Ever since the first High School Musical movie debuted and a longish-haired space cadet of a character exclaimed, "Dude...I play the cello!" my seven-year-old son has wanted to play the cello.
Of course, I've called him on it over the years and said things like, "You only want to play the cello because of that dude guy in High School Musical." And of course, he always denied it with a whiny-sounding Noooo-uh!
I'd never discourage a musical instrument from my kids, mind you. I'm thrilled that my children's public elementary school offers an incredible Strings program starting in the second grade. This is unusual, and I realize we are fortunate in this regard. My own elementary school didn't offer any musical instrument studies until the fifth grade, whereupon a young Ruth Dynamite chose to play...the trumpet. I had already been studying the piano since about the age of five or six, and I enjoyed branching out at school and tooting away on a shiny brass horn (even if I got embarrassed when people called me Hot Lips).
No one calls me Hot Lips anymore, but I know that my years of music study - and years of complaining about having to practice music - helped me grow and develop in many other ways.
I've watched my nine-year-old daughter transform from an enthusiastic but cacophonous viola beginner to a reasonably melodious and confident novice. When she plays, she beams with pride - and so do I.
And I know that my dude of a son will also grow and develop from the experience of rubbing a screechy bow against scratchy strings on some scaled-down, kid-sized cello that I nag him about practicing every week. Because soon enough (and not soon enough, too) his screechy nails-on-a-chalkboard scratchings will be music to my ears.
[This post also appears on Ruthless in the Suburbs. ]
