Oakville Suzuki celebrates 40 years and its founder By Dominik Kurek OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF Jean Grieve's friends call her a gift to Oakville. She has taught generations of children to play music here and abroad. She started organizations that had brought music to thousands more. She has done it all humbly, simply because she loves music. Now, as the Oakville Suzuki Association is celebrating its 40th year, it is hosting a Gala musical event for its current students and alumni. The event is both a celebration of 40 years of Suzuki education in Oakville and of Grieve's 80th birthday. Grieve founded Oakville Suzuki. The Gala features two concerts on Wednesday, June 27 at The Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts. The concerts will feature current students of the Suzuki Method and its alumni, performing alongside members of the Oakville Symphony Orchestra, an organization Grieve co-founded in 1967. "She was a woman in her 30s at the time when she founded the orchestra," said the symphony's artistic director, Roberto De Clara. "So, how many generations of people has she trained and inspired? It's truly astonishing and she does it in such a humble way." De Clara has been with the symphony for 15 years, which is how long he has known the Symphony founder for. He called Grieve an exceptional person who has influenced people's lives because she has opened the gift of music to many people, in particular young people. And she did it out of pure love of music. "She found that when she was very young, music gave her great joy and she's motivated by making sure everyone has the ability to experience that kind of joy because it really does change one's life. Jean still finds such joy in music and turning young people on to music," De Clara said. Grieve is a native of England where she learned to play the cello in private lessons, starting at age 10 to the delight of her own mother, who played piano but had always wanted to play cello herself. As a teenager, she became a member of the National Youth Orchestra in London. "I enjoy it so much," she said of playing music as a youth. "I found it really made my teenage years a whole lot more joyful than they otherwise would have been." Even though she studied languages (Russian and French) in university, music was a constant part of her life on campus as she joined two orchestras and a chamber group in school. She also took private lessons from a teacher who was a professor of cello at the Royal Academy of Music in London. At age 22, she married and moved to Canada with her husband. Upon arriving in Canada, Grieve went to teachers college where she met other people her age and bonded with them in music sessions. "That was very good for me because I immediately met a whole lot of people my own age who liked to play instruments. It was an excellent entrance to Canada," she said. Her husband got a job with Atomic Energy of Canada in Chalk River, so she applied for a job as music director in nearby Pembroke Collegiate Institute. "I got it right away," she recalled. "There were no strings there and I had to conduct the band and run an operetta. This was all completely new to me so I relied a lot on my senior students my first year. I wasn't much older than them." She and her husband lived there for three years. In her second year, Grieve introduced a strings program at the school. In 1958, the pair moved to Oakville where there wasn't much music happening. "It just happened that in the Oakville Beaver, or as it was called then, the Journal-Record, there was a little advertisement saying, `Cellist needed for a string quartet.'" She joined the group and played with it for nine years. Several of those members were among the founders of the Oakville Symphony Orchestra in 1967, including Grieve herself. She not only played in the Symphony in Oakville but in India as well. Her husband had a job in India and in that time, Grieve was able to join the volunteer Bombay Symphony Orchestra. The couple lived there for three years. "It was very funny. The double-basses were too big to get into any of the small cars in Bombay so they used to employ a porter who would run along the road with the double-bass over his head. I wish I had taken a picture," she laughed. When she was still in Canada, she took a Suzuki teaching course, one of the first available in Ontario in the summer of 1972. The fall of that year, she started taking on students. The principal of what had been John Wilson School where her child was in kindergarten at the time saw Grieve's daughter playing and he was interested in introducing a music program at his school. "In those days, there were empty classrooms and I used to go down and teach all day in the school. The parents would come in and watch because in those days most mothers did not work," she said. "I think I had 40 students right away at John Wilson School." That was the start of the Suzuki program in Oakville. Soon after, the program spread to other schools and Grieve went from school to school teaching music. Eventually, the Suzuki programing spread and other teachers began doing it. The Suzuki method was developed by Japanese violinist Shin'ichi Suzuki in the mid-20th century. The basic of the method is that, like language, everyone is capable of learning music in the right environment. The idea is to teach music to children from a young age, even while they're still in the womb, so that the sounds are familiar to them. It also depends on parents creating the right environment for their child to be able to learn. "We have a training session for parents every fall," Grieve said of the Suzuki program in Oakville. A parent will try to learn a bit along with their child at the session, learning such things as how to hold a bow, what is a good sound, and how to talk to a child who's practicing. In 1975, Grieve founded the Halton Youth Symphony. See Jean page 43 Artscene 41 · Friday, June 22, 2012 OAKVILLE BEAVER · www.insideHALTON.com photos by marta iwanek / oakville beaver / @halton_photog making sound: Jean Grieve, who founded the Oakville Suzuki Association, gives The Oakville Beaver a mini-show in her living room on her 200-year-old cello. Oakville Suzuki is hosting a Gala celebration on Wednesday to commemorate Grieve's 80th birthday and its 40th.