing.
“This is exactly what I do for a living,” comments Kashap. “Can we give the person enough technical ability that they don’t have to think about technique anymore? If they’re set up properly, then the ease of motion allows them to start to connect the music to emotion. Suzuki used to say that the tone (of a violin) has a living soul, that the instrument is like a person. Its sound is like the voice of a human being. And we work on that constantly. Every lesson, can we get the instrument to sound like somebody’s singing? It connects tone to soul.”
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Philip so well deserved, you are an amazing teacher you taught this old dog cooking lessons every time I come to help with the your Indian dinners. Looking forward to the next one
Well done, Philip, and we’ll earned!
Thanks for all YOU do …?.Congratulations 🎻Cameron of Lochiel