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By Root 258 0

with energy and the sounds of twenty different instruments. Not only did Lulu have her lesson with Mr. Shugart; she went straight from there to a group Suzuki class with him, followed by a violin-piano duo session with Sophia. (Lulu’s piano lessons, which we had not abandoned, were on Fridays.) Back at home, despite the three-hour lesson block we’d just had, I would often try to sneak in an extra postlesson practice session—nothing like getting a good jump on the next week! At night, after Lulu was asleep, I read treatises about violin technique and listened to CDs of Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, or Midori, trying to figure out what they were doing to sound so good.

I admit that this schedule might sound a little intense. But I felt that I was in a race against time. Children in China practice ten hours a day. Sarah Chang auditioned for Zubin Mehta of the NewYork Philharmonic at the age of eight. Every year some new seven-year-old from Latvia or Croatia wins an international competition playing the monstrously difficult Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which I couldn’t wait for Lulu to get to. Besides, I was already at a disadvantage because I had an American husband who believed that childhood should be fun. Jed always wanted to play board games with the girls, or go mini-golfing with them, or worst of all, drive them to faraway water parks with dangerous slides. What I liked best to do with the girls was to read to them; Jed and I did that every night, and it was always everyone’s favorite hour of the day.

The violin is really hard—in my view, much harder to learn than the piano. First, there is the matter of holding the thing, which isn’t an issue with the piano. Contrary to what a normal person might think, the violin isn’t held up by the left arm; it only looks that way. According to the famous violin teacher Carl Flesch in The Art of Violin Playing, the violin is to be “placed on the collarbone” and “kept in place by the left lower jaw,” leaving the left hand free to move around.

If you think holding something in place with your collarbone and lower left jaw is uncomfortable, you are correct. Add to this a wooden chin rest and metal clamps jutting into your neck, and the result is the “violin hickey”: a rough, often irritated red blotch just under the chin, which most violinists and violists have, and even consider a badge of honor.

Then there’s “intonation”—meaning how in tune you are—another reason I think the violin is harder than the piano, at least for beginners. With piano you just push a key and you know what note you’re getting. With violin, you have to place your finger exactly on the right spot on the fingerboard—if you’re even just 1/10 of a centimeter off, you’re not perfectly in tune. Even though the violin has only four strings, it can produce 53 different notes measured by half-step increments—and infinitely more tone colors by using different strings and bowing techniques. It’s often said that the violin can capture every emotion and that it’s the instrument closest to the human voice.

One thing that the piano and violin have in common—with each other but also with many sports—is that you can’t play extraordinarily well unless you’re relaxed. Just as you can’t have a killer tennis serve or throw a baseball really far unless you keep your arm loose, you can’t produce a mellifluous tone on the violin if you squeeze the bow too tightly or mash down on the strings—mashing is what makes the horrible scratchy sound. “Imagine that you’re a rag doll,” Mr. Shugart would tell Lulu. “Floppy and relaxed, and not a care in the world. You’re so relaxed your arm feels heavy from its own weight.... Let gravity do all the work.... Good, Lulu, good.”

“RELAX!” I screamed at home. “Mr. Shugart said RAG DOLL!” I always tried my best to reinforce Mr. Shugart’s points, but things were tough with Lulu, because my very presence made her edgy and irritable.

Once, in the middle of a practice session she burst out, “Stop it, Mommy. Just stop it.”

“Lulu, I didn’t say anything,” I replied. “I didn’t say one word.”

“Your brain