This September we are delighted to feature Zaara Shareef as our Student of the Month! Zaara has been taking voice lessons at our Sunnyvale location for four years, since 2022, with Teacher Gaby.
She sang “Skyfall” at a recent recital, and several parents went out of their way afterward to tell her family how much they had enjoyed it. Ask Zaara what she likes most about singing and she will tell you it is discovering new ways to improve her voice, which is a fairly serious answer from an eleven-year-old.
Read more about Zaara’s experience at CCM below!
Student of the Month Questionnaire – Zaara Shareef
What is your name?
Zaara Shareef.
How old are you?
I am 11 years old.
Who is your teacher?
Ms. Gaby.
How long have you been taking voice lessons?
Four years, since 2022.
What advice would you give to a voice student just starting out at CCM?
To always arrive to your lesson on time and always practice after your lessons!
What piece are you looking forward to learning someday?
Not a particular piece, but I want to try different varieties of songs.
What is your favorite thing about voice lessons and singing?
Discovering new ways to improve my vocal skills.
What is your favorite food?
Burritos.
Do you have a pet?
Yes, I have two cats.
Do you play any sports or do any other activities outside of music lessons?
Yes, I play the piano and I enjoy playing volleyball.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I want to be either a lawyer, a governor, or the U.S. President.
What is your most memorable experience at CCM?
I love the recitals. I especially love how all the parents clap for me at the end. It makes me feel I did an awesome job, which I always do.
Parent Spotlight – Nuzhath Jahan
Regarding voice instruction, what are you most proud of your child accomplishing?
I am incredibly proud of how Zaara’s voice skills have grown. Her recent recital performance of “Skyfall” was wonderful, and it was touching when several parents shared their appreciation for her singing afterward.
What advice would you give a new parent starting in the program?
Encourage your child to practice regularly, even for a few minutes a day. With consistent practice and encouragement, they’ll build confidence and see improvement over time.
Why did you decide to give your child a musical upbringing?
I’ve always loved music, but I never got the chance to learn it myself. So I wanted my kids to have that opportunity — to not only enjoy music, but learn it, grow through it, and hopefully bring joy to others through their music.
Congratulations, Zaara!
Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
A four-year-old spent a summer at her grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where there was no piano. She composed three waltzes anyway. She held them in her head until the family went home, sat down at the keyboard, and played them.
Amy Beach is our Composer of the Month for September. By the time anyone thought to give her lessons, she had been composing for years.
Early Life and Inspirations
She was born Amy Marcy Cheney on September 5, 1867, in Henniker, New Hampshire, into a family that noticed early what they had.
At two she was improvising harmony against the tunes her mother sang, singing a second line underneath rather than copying the first. At three she taught herself to read. At four came the waltzes composed away from any instrument, which is the detail that tells you the most about her. She was not working things out with her hands. She was hearing them.
This is worth sitting with, because it is the thing we tell parents about young children and music. The ear arrives before the technique does, and often long before anyone is formally taught anything. Beach simply had an unusually clear example of it.
The Symphony No American Woman Had Written
On October 30, 1896, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere of her Symphony in E minor, the piece everyone calls the Gaelic Symphony. It was the first symphony written and published by an American woman.
She had been drawn to a collection of old Gaelic folk tunes and described being taken by their simple, rugged, unpretentious beauty. She built a full symphony out of that interest, at a time when a great many people believed American composers had to study in Europe to be taken seriously.
Beach never did. She is generally counted as the first American classical composer to reach that level without a European training behind her, and audiences in Europe took to her music anyway.
Teaching Herself
Here is the part that surprises most musicians. Amy Beach had one year of formal composition lessons, in Boston, and that was all.
After that she built her own course of study. She got hold of scores and worked through them systematically, in her words: “I copied and memorized whole scores of symphonies.” She translated treatises on orchestration for herself. She learned how a symphony was made by taking symphonies apart.
Her circumstances shaped the choice. She married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885, and as a married woman of her time and class she agreed to limit her public performing, appearing roughly once a year and giving the proceeds to charity. Composition became the work she could do without restriction, and she did an enormous amount of it, more than 150 numbered pieces across songs, chamber music, choral works and orchestral scores.
