When I was 8 years old, my Mom told me to pick out a musical instrument, and they would give me one. She didn't care which one I chose. My parents took me to a big convention of musical instruments, and I saw a violin. Ironically, the reason why I chose the violin would become the only reason for buying my current upright bass before playing a note: it looked amazing. The choice of whether or not to have music in my life was never mine to make.
With the violin came the mandatory lessons and practice time. My mother assured me that I would practice 30 min a day. She never regulated the content of my practice routine, but she made personally sure that I did not leave that room until my time was up.
Do I have a memory of being locked in the practice room? Possibly. I do remember one very clear confrontation between myself and Mom: my refusal to get in that practice room drove her to cancel some appointment so that she could be a quiet sentinel next to the door of the room while I first snarled and foamed, like some cornered wild game, and finally after 15 min, picked up the damn thing and began to make horrible stomach-twisting sounds (a quality of my violin playing that I never seemed to champion in 10 years of playing).
Maybe I wanted the sounds to be horrible, so that Mom would give up on this silly crusade and see how disinterested I really was in learning how to make music. However, she never made a sour face while I practiced, never told me to try making the violin sound less than a rabid bat in it's death throes. As long as I had that thin piece of wood between my shoulder and chin, she was content.
From her unique style of stoic nurturing, I learned a great deal about what it really meant to insist on the presence of music in someone's life. How many parents shy away from teaching children the importance of appreciating fine art because they're afraid they might not be good at it? Michelle tells me that when she practiced violin at a young age, her dad would ask her if she could make it sound less bad? Be the question productive or not, I could never hold it against someone who didn't grow up around music. How could they ever understand the discipline required at any age - much less a young age where deep focus is close to impossible - in order to put in the time required to make an instrument sing?
I do, however, get very annoyed when I hear people talk to me about my innate musical talents. Are you shitting me? If you could hear me play violin at the age of 8, you wouldn't think I had a musical bone in my body. I hated playing music, I hated making horrible sounds, and I hated Mom for making me reproduce this shining example of my failure.
And then someone will say to me: "Well, I played piano for two years, but I was never really good at it, so I gave it up" Let me guess: your parents grew impatient when you didn't start sounding like Chico Marx after two months of expensive piano lessons? I remember a bass student I had in San Diego once, a 16-year-old girl who's father supervised our lessons for obvious and understandable reasons. By our third lesson, this girl had developed numerous walking bass lines, several scales, and the courage to attempt an improvised solo. While I saw this as an amazing growth, her father asked me after every lesson: "is she actually getting better?"
Almost a decade before I ever touched a bass, I had learned a handful of priceless lessons about being a good artist:
1) Be patient with yourself, more so than with anyone else.
2) Painful as it is, spend personal time working on weaknesses, rather than embellishing strengths.
3) True greatness takes time, commitment, and love.
4) Innate musical aptitude is negligible. Exposure (as early as possible) is the lifeblood of a child's appreciation and execution of art.
Next time I'll pick up on how a bass came into my life, but all this talk about practicing is making me antsy. I'm going to put on a fresh pot of coffee and run some scales.
