Musically Inclined

When I was a kid, my mother was a huge fan of, "The Lawrence Welk Show" on TV. It came on every Saturday night at 7:00 pm or so. I remember watching it with her as she would roll my damp-from-the-bath hair in curlers for Sunday church the next day. Sometime during watching those shows, my mom got the bright idea that she wanted her youngest daughter [me] to be a violinist. If I wasn't in the room with her, she would call me in -- to see the violinists when they were featured on the program.



Looking back, I think she was prepping my child-mind for her plans.

When I was 7 years old, a man came knocking at our door one evening. I used to think that he was a door-to-door salesman, which was more prevalent then than it is now. Now I wonder if she hadn't already arranged for him to come that evening. (I asked her about it many years later, and she said she couldn't remember.) He was selling music lessons. Lessons on stringed instruments, in particular.

He had a guitar with him. Now we're talking!! THIS was what I was all about! It was the 70's, and a guitar looked really, really interesting to me. He showed me some chords there in our living room. Everyone asked me if I was interested in learning an instrument. I looked at that guitar, wondered how my parents could afford it, and said, YES. I wanted to learn.

At some point, the rug got pulled out from under my feet, when that gentleman told my parents that I was just too small for a guitar. My poor "little arms couldn't reach around it very well." (Like I would never grow??)  And I was "much more suited" to the smaller violin. My mother's eyes gleamed. The old bait-and-switch technique thrived with her!

So, I started violin lessons. My first lessons were group lessons in the rec hall of some church in Lower San Bruno. It lasted about a year, and I thrived on it. I was a competitive little stinker, and I loved being "the best" or second to it. I could play the notes and get them right most of the time, without the teacher coming around to move my fingers.

What I know now, and I didn't know then, was that I have perfect pitch (or absolute pitch). If you're not musical, this is not as "perfect" as it implies. Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a music note just by hearing it, without any other reference. It's not something that you learn, it's something that you either have or don't have. And it has its pros and cons. For one thing, because of it, I'm absolutely horrid at transposing music. But I can stand in the next room, and yell at my piano-playing child, "B-flat!" (Isn't yelling a requirement when you're the parent of a child in music lessons? What? It isn't??)

I didn't know anything about perfect pitch until late in high school. I just thought that everyone heard music the way I did. It never occurred to me otherwise.

But knowing the notes, and playing them well were two different things. I remember that in my earliest months, our dog (who was an outside-only dog).... would howl when I practiced the violin. True story! It seemed that those high pitched notes, combined with my squeaky-beginner's technique would hurt his ears. (He howled at sirens, too.) It was a real blow to my self-esteem! My brother laughing at me didn't help, either.

My mom was also good at guilt. Somehow, she guilted me into playing the violin for more years than I would have chosen. She bemoaned the fact that the other kids hadn't stuck with their music (piano) lessons, and she had lofty dreams of me becoming a concert violinist.

I remember performing twice a year in my teacher's recitals. I played in church, and I played at funerals. It wasn't exactly exciting, and all my performances consisted of me playing alone with a piano for accompaniment. And only one person I knew was taking violin lessons. I felt like I was in a nerdy, geeky minority. And in all honesty, I was nerdy and geeky enough on my own; adding violin-nerdy-geeky wasn't necessary! So, after 7 years of lessons (which was half of my life at that point), like my siblings and most other kids, I finally walked away from it. Mom was desperate, and even offered to have a violin specially custom-made for me if I would just stick with it. But at the time, our schools had no program for stringed instruments. A great marching band, but no orchestra. There was no draw for me. I was done.

. . . . . . . . .


I tell you all of this because as a mom, I've had every one of my kids take piano lessons. Every child has taken lessons, and every child has dropped them. And that might sound like failure. I don't look at it quite that way. Sure, I'd have loved it if one or more of them might have stuck with it! I could have been more devoted to keeping them in lessons. But there came a point with each of them, that I think I valued my relationship with them more than I valued their continued musical careers.

What I value now.... is that seed of music-love that was planted in my kids. I never expected any of my kids to be professional musicians. But I did hope that they would have enough basic musical skills to be able to sit down to the piano, and play something they were interested in.

And now, .... I love when I'm sitting in church, and I sneak a look down the bench and see my child singing the hymn. I love when my kids have knowing looks on their faces when they hear a song from an old Rogers & Hammerstein/Cole Porter/Lerner & Lowe musical. I love that several of them are "band geeks", and have band geeks for friends -- they're great kids. I love that one of my teens is currently listening to music from "Les Mis" on her iPod.

And I love that sometimes, when they think about it or feel like it, ..... my kids will sit down at the piano and play something, just because they want to. If they're doing that, it makes me feel like their piano lessons have served them well -- because they find some joy in music and there is no "forcing" them into it.


One of these days, I'll tell you Part Two to this story. It's called, "How a Music Teacher can Profoundly Influence a Student (positively, or negatively)."  It applies to more than just music teachers, too.

Smile! You know how you get a song stuck in your head? Well, now I've got the Lawrence Welk "Goodnight" song stuck in mine. If you're old enough to remember it, maybe you've got the same song stuck in your head!


P.S. I was searching for one of the few photos of me playing the violin as a kid -- and couldn't come up with it. Sorry!