Learning the Violin

There’s more mathematics involved in playing the violin than I would have imagined. It’s physics, really. You get the rich, church bell sound not by pushing the bow on the strings, but by resting and gliding it. To play louder you do not necessarily change the pressure of the bow, but the speed. Speed equals volume. Location equals tone. Vibrato is in the arm, not the fingers or the wrist; and the perfect C# is a little closer to a D than you’d guess.

Two years ago, my then-five-year-old daughter started taking violin lessons. This was entirely my idea. I spent my childhood desperately wishing to play the violin, only to be plopped in front of a piano instead (which I loved, nonetheless). So, renting that little one-eighth violin (it looked like a doll’s instrument) and placing it gently in my girl’s hands every Monday after school was absolutely an attempt to live vicariously through her. I recognize that’s generally a tacky thing to do, but being as convinced as my husband and I were of the incontrovertible benefits of learning an instrument, I thought it was probably OK in this case.

Six months went by, and I was hanging on her instructor’s every word. Six months of watching my daughter learn to form her right hand just so (for the bow hold) and her left hand like this (her violin hand), and clap little nonsensical rhythms (Mis-sis-sip-pi hot dog!), and read the notes on the treble clef. That Christmas, my husband surprised me with my own grown-up-sized violin, freshly tuned and impossibly delicate, along with lessons of my own. I was a little embarrassed. I was also thrilled.

Now, every Monday afternoon, my two daughters (now ages eight and five) and I march up the porch steps of our teacher’s house with three instrument cases of various sizes slung over our shoulders, looking like Goldilocks’s three bears. We shuffle inside, remove our golden, polished violins, and tighten our bowstrings. My lesson is first.

Photograph by Boon / AdobeStock.

We’re learning the Suzuki method, which treats music as a native language that children learn through immersion. Our graduate-degreed instructor has a Very Strong Conviction that it’s such a great thing that my daughters sit in the back of the studio and watch my lesson before theirs. Sometimes they get bored and drum their fingers on the table. Sometimes they whine and I get flustered.

My older daughter’s lesson is next, followed by my youngest – whose perfect little hand is just now getting used to finding that balance between tension and passivity in her bow hold.

If we were to tally up the minutes, my girls spend most of their life outside their violin studio, living a fundamentally effortless childhood.

They go to school, play in the backyard, color, play “house,” and arrange and rearrange their dolls on their bunk beds. They brush their teeth and complain about broccoli and really want to watch one more episode of Bluey. Learning the violin is something else. It does not come naturally – to them or to me. (I’m not sure I’d trust anyone who claimed playing the violin came “naturally.”)

Together, in real time, my girls and I are learning something entirely new. We’re learning the obvious things, of course: which note is where, how to place just the very tips of our fingers on the strings, and which kind of movement makes the violin sing and which kind makes it squeak. We do pinky finger exercises. We silently move our arms in time with the rhythm of the song, like little mimes, before we finally pick up the bow. I am thirty-seven and I do this standing next to my five-year-old, who is also doing it. We feel kind of silly but we do it anyway. We learn the notes of the songs that make up Suzuki’s canon, playing at first what sound like nursery rhymes before graduating to concertos and waltzes and the sorts of songs we’ve heard in movies featuring castles or ballet.

But along with the notes and the posture, my girls and I are learning the intangibles – like feeling a little silly doing something but then doing it anyway. And what it feels like to fail at something, over and over, before we get it right even once. Mostly, we’re learning how to be frustrated, discouraged, bored, and just generally uncomfortable – and how to keep practicing anyway.

This, I’m convinced, is crucial.

Early in her lessons, my oldest daughter hit a brick wall. The novelty had worn off and she was over it. She fought me at practice time every day, collapsing into a five-year-old tragicomedy on the living room rug the moment I told her to get out her instrument. I continued to push her, but it became exhausting. I pleaded for help from our instructor, and she gave my daughter an unusual assignment: put down the violin and write a list of the songs that make you anxious.

In her squiggly kindergartner handwriting, she carefully copied the titles. 1. “Song of the Wind.” 2. “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” (There was something heartbreakingly sweet about such playful titles written with such earnest grief.)

The following week, our teacher considered the list. “I see ‘Song of the Wind’ and ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody’ are making you feel frustrated,” she said. My daughter nodded timidly. “OK. We’ll play some other songs first. And then we’ll take a really deep breath, and we’ll play these.”

