MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Unidentified Person: Ready?
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DAVID GURA: An arrangement of the piece is in the "Suzuki Violin Method," Book Four, for the initiated, and many people have been. Millions of musicians, including this group, have used the Suzuki Method.
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GURA: Suzuki believed that music should be taught like spoken language: by ear. And he liked the old guard of European classical composers: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Schubert, Mozart and Handel. For the most part, the Suzuki repertoire is canonical. So it was surprising to hear what Huneven's students played next.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O, SUSANNA")
GURA: They transitioned from Baroque to bluegrass, to "O, Susanna," a traditional American fiddle tune. It's in a new instructional method by Grammy Award-winner Mark O'Connor, with more two-steps than minuets. He wanted to base it on music from the Americas: Cajun and country, ragtime and rock 'n' roll.
MARK O: Rather than concentrate on all these divisions, it would be great just to broaden the tent and include a lot of these disciplines.
GURA: O'Connor was a fiddling prodigy. When he was 12, he signed his first recording contract. As a teenager, he won national competitions.
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GURA: He was a first-class fiddler. But O'Connor's musical interests grew wider. He headlined classical concerts. He performed alongside jazz greats. And he tried his hand at composing.
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GURA: Over the years, O'Connor became hard to categorize. He blazed a trail across genres as few string musicians have and along the way, O'Connor says, he realized something.
CONNOR: That it doesn't have to be such a unique path. That path could be duplicated. And, in fact, it could be in some ways kind of copied and emulated in the process of really developing a full-tilt exploration of American string playing.
GURA: Doree Huneven remembers how exciting the camp was.
DOREE HUNEVEN: There are these teenagers who are just in love with the instrument, and they were playing blues and Cajun and world music. And I thought, that's amazing.
GURA: In the '70s, she sat at the feet of Shinichi Suzuki. She was the third Western student to graduate from his school in Japan. Now, Huneven is an O'Connor acolyte, one of the first teachers to use his new method. The books are richly illustrated, with information about the history of every piece, and every melody is catchy.
HUNEVEN: It grabs them. It ropes them in. It's Pied Piper music. They just love it. They can't stop playing it.
NICOLE MATTEY: Every time I listen to music, I can think of the notes. I can hear it better.
GURA: Nicole Mattey is one of Huneven's students.
MATTEY: When I play a fast song in classical, I find that it's a bit more like fiddle than I would've expected.
GURA: Still, Huneven acknowledges that some people don't get what O'Connor is trying to do: to blur the lines between jazz and bluegrass and world music, to re-brand America's various musical traditions as American classical music.
HUNEVEN: I still have parents that say: Oh, are we going to play the fiddle music? But it's not. It's violin music. It's really important that they understand that this is our music.
GURA: Mark O'Connor is adamant that his method doesn't handicap students from playing traditional classical repertoire.
CONNOR: Say they want to play the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, there is nothing in this method that will prevent them from doing that.
GURA: David Gura, NPR News.
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