The Olshans are now in the sixth year of a running experiment: is it possible to take a child with a tin ear and turn her into a concert cellist?
I can already hear the objections welling up from the grandparents. “A tin ear? How dare you say that about our darling Nina? And do it publicly? In print? It’s scandalous!”
So let me start by saying that our precious little bundle has developed into a fine musician. Cello is only the beginning. Lately she’s been picking up guitar and ukulele. Not to mention singing a lot, especially in the car. But also confidently — and in tune! — at her school’s open-mike night.
But let’s call a spade a spade. For a long time — the stretch between birth and age twelve or so — Nina was, shall we say, musically challenged.
The damage she could do to ordinary songs was legendary. Even “Happy Birthday” would somehow wind up in a minor key, like something from a Tim Burton movie. Creepy!
This was quite painful for her parents. Shana and I met as singers back in high school, and both of us went on to sing the most challenging vocal repertory we could find. I stopped singing some years ago to focus on writing, but Shana still has a paid church gig. She’s the kind of musician who can show up on a Sunday thinking she’s going be singing one part, and wind up singing a part she’s never practiced. We’re talking early music here, complex polyphony, one person to a part, performed by a handful of singers without accompaniment. Very difficult stuff.
Ours is a house of music. We listen to it incessantly. We make it. We appreciate it. Nina was surrounded by music, enfolded by it, awash in it, from the day she was born. Even before she was born!
And yet.
We didn’t make a big deal of the fact that her singing was cringe-worthy. We just kept singing along with her, hoping that one day she’d make the connection between the sweet sounds going into her ear and the otherworldy ones coming out of her mouth.
It seemed that day would never come.
By the time she was eight, she’d been agitating for two years to learn cello. We held off as long as we could to make sure she was serious about cello and old enough to have a real go at it. We arranged lessons with her music teacher and borrowed a cello from the school, a 1/2-size beater of an instrument that sounded like a squawk box. And that was on a good day.
It would be nice, at this point in the story, if Nina were to pick up that school cello, flip ahead in her music book to a Bach suite, and miraculously rip into it, dazzling the room with her virtuosity.
Uh, no.
The same ear that was responsible for her Franken-singing carried over to the cello world. Only the cello was MUCH LOUDER.
As the parent who accompanied Nina to her cello lessons 99% of the time, I will say, at the risk of sounding like a bad parent — and worse, a musical snob — that the early years involved a great deal of personal sacrifice.
(If there are any music teachers reading this, I salute you!)
But she kept at it. She practiced, practiced, and practiced. This involved more sacrifices for everyone involved, including the neighbors.
Some time around year four, something clicked. She started to hear the music. When she’d hit a clunker of a note, there’d be a correction; soon the corrections were happening quicker and quicker.
Last Tuesday, I was sitting on the overstuffed couch at her teacher’s studio, reading the New Yorker, as usual, when all of a sudden the music overtook me. I thought Nina’s teacher was playing a particularly difficult passage to show her how it should sound. The notes came fast and furious; the phrases had shape and line; the low strings throbbed; the high strings sang out in perfect tune.
I looked up.
There she was, in all her fourteen-year-old glory, her mouth puckered with concentration, her eyes devouring the page, the music just pouring out of her.
I was in awe while it was happening. As I write it, though, my eyes are full of tears.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 29 November 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
