When our daughter was very small — kindergarten small — she announced that she wanted to play the cello.

This was a surprise to her mother and me, since neither of us plays an instrument. On the other hand, we did meet as singers in high school, and for both of us, musical training started early and continued long after college. Shana still sings professionally from time to time, although my musical production tapered off years ago. (More on that later.)

I’d had a brief flirtation with the violin as a youngster, but the relationship didn’t take, so I was wary of Nina’s cello impulse. Cellos seemed exotic; cello lessons sounded expensive. We put her off as long as we could, but she was adamant, and after three years of lobbying, we finally relented.

Her first cello was a pitiful thing, a battered half-size instrument borrowed from school. And her first lessons…well, let’s just say that some things are better left undisturbed in the part of the brain where we bury past traumas.

Nina was starting from scratch. She was learning to make sounds with a new instrument, but she was also training her ear. And by “training her ear,” I mean she was struggling with the rudiments of pitch, melody, and rhythm.

In the beginning, she had no idea how much there was to learn. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, she didn’t know what she didn’t know. She practiced; she played; she listened to her saintly teachers. Bit by bit, the sounds she produced with her instrument started to match the tunes we were hearing in our heads, the ones she was supposed to be playing.

Year after year, she kept at it. Her teachers got better — and tougher. She traded in her half-size cello for a full size, and then got her very own cello, a good instrument that has been slowly renovated into an excellent one.

She kept practicing. She kept playing. She kept listening.

I’ve had a front-row seat to her musical education, perched on various sofas and chairs at her teachers’ studios. The music has gotten a lot more interesting. Each step of the way, by design, the technical demands have increased. Just as she mastered one bowing technique, another more difficult one would rear its head. Just as she figured out a certain finger position, there’d be another, crazier one that seemed to require joints of rubber and tendons of steel.

Of course, from my vantage, sunk in the overfilled cushions of an armchair, the matter was straightforward: the piece was supposed to sound like this, but so far, it only sounded like that. And the bar was always being raised. So you can play the note? Great, time to add vibrato. You can play vibrato? Wonderful. Now let’s address tone. You’ve got a handle on tone? Good. On to dynamics.

And so on and so forth, until the culmination of all her hard work and dedication: the day her teacher asked her to take everything she’d learned — theory, structure, technique — and wipe it from her conscious mind so she could concentrate on making music.

As an adult, it’s easy to forget what it feels like to sit in the student’s chair. We tend to organize our lives to avoid being put on the spot. The older we get, the more embarrassment we feel when we make a mistake. We shudder at the thought of exposing our flaws and weaknesses to someone whose job it is to point them out and correct them.

But sometimes the student’s chair is unavoidable, especially if you like to learn new things. Case in point: I recently decided to teach myself an obscure vocal form called Tuvan throat singing. Tuva is country near Outer Mongolia that was once part of the Soviet Union. It’s a land of nomads, rugged landscapes, and extreme weather. Over the millennia, the Tuvans developed a style of music for communicating on horseback across the open steppe: a combination of singing, whistling, and croaking that at times sounds like it’s from another planet.

YouTube has been a big help, but there are limits to what you can teach yourself by watching, listening, and practicing on your own. Which is how I found myself Skyping with a western master of throat singing, a fellow who traveled to Tuva to research his PhD, and who now gives concerts and lessons. I found him on YouTube giving Wynton Marsalis a mini-lecture on vocal overtones.

It was a productive lesson, but my cheeks were burning throughout. I hadn’t shared my awkward throat-singing with anyone, and here I was, kneeling on the floor in front of the computer, croaking my heart out in front of a modern master.

Afterwards, I compared notes with Nina. “I went in pretty confident,” I said. “But as soon as he asked me to do something new, I was like, ‘Blah!’”

“I know,” she said.

“All the hard work I did in practice seemed to melt away. Suddenly, I couldn’t make any of the sounds!”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

“Still, it’s good, I guess,” I said, sighing.

Then she gave me a hug. “Don’t worry, Papa,” she said. “You’ll get it. I know you will.”