This proved to be a bit of magic. Our teacher made my daughter feel heard but also gently pushed her. She acknowledged her frustration without letting it have the final say. Yes, these pieces are hard. And we are going to play them, and we will know they are hard.

My daughter still gets flustered and discouraged sometimes. But now she knows these things come with learning.

When you have a baby, people will tell you to follow your instincts. Whether that’s good advice depends on the context, which probably makes it bad advice. But here’s what I do know: as a mom, my instincts are almost always bent toward protection. I never want my girls to be sad, hurt, frustrated, scared, disappointed, or in danger. If I see pain coming for them, I become the mom from the urban legend, lifting the car off of them with a surge of superhuman strength. It’s not just that I never want my kids to experience difficulty; I also know it would hurt me to see them experience difficulty. And I don’t want to hurt either.

But sadness, hurt, frustration, fear, and disappointment are going to find my girls anyway. So even when watching them hurt feels like nails on a chalkboard or splinters to the shins, I must trust that leading them deliberately toward certain difficult experiences now is what’s best. Because they need to learn how to get through them. They need to watch themselves get through them.

When I was a kid, I saw an astonishingly small child play the violin on David Letterman. I was in the kitchen, spying on the television in the living room. I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed. I was just trying to pour a glass of milk. I remember the milk because when I saw the little girl playing, with dramatic sweeps of her elbow and a look of fierce concentration on such a young face, I dropped it. The gallon burst, a creamy flood washing over the linoleum floor.

I don’t remember what happened after the spill, but the emotional core of this memory is the little girl. A “violin prodigy,” Letterman had called her. I didn’t know the violin could sound like that. I didn’t know little girls could make the violin sound like that. I had dropped the milk because she had made me feel suddenly, powerfully, and inexplicably sad. I think I felt bad for her. She was too serious. She looked like she knew too much for her age. I felt sad for myself too. Why couldn’t I play like that?

Decades later, I’m convinced there’s an upside to lacking prodigious talent. There are downsides, obviously. (To my knowledge, Letterman never had a “kids with mediocre ability” segment.) But there is magic in being sort of bad at something, or at least in not taking to it right away. If my girls, somehow, found they could play Vivaldi the second they tuned their strings, how could I possibly convince them that struggling is worthwhile?

At the same time, I’m hoping to communicate to them that proficiency isn’t the main goal here either. I don’t want them to think that the whole thing will only have been worthwhile after they make first chair at the orchestra. Becoming that little girl on Letterman, or a grown-up version of her, isn’t necessarily the aim. I want them to find their passion more than I care about them finding their ability.

What kind of chump spends time and money and frustration on something that’s never going to make her a dollar, lose her a pound, or gain her an audience?

I’m hoping my own clumsy playing points my girls in this direction. I’m under no illusion that my violin practice is “going somewhere” in any professional or economic sense. I have no aspirations for any stage outside those of the rented churches into which my instructor forces me, twice a year, for the “studio recital.”

What I’m really after is the joy of playing. I just … really like it. When I was younger, I would have been embarrassed to admit this. What kind of chump spends time and money and frustration on something that’s never going to make her a dollar, lose her a pound, or gain her an audience? These days, who does things just because they like to do them?

Obviously, I’ll be thrilled if one or both of my daughters love and excel at playing the violin so much that it factors into their vocation. And I also think it’s reasonable and healthy to encourage them to work toward accomplishments that they might not know enough to desire now – in other words, whether or not they want to play the violin right now isn’t the only factor in whether they’re going to. Sometimes I’m going to make them do it.

But every time one of my girls finds that bell-ringing tone, or her pinky finger hits just the right spot on the D string, or something clicks and she just gets the vibrato, I want something more for her than a sense of achievement. I want her to feel what it’s like to love something for its own sake. I want her to feel like she’s doing something mystical. Whoever thought an object like this could make a sound like that – like the tinkling of a crystal chandelier, or water dripping into a copper sink?

I am not a utilitarian, I am a Christian. I believe being earnestly, uncynically excited by and about something beautiful simply because it’s beautiful is deeply Christian. Beauty is never a waste. Wildflowers grow in abandoned fields that no one ever sees. God sees them, and God loves beauty.

If you doubt that playing the violin, even clumsily, can remind someone of this, then I humbly recommend picking up a bow.

