?Ready"? I asked my eight-year-old daughter as I adjusted the banjo on my lap.
She nodded and lifted the quarter-size violin to her chin, holding the bow between her thumb and forefinger, as she had been taught to do over the past month of lessons. Together, we eked out ?Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,? alternately out of tune and out of time, interrupted by my younger daughter until, with a flourish of ritardando, we stopped.
I whooped with delight. That was it: my lifelong dream fulfilled. You heard that right: My dream?the gift I wanted most?involved bad intonation and alternating tempos. My eldest daughter was doing two things that I?d desperately wanted to do growing up: play music and jam with a parent. More importantly, she was powering through the hard parts, more interested in learning music than mastering it. She was learning, successfully, to fail.
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Is there a perfect age to start music lessons"
After my parents divorced when I was five, I only saw my musician father on some holidays, during the summer and one weekend a month. It seemed like every time I showed up, he knew a new instrument, whether it was the mandolin, tenor guitar, clarinet or piano. He would teach me the basics of whatever instrument I?d decided to play wh...