A young Jascha Heifetz?

Today I'm going to write a serious blog about a serious subject. I'm going to write about how I was taught to play the violin.

One day when I was 5 years old, my father walked into my room, placed a violin in my hands, and told me I was going to learn music. We're speaking about Jewish parents who were trying to make their place in the American society after the Second World War, and according to this mentality, children had to learn music. I wasn't asked if I wanted to play, and which instrument I would prefer (as if I had any idea of what an instrument was, and what they sounded like!). In those days, this is the way it was done. The father decided and the child obeyed, and so, this was the beginning of my musical education.

I can't say I was very motivated at that time. I practiced because my father came in my room and told me to practice. He accompanied me to my lessons, sat in on the lessons and then became my teacher during the week until it was time for the next lesson. As you can surely tell, I'm not very much in favor of this method of getting children to learn music, and none of my children (all of whom are very musical) ever learned music in this fashion.

At some point when I must have been about 6 or 7, I was placed in the Manhattan School of Music (at that time there were lessons for young players), and I had a very very patient teacher who tried every trick in the book to teach me to play without making mistakes. Therefore, I was offered a nickel (5 cents) if I could play a piece of music without making any mistakes. I though that the teacher was an idiot, and I was going to have an addition to my weekly allowance. Unfortunately, this never happened. The teacher kept his nickel, as I never quite managed to play without making a mistake!

He did teach me one very useful trick, which I use even today. He taught me to look two measures ahead all the time (he would cover the music with a piece of paper and I had to remember what was on the page). Because of this, I became a fantastic sight-reader, and it helped me out on many occasions when I played in orchestras as a "ringer" and hadn't seen the music before. A ringer is "a substitute or addition, as a professional musician hired to strengthen an orchestra" . But I'm getting ahead of myself, because this is the subject of another post.

I went from teacher to teacher (according to my family's financial status at the time) and played in student orchestras until I got to the stage when I realized that I enjoyed playing, was good at it, and didn't need my father standing over me to make me practice.

I know that there are many different viewpoints on this subject. The Suzuki Method is just one example of teaching music to very young children. Maybe I'll do a post on this method sometime. There are many many views on teaching young children, the younger the better. However, I think that music requires a certain maturity in a child - the exception being, perhaps, a child who shows exceptional musical ability.

Who knows if I would have become a musician if my father hadn't forced me to play at the age of 5? But then again, who knows if I wouldn't have become a much better musician, maybe on a different instrument, if I had been left to my own initiative? Food for thought.