Rethinking Genius

The ideal age to start children on music is something hotly debated across several fields of study.  Neuroscientists research brain development before and after musical education...teachers study a student's attention span after music exposure...math experts wonder if music students are able to understand fractions more quickly... the list seems endless. I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this topic.  I wanted to talk about longevity. Honestly, I feel that that the best  reason to start a child on music at a young age is so the child can start forming the habit of music.  Playing an instrument is complicated. Any number of hurdles will hold back a musician's progress.  And the sad fact is that even if a child starts young only a small percentage of children ever "make it" (I mean this in the loosest of terms: mastering the instrument enough to have a degree of fluency). Music is a lifestyle.  In order to be truly successful at learning...

I am a violist at heart.  It's a sort of cruel irony that violinists usually switch to viola to avoid the higher sounds but then you have to primarily teach those higher sounds to students until some of them decide to join your viola ways. Besides just being a less commonly heard of instrument, the reason why violists are fewer in number is a physics problem.  The C string (the lowest string on the viola) is much thicker than the G.  In order to vibrate and make a sound the string must be a certain length. This posses no problem on tiny cellos because even the smallest cello is about the size of a full-size violin.  However, the fractional violins are much smaller than that.  The shortest viola strings manufactured fit on a 12 inch viola (or a 1/2 size violin).  So the student starting the viola needs to be physically big enough in order to make the attempt. In a nutshell: it takes awhile before a teacher can start to acquire some viola students. ...