Clean shoes. Check.
Sharpened pencils. Check.
Holiday adventure stories. Check.
Musical instrument … Check?
This week millions of school children all around Australia will return to their classrooms, their friends, their teachers and their mind–broadening education; that will include for some of those children — although not as many as one might hope — music and instrumental lessons.
If your child is one of the lucky ones, with an array of musical instruments on offer to learn, how do you negotiate this plethora of playing possibilities as a parent, and how do you help your child make the best decision for their musical and general future? After all, this decision may be one of the most important of their lives.
The first thing to remember is to trust your child. If they have been begging to play the viola for months (rare, but yes, it happens), then those messages under your pillow and the drawings of violas on the fridge might mean something. Your child knows what they want. They know the sound they want their musical voice to make in their world, and isn’t that great?
So the first step is taken, but then a pit starts to open up, waiting for you to fall into it.
Your child has an instrument, but now they want a bunch of other things: one of their mates is doing karate, so they need to join them; another friend has started cricket, so they need to do that as well. Before you know it, your child’s life (and yours, since you’re the parent taxi driver) is stuffed to overflowing with activities.
Last year I had the most wonderful violin student — let’s call her Alice. Alice was nine and playing the violin with great flair and grace, but Alice was also a ballet dancer, a gymnast, a trumpet player and a basketballer. At nine. Alice’s schedule was SO full, she didn’t have time to do anything except work. And she didn’t have time or mental space to properly practise the violin so her playing stopped developing, so she stopped enjoying it, so she stopped even vaguely trying to make time for it, so she began to hate it, and, you guessed it, Alice gave up. Isn’t nine too young to have given something up already? Alice didn’t have time to practise properly, but Alice also didn’t have time to get bored. Her life was so full of teachers telling her what to do and how to do it, that Alice didn’t know what to do on her own. Alice was being led away from her own life.
Do you remember those holidays back in childhood, with the long summer stretching for ever, and on day one and a half you crying out, “I’m BORED!!”? And your mum, or your grandma, saying some quip like “Only boring people are bored.” Or “If you’re bored, then do something about it. I’m not your entertainment.” And it was through those moments of misery that you began to discover, on your own, what you wanted, what fascinated you, what you loved.
To allow your child to flourish on their chosen instrument, they need to have room in their brains and schedules to play their instrument, to muck around, to come to it when they’re bored instead of having yet another activity to distract them. How many activities and instruments does a nine-year-old need?
And for a musical depiction, just listen to the beauty and perfection Arvo Pärt creates, with so few notes in Spiegel im Spiegel.
So this is a short ode to doing fewer things, and the ones we have left, giving them a real chance to flourish; giving ourselves a chance to be bored and the only thing left is that one instrument in the corner …
Ed Ayres presents Weekend Breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday 6am – 9am). He also presents The Art Show on RN (Wednesday 10am).