12 I first started studying Suzuki pedagogy in my 30s. At this point I was living back in my hometown of Hobart, Tasmania, in the far south of Australia. I had been loving working as a professional cellist in various orchestras around Australia but was discovering that my real passion was with teaching. I felt the need for more resources, ideas and inspiration for my lessons though, and this was at a time when the internet was starting to explode with new information and connections, and naturally some of the Suzuki teachers were some of the first there. I travelled to the USA to some of the bigger institutes in Utah and Chicago and began to see how it all worked in practice and began training there. The more I saw and learned about the philosophy and history of the Suzuki approach, the more I fell in love with our method. When I moved to live in the Netherlands, I continued my training with Marianne Vrijland in Utrecht, also attending workshops and short courses in the UK and Spain. I undertook my level 4 and 5 in France with Ruben Rivera and Chantal Latil, and continued to travel to attend workshops around Europe. I had such fantastic trainers, and the colleagues in my courses were really amazing players, teachers and people. I have loved working on my foreign language skills to communicate with them and learn to teach in other languages (and without verbal language). My mother worked as a speech therapist, and she has old cassette tapes of her helping me to learn the sounds of my mother tongue English as a very young child, and step by step noting what age I mastered each phoneme. I’m sure this has had an influence on my lifelong love of word games, crosswords, language learning, and the Suzuki method. During the Corona times, I took the opportunity to review and retake all the levels through the Suzuki Association of the Americas online. I worked with American trainers Carey Cheney, Laura Shaw, Avi Friedlander, and of particular note, I did many courses with Tanya Carey, one of the American pioneers of Suzuki cello. I found this such an invaluable experience, both working with wonderful trainers, and meeting many American teacher colleagues online. After teaching at many Suzuki workshops online, and then thankfully back in person around Europe, I was approached by several Teacher Trainers and invited to apply to become an instructor. Ruben Rivera was my mentor for my instructorship in France. I also observed two years of the UK course with Tessa Oakley, and assisted Eulàlia Subirà with teacher training in Poland, including the first class of Ukrainian Suzuki Cello teachers. Now I continue to teach and perform in Amsterdam. I have always kept playing chamber music, with concerts in recent years in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland and Russia. I have a studio of students of all ages and levels, and I am looking forward to beginning Teacher Training courses in the Netherlands, and I will also be involved in the newest UK cello course. 2024 Teacher Trainer Appointments Brendan Conroy VIOLONCELLO, NETHERLANDS
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