How a Suzuki Concert Proves that Bob Dylan Was Right

           In 1964 Bob Dylan told us that “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”    Nothing underscores just how right he was more than attending a seven-year-old granddaughter’s violin recital in Charlotte.

            I was in college when Dylan penned his provocative lyrics, attending a university where almost every student was white and most of them were male.  Fewer than five million people lived in North Carolina, and most of them had been born here.   Our population included the lowest percentage of Catholics of any state, and the only people who spoke a foreign language were school teachers. 

            At first blush you might not think that listening to 20 or 25 young Suzuki students between the ages of four and 14 play their brief recital pieces for an audience of dutiful parents, doting grandparents and fidgety siblings would engender reflections on Bob Dylan’s prescience, but even if the event is held in a beautiful church chapel, as this one was, you can only spend so much of the time admiring the stained glass windows while you wait for your granddaughter (#22) to take the stage.   If you have been admonished to leave your book, Kindle® and iPhone® at home, your eye naturally will focus on what’s at hand: the printed program listing the performers and their selections.   It’s there that you can readily see that the times not only are a-changin’ but how much they’ve already changed.

            If there had been such a thing as a Suzuki recital in Charlotte in 1964, all of the players would have been white and their names would have reflected North Carolina’s Anglo-Saxon (and specifically Scots-Irish) heritage.   These days about half of the children probably will have those sorts of surnames – names like Lamm, Hunter, McClellan and Stevens – but the first four performers are just as likely to be named Christina Yue Xin, Pavan Thakkar, Gisel Zapata and Nikhil Vaishnav, as they were at our granddaughter’s event.   As the program proceeds, Emma Willis, Katie Polk and Archer Herdon may well be followed by Micaela Flandoli, Gabriela Ortega and Ana Palomino.  Even the alphabetical list of the children’s teachers – Ker, Smilovici, Stanchauskas and Talley – reflects the ethnic and cultural diversity that makes North Carolina so different today from the North Carolina of 1964.