As I mentioned, twice a year we have a studio recital. When I started taking my own lessons, I took for granted that these performances wouldn’t include me. There was no scenario in which I was going to stand on the same stage as a four-year-old and attempt a squeaky version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” In public.

(This is the other thing about learning the violin: you can make a lot of progress. You can learn a lot. And you will still sound like you just picked it up for the first time. Learning the piano is different: you learn the notes and how to press them, and then you gradually add more notes, and the songs become more complicated and, thereby, impressive. The violin is fits and starts. You learn how to hold the bow first, without worrying about the notes. Then you focus on the notes and forget about the bow for a while. All this means you can get up on a stage six months in, having put many hours into honest practice, and still sound really, really bad.)

Our teacher has a Strong Conviction about this, too, which is that learning “how to perform” is its own important lesson. It may sting, but it’s valuable. Do we forget the notes when we get on stage? Does our bow arm shake, and can we correct for it? Do we feel nauseous or scared? Can we play anyway?

Unfortunately for me, I think our teacher is right. I also think it’s probably important for my girls to see me up there, stumbling through the same nerves and tripping over the same notes they do. If I’m not embarrassed, why should they be embarrassed? Better yet: if I am embarrassed and I do it anyway, they can feel embarrassed and do it anyway too.

At our first recital, I played a song called “O Come Little Children.” (I know.) Before the “show” started, a serpentine line of little bodies with littler violins formed in front of our instructor, who was tuning the strings. The first twenty or so budding musicians in that line would not have been tall enough to ride a roller coaster. I stood there looking like the point on a line graph where the stats spike upward.

My oldest daughter was performing at this recital too. (My youngest hadn’t begun her lessons yet.) Her song was called “Lightly Row.” The song repeats, and the second time through, she lost her place for a moment. Later, I spun this as good news: you know this song so well, your brain got bored and went somewhere else! But she was flustered and angry. She knew she could play it better than that, but no one in the audience knew that.

There’s a delicate balance here, and I haven’t always found it. After that recital, I had a long conversation with my daughter about how she had felt during it. It was one of those conversations where I was convinced I was simply Mom of the Year, delighted by how empathetic and brilliant I sounded with all my clichés about our feelings being important and the courage it takes to get in front of a crowd. But when I finished, my daughter burst into tears. Now the recital wasn’t just a recital. I’d turned it into a Very Important Event, with Very Important Implications and High Emotional Stakes. I’d made it too big, and she was overwhelmed.

I still think it’s good and helpful to ask the girls how they are feeling, and to really listen when they tell me. But after that recital, I’ve tried to ask a little more sparingly. Every journalism major learns that “the act of observing something changes it,” and our inner experiences are no different. Too much time focused on our feelings can change them. If we’re constantly asking ourselves how we feel, we run the risk of giving the answer too much power.

The balance lies somewhere at the intersection of mindfulness and just-getting-on-with-it-already.

To be fair to my eldest, I was no Yo-Yo Ma myself at that recital. I did indeed learn much valuable information, as our instructor had promised. My arm indeed shook, and this indeed affected the steadiness of my bow in a less-than-ideal way. I played the whole song, and it didn’t sound great. It sounded like a little kids’ song, performed by a little kid. I was sweating.

My daughters are (mercifully) too young to be embarrassed by me yet, but I made sure to tell them after the recital that I was embarrassed. I was hoping that would surprise them. It did.

Now I had at least one public performance’s worth of credibility to tell them that bravery isn’t a feeling; it’s action in spite of a feeling. That brave women know how to do something with dignity, even when they don’t want to do it, even when they feel foolish.

Both my daughters have taken to the violin more easily than I have. Our teacher chalks this up, in part, to age. But their little arms have a way of easing into the posture and the ballerina-movement of the bow that mine can’t always find. This thrills me, which I try to remember to tell them often. I think it thrills them too.

These days, my oldest is working on a song called “Perpetual Motion.” It’s a bit complicated. It’s not exactly a lovely melody either; I think it’s more about practicing the A major scale and its variations than playing a pretty song. I don’t think she’ll ever perform it. But my hope for this song is the same as my hope for all these Monday afternoons and all the practice outside the studio: that through it, she’ll prove to herself that she can do meaningful, beautiful things even when she doesn’t feel like it.

And that beauty is its own reward.