Giving a Gift Unlike Any Other

          How about giving your child a gift that is comparable to a college education but, unlike a college education, can only be obtained through your actions? What if it requires all of your patience, perseverance, tact and authority? What if it enables you to spend countless hours with your child in pursuit of that almost-forgotten goal—excellence? What do Jack Benny, Thomas Jefferson, Sherlock Holmes, Albert Einstein and Edward Teller have in common?

            I am suggesting that the finest gift you can give your child is to see that she or he learns to play a musical instrument – learns to play it well with grace, poise, ease and competence, and well enough to be a professional musician.

            To play an instrument competently is to give outward expression to the feelings for order and beauty that lay within us. It requires both mental discipline and complete control of the body by the mind. Accomplished musicians, be they ever so gifted, know how to work hard and how to concentrate. They have had to do both for years.

            By learning to play an instrument, your child earns a passport to participation in the world of music—a large and fascinating world. The person who can only listen to music should eagerly partake of the pleasure, just as a single lady should not deny herself the reading of romantic novels.  But in music, as in love, the greatest rewards fall to the active participants.

            In playing the music of Beethoven and Mozart, one becomes an active collaborator with men who knew as much about beauty as it is given for mortal man to know. But their music must be played for it to live. To play their music brings feelings of self-fulfillment and satisfaction that are as inexplicable as they are real.

            There are other musical worlds (classical music is the one I am familiar with), but they all start out with music lessons and practicing.

            It takes self-discipline of a high order, on the part of both child and parents, to set a goal of practicing one hour every day and then do it, day after day, month after month, year after year. It takes the same self-discipline that leads to success in business, science, politics or any other field. All the people listed earlier are, or were, successful in fields other than music while being accomplished musicians.

            By learning to play an instrument, your child can see firsthand the relationships between self-discipline, hard work and accomplishment, but these are fringe benefits.

            Another fringe benefit of playing is the opportunity to meet interesting people. My wife and I have played for musicals, operas, ballets, in symphony orchestras, at weddings and in chamber groups. She is a mother and homemaker, as well as an accomplished musician. I am an engineer. Among the people I have played chamber music with are my wife, my kids, a professor of philosophy, a judge, a liquor store clerk, the medical director of a leper sanitarium in India, a psychiatrist, the husband of an author who worked on her famous diary while we played, and a retired symphony conductor still hale at 80 and living on the top of the Santa Cruz mountains.

            Only the parents can give a child the opportunity to learn to play well. Except in rare cases, a person must start before the age of six or seven to become truly proficient. At that age, no child can be expected to want to play badly enough to put in the time and work required. Beethoven, Mozart and Heifitz were made to practice by their parents. Your child may never become a Beethoven, but you can make the decision that will enable him or her to develop his or her love and appreciation of beauty far beyond anything she or he can expect if you don’t act. And if you don’t do it, be assured no one else will.

            Don’t ask your young child if he or she wants to study music. The child has no way of either knowing the answer to the question or realizing its importance. The decision, seriously made, involves the expenditure of money for instruments, lessons, music, and transportation. It means the investment of thousands of hours of the child’s time and hundreds of hours of the teacher’s time for what may seem like an eternity for the parents. It is too important a decision to be left to a child.

            This does not mean that the child’s interests and abilities are not to be considered—they are of utmost importance.  But the parent must make the decisions, for the most part, on the basis of indirect evidence, and then nourish the interest. Does the child respond to music at church or at the circus? Do the parents enjoy music? Is there anyone in either family who plays or sings?        

            Even those who sincerely try may not make it to the heights reached by the great artists. In fact, they almost certainly won’t become a Kreisler or a Rubenstein. That requires special and rare gifts of talent in addition to years of dedicated work, and after that, one still needs enough lucky breaks to make a gambler rich. But the world of amateur music has room for all kinds of people and their accomplishments. At every level there are kindred spirits, and a more interesting group of kindred spirits would be hard to find.

Robert M. Lee