Violinist Louise Behrend dies at 94

Louise Behrend, a concert violinist who trained a generation of American teachers in the Suzuki method and whose standing as a musician helped the Japanese movement establish itself in the United States, died Aug. 3 at Montgomery Hospice's Casey House in suburban Rockville, Md. She was 94.

She had complications from dementia, her family said.

Behrend, a native Washingtonian, grew up in a musical family that included an uncle whose inventions led to the development of the phonograph. She was a toddler when she tried to enroll herself in violin lessons.

Her musical ability earned her a scholarship to New York's prestigious Juilliard School, where she performed so impressively as a student that the school kept her on as a faculty member after her graduation in 1943. By 1950, New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg put Behrend "among the ranks of the better young American violinists." Behrend was teaching at Juilliard in the 1960s when Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of the Suzuki method, brought a group of students to the school. His philosophy was based on the notion that children should learn to play music just as they learn to speak: at a very young age through imitation and repetition.

Detractors criticized the method for relying too much on rote and for being impractical for American parents who might be less involved in their children's education than many Japanese parents were.

Behrend said she was amazed by Suzuki's success.

"Judging by the numbers of Suzuki-trained children in both Japan and the United States who are playing, and playing well," she wrote in her 1998 book "The Suzuki Approach," "Suzuki would seem to have proved the validity of his idea." Soon after their first encounter, Behrend traveled to Japan to learn from Suzuki. She became convinced that his method was an inspired one and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching it in the United States.

In the early 1970s, she founded the School for Strings in Manhattan, still one of the nation's premier Suzuki-based schools.

"She not only was successful as a teacher, but also as a teacher of teachers," said William Starr, the first president of the Suzuki Association of the Americas.

After one teacher turned her away from music lessons when she was 3, saying she was too young, Behrend taught herself to read music by watching her sister's piano lessons.

"I started at age 10, which is late by today's standards," she told a Juilliard publication -- and very late by Suzuki's standards.

Survivors include her sister, Elsie Paull of Washington.