To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a case of a child actually dying from being forced to take music lessons. (Of course, now that I am committing this to paper I can nearly guarantee that I will soon start receiving a slew of letters all complaining about my lack of sensitivity to the musically injured, starting with the woman whose buck-toothed daughter accidentally inhaled her piccolo and finishing with the guy whose brother drowned when he neglected to clean out the spit valve on his tuba.) Ok then, let me rephrase: freak accidents aside, no child has ever been seriously harmed by practicing a musical instrument. (Ah, but what about the zither, you say? I hear that if you practice a zither with the wrong posture you can end up crippled for life.) Enough already–I’m sticking with my original argument: it ain’t gonna kill you to practice your violin for fifteen minutes a day. Or at least that’s what I tell my children.
Between Clementine and Clyde, our family has been taking violin lessons at NAU for the past seven years, which, although it may only be equivalent to 49 years in a dog’s life, is the same as 523 years in the life of a Suzuki mother. This means that according to all methods of calculation I should now be dead 10 times over, or at the very least be leading a shadow existence as a head in a jar somewhere. Somehow, though, life goes on.
It hasn’t always been easy (actually, it hasn’t ever been easy). Fortunately, however, with Clementine I got to experience the very worst of it at the very first of it: how well I remember the sight of a cute little four-year-old Clementine lying on the floor with her tiny little violin, pathetically clutching her head and moaning, “I wish I was dead! At least then I wouldn’t have to play the violin anymore.” Compared to that, Clyde’s feeble little protests (“I don’t remember signing up for this”) are almost charming.
And it hasn’t always been rewarding, either. Although, ever since we allowed her to give up on the classical pieces entirely and concentrate on fiddle tunes Clementine has begun to make excellent progress, back when she was still in the structured world of Suzuki we despaired of her ever advancing at all. In fact, I was convinced that she was destined to become the oldest living Book 1 student of all time. (As her fellow classmates grew up and moved on to Books 2, 3, 4 and even 5, and as their places were filled by a series of comparatively younger replacements, I felt as if I was seeing a real life version of Dazed and Confused, with Clementine in the Matthew McConnaughey role–“That’s what I love about these Book One kids, man. I get older and they stay the same age.”)
Many people (my husband first and foremost among them) have asked me why, since we obviously have no shortage of other stressors to fill our life, I insist on adding music lessons into the mix. To them I always reply that there was once a time (not that very long ago, actually), when people didn’t consider a person to be truly educated unless they had learned at least the basics of music–something that I still believe to be true.
And then, of course, there is something to be said for bowing to the inevitable: after all, what are the chances of a 4-year-old who melodramatically wishes for death developing into anything other than a 14-year-old who broods over the pointlessness of life as we know it? At least this way when the time comes (and it will) for Clementine to write morose little emo songs about broken hearts and dying, she’ll know exactly which key to write them in.