A Frogmarch: Music Lessons for Kids

Far and away the hardest thing I do each day is getting my kids to practice the violin. This is harder than coming up with story ideas for the magazine; harder than stopping the chickens getting eaten by raccoons; and much harder than thinking of something to write about for my column. Despite this, five nights a week after supper I summon my children one by one to the living room and frogmarch them through enough scales, studies, etudes, gavottes and fiddle tunes to reduce the young Yehudi Menuhin to tears. It certainly has that effect on the kids from time to time, and sometimes on me as well. Getting them to the music stand and ready to play requires considerable determination on the part of the parent—a finely balanced combination of encouragement, bribery, and just enough good, old-fashioned browbeating to keep them focused without actually making them cry.

And guess what? They don’t like it. And a lot of the time, neither do I. So why would I subject them, myself and anyone within earshot to this ritual self-flagellation? Is it because my wife and I believe that music lessons form an indispensable part of a well-rounded education? Because we think they’ll be more productive members of society if they grow up understanding consonance and dissonance? Well, mostly I do it because my mother did it to me. From the age of eleven through seventeen I would be sent to the living room every evening to practice violin until supper was ready. Mum, an accomplished cellist who cherished notions of raising her very own home-grown string quartet, didn’t actually hover over me and my siblings the way I do with our children, but she would evesdrop from the kitchen, shrieking “A-Sharp!!” whenever one of us played a wrong note. At best I was a half-hearted student whose music report card bore comments like “James shows promise that could be realized if only he was willing to practice.” And although I enjoy playing the violin now, I absolutely loathed the nightly practice as a kid and would go to almost any lengths to avoid it. The funny thing is that as an adult, summoning the resolve to make my kids play elicits many of the same feelings that actually playing the violin used to arouse when I was their age. Before rounding them up I have to put myself through a kind of pre-game locker-room pep talk to steel myself for the battle of wills to come.

I’m exaggerating, but only a bit. Anyone who’s heard a five-year-old scraping her way through "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" understands that in the hands of the uninitiated, the violin is an unforgiving thing. Having been at it for five years now, Mathilde’s through the worst of it and can occasionally be caught actually deriving some pleasure out of the sounds she makes. But Charles still struggles, bless him. I can see him doing his level best to concentrate. But then, a third of the way through “Turkey in the Straw” you can literally watch his fertile imagination hijack his higher brain functions, teleporting him out of the living room and up, up and away—to a place populated with wizards and lizards, trolls, gremlins; and no violins. Limp in his hand, the bow becomes a wand, the violin a broom, the page of music in front of him a runic spellbook written in Parseltongue. And it’s back to the beginning to play the whole thing again. Sometimes both of us get so frustrated it’s tempting to just give up. Learning an instrument requires such an enormous commitment of time and effort for what, in the early years, seems an impossibly distant reward, it’s not easy for a fully grown parent with twenty-twenty hindsight to see the point of it all. So hardly surprising that a seven-year-old boy with a wizard fixation should have difficulty doing so.

So they’re doing something hard, but not impossible. We’re fortunate to have a marvelous teacher who comes to St. Francisville each week to teach a handful of local children with parents convinced enough of the transformative power of music lessons to endure the consequences. Now, with several years’ work under their belts, I think both kids have the chance to become pretty fair players if they can hang in there through adolescence. After all, is it any bigger a commitment than baseball? And really, which of these activities are they likelier to still be doing, and deriving pleasure from, when they’re our age?

One way of helping the kids see the value in all this is to be sure they see truly accomplished musicians strut their stuff when the opportunity presents itself.

In September the Baton Rouge Symphony’s Masterworks season opener welcomes pre-eminent Taiwanese-American violinist Cho-Liang Lin to the River Center stage. Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Lin took up the violin at five years old, left Taiwan at the age of twelve—by himself—to pursue his studies, went to Juilliard, played at Lincoln Center by the age of nineteen, has since performed as a soloist with virtually every major orchestra in the world, and plays a three-hundred-year-old Stradivarius named ‘Titian.’ When Lin comes to Baton Rouge on September 20 we will certainly bring a pair of young, sometimes reluctant violin students, in the hope that seeing a star perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto adds some inspirational fuel to their fires. But out in the auditorium I bet all the parents of young, sometimes reluctant violin students will be envisioning the same thing: a little boy slumped disconsolantly in the corner of some long-ago Taiwanese living room, being harangued by his father to stop staring out of the window and concentrate!

… And to play it again.