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I became a convert last night.

After a lifetime of thinking myself a piano player (note I didn't say the high falutin'  "pianist") courtesy of a few years of lessons in grade school and high school, and a maternal lifetime of hearing four kids practice for eight years of piano lessons and recitals and competitions each, I'd harbored no real affection for any other instrument.

Even when my youngest son, nearly eighteen, took up playing the violin about a year and a half ago, I wasn't won over.  Of course the first few months of this new effort naturally sounded like a cat being pulled tail-first through a wringer...but he jumped in with both feet, practicing hours a day, and by now has gotten startlingly, amazingly good at it.  Good enough, and gifted enough, to play occasionally at weddings and bars and restaurants with his wonderful violin-playing girlfriend and have people actually give them MONEY!!  The background music in my house has switched totally from Mozart and Beethoven (and of late, Journey and Billy Joel and Foreigner) on the keyboard to Scottish reels and Irish ballads on the violin.  I am truly blessed.

But until last night, unswayed.  That's when I sat to watch my son and some other kids in his youth orchestra sit for a learning and jam session with the Quartet San Francisco that was in town for a concert this Saturday.  These four remarkable, superlatively talented musicians take the phrase "chamber music" into the twenty-first century with playfulness and irreverance and downright glee.  I'd gone just so that I could see my kid in action, doing something he loved.  I left with a sense of slack-jawed amazement at a lot of things I'd seen and heard.  But one of them was the watershed realization of  how much more soul and versatility and depth a violin has in the hands of a joyful artist.  Part of it I think is the fundamental difference between a two-dimensional keyboard keeping the musician nailed to one fixed spot on a bench, and an instrument that melds to its owner with every tiny movement.  Some of it's the incredible variety of sounds, some fluid, others staccato, some completely counter-intuitive but still amazingly fun.

Driving home afteward, we drove through a Culvers to celebrate this remarkable evening with some remarkable sundaes.  Food always plays a part in celebrations!!  And the word that kept bursting forth from both of us as we drove home talking about the session was, to no surprise, "amazing"!!!!  Over, and over, and over!

The evening was a discovery I never expected to have...and aren't those always absolutely the best?

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