Here we go

The Maestro finally got his cello. If you don’t know the Maestro, you should. People always ask us who he gets his musical interest from, me or Riley. The answer is, really, that he came up with it himself. I come from a pretty musical family, and took piano lessons for years. I also played trumpet in the band, and learned to sing. None of that, however, leads to having a son who can name, describe, and pick out by sound all of the instruments in the orchestra by the time he turns three. I’d pick a younger age as the cut-off for that, but it took him several months to reliably differentiate the oboe, the clarinet, and the English horn.

All of this, he came up with by himself. Riley and I have been continually stretched to answer his questions. What IS that part of the violin called? What is a Flugel Horn, anyway? He really is amazing. He loves to watch concert videos, and listen to the radio. While he was still two, he called me at work, pretending to be Zubin Mehta. How many people even know who Zubin Mehta is? Everywhere he goes, he takes some object that has become an instrument to him, and people who know him simply assume now that he has that coat hanger because it makes music for him.

My favourite story was the day he took a round sieve, taped to a toy broom handle, to church. Some people thought that maybe it was a banjo, but they were wrong. He politely explained that is was a BANJ, which is like a Bass Banjo. It plays lower notes than a banjo, and has seven strings. I know, from living with the Maestro, that a standard Banjo has only five strings. A Banj, apparently, has seven. Oh, and a Banj doesn’t really exist; he invented it for the day. I think he was justifying to himself the longer than normal length of the neck, compared to the body of the instrument. A longer neck means longer, bigger strings, hence a Bass Banjo.

There is only so long that a kid can go around telling people that he wants to be a musician and a conductor when he grows up before you have to consider putting him in lessons of some kind. I mean real lessons, not just buying him a recorder and trying to teach him fingerings. He plays with “instruments” of all kinds, but comes back most often to the string family, and the bassoon. Bassoons are problematic, being approximately twice as tall has he is. Strings are built down to 1/16th scale, so the physical limitations of being only three aren’t quite so insurmountable. He picked the cello to learn first. Of course, once he learns the cello, he said, he wants to learn the violin, then viola, and then the bass.

We had been reading a book on gifted children called, “Some Of My Best Friends Are Books”, about how reading can help children meet their emotional and intellectual needs. The idea that gifted children, my gifted children, have intellectual needs, and that the opportunity to meet these intellectual needs can have strong consequences on their emotional growth, was something that I had not considered before. Is there a part of the Maestro that will feel incomplete if his chance to be a musician consists of carrying around PVC pipes fastened together with elastic bands and calling the collection a bassoon? Being smart and interested in music is one thing. Feeling like a musician trapped inside a little body that can only pretend is another thing. What is really going on inside him when he has taken wooden spoons and is using them to play cello along with Vivaldi? Is he playing a game, or is he coming as close as he can to touching the picture he sees of himself inside?
There are people who are willing to answer that question for me. He’s only three, they say. It’s a phase, they say. I did Suzuki lessons, but I didn’t start until much later, they say. But THEY don’t know the Maestro, do they? They don’t go to the library looking for CDs, because their three-year-old has been asking for a clarinet concerto for a week now. They don’t have three-year-olds that would call them out for putting on the oboe CD and telling him it is a clarinet concerto. I do.

So I don’t know. I do know that we won’t find out if we don’t take the chance. I will be watching to see if he can look his teacher in the eye for ten seconds. I will watch to see if he can hold the cello between his knees while in rest position. Later, I will watch to see if he holds his bow properly, and if he keeps his elbow up. But, I will also be watching to see if he holds his head differently, if he plays by himself differently, how he relates to the self-portrait in his head differently. I don’t know how I will know these things. I don’t know if I will know these things. The criteria are more subjective that the sticker chart his teacher has.

Yesterday I came home from a meeting and instead of running out and demanding my attention, as is his wont, he continued what he was doing with play food inside a cardboard box. I went into his room to see what he was doing. He looked up at me and said “I’m listening to my music.” He had on the Suzuki Cello volume 1 CD. Three days ago, it was cello music. Today it was HIS music. I feel like something in how he listens has changed for him since we brought the cello home. Am I attaching more significance to that than what it deserves? Maybe. Time will tell. He did seem more centered than usual, if that word has any real meaning in this western society. But if that word doesn’t have any real meaning here, I think that Shinichi would still know what I mean. And he would approve.