She returned to the concert stage in her forties and toured widely, playing her own music to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. She kept composing until the end of her life in 1944.
What Students Can Learn from Amy Beach
Two things in her story are worth passing to a young musician.
The ear leads. A child who can hold a tune in her head, turn it over, and change it is already composing, whether or not she can write a note of it down. Beach did this at four in a house with no piano. Encourage the humming, the making things up, the playing by ear. That is not a detour from real musicianship. It is the foundation of it.
Curiosity beats credentials. One year of lessons and a lifetime of taking scores apart produced a symphony the Boston Symphony premiered. Students sometimes believe there is an official path and that missing it settles the question. Beach is the counterexample. She wanted to know how the music worked, so she found out.
Start Listening
Begin with The Year’s at the Spring, a setting of Robert Browning that became one of the best-loved American songs of its era. It is short, immediately appealing, and within reach of many voice students. Its companion, Ah, Love, but a Day, is the other Browning setting worth knowing.
Violinists should go to the Violin Sonata in A minor, written the same year the Gaelic Symphony was premiered. It is full-blooded Romantic writing and it deserves to be played far more often than it is.
Then the Gaelic Symphony itself, for the scale of the thing, and the Piano Quintet in F sharp minor if you want to hear her at her most concentrated.
Listen for how she handles a melody she did not write. In the Gaelic Symphony the folk tunes are never merely quoted and decorated. They get pulled into the argument of the piece and changed by it, which is a much harder thing to do and a good deal more interesting to follow.
Much of her music is available through IMSLP, and there are now excellent recordings of the symphony, the concerto and the chamber works.
Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
Our August Musician of the Month turns 81 on August 31. Itzhak Perlman heard a violin on the radio when he was three years old and decided that was the instrument. A year later he caught polio. He has played sitting down ever since, and for six decades he has been one of the most recognizable living violinists.
Early Life and Inspirations
He was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to parents who had emigrated from Poland. Neither was a musician. The radio did the recruiting.
He was turned away from the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin properly, so he taught himself on a toy instrument until they relented. He studied at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv with Rivka Goldgart from the age of five, and gave his first public concert at ten.
The polio arrived when he was four and left his legs permanently affected. He performs seated and uses crutches or a scooter to get to the chair. His disability is not a prelude to the music or a problem the story needs him to overcome. It is simply part of how he performs, as it has been throughout his public career.
The Ed Sullivan Show and What Came After
In 1958, at thirteen, he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in front of an American television audience of millions. The family moved to New York shortly afterward, and he entered Juilliard to study with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, two of the most influential violin teachers of the second half of the twentieth century.
His Carnegie Hall debut came in 1963. The following year he won the Leventritt Competition, the breakthrough that launched his international career in earnest.
He has since collected sixteen Grammy Awards and four Emmys. He received the Medal of Liberty in 1986, the National Medal of Arts in 2000, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. That last citation named him not only as a musician but as an important voice on behalf of people with disabilities. He has spent decades pushing concert halls to be places that disabled audiences and disabled performers can actually get into.
The Voice Behind the Films
If you have never been to a classical concert, you have almost certainly still heard him play.
The violin solos in Schindler’s List are his. So are the ones in Memoirs of a Geisha. John Williams hoped Perlman would play the central violin part, and the sound of that recording is restrained, unhurried and never showy. It is a fair introduction to what he does.
He plays the 1714 “Soil” Stradivari, which previously belonged to Yehudi Menuhin. He acquired it from Menuhin in 1986 and has played it ever since.
Teaching has also become a central part of his work. He has held the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in violin at Juilliard since 2003, and he and his wife Toby run a summer program for string players aged twelve to eighteen on Shelter Island in New York.
What Students Can Learn from Itzhak Perlman
The Perlman Music Program has a phrase we like a great deal: connection over competition. Admission is based on musical ability, and even the orchestra seating is noncompetitive and regularly rotated, so students experience both leading and supporting roles. The whole design encourages young musicians to become collaborators rather than rivals. Coming from someone whose career has included nearly every major musical honor, that is worth paying attention to.
The other lesson is about tone. Perlman is a formidable technician, but what many listeners remember first is not his speed. It is the warmth of the sound. Students often assume the impressive thing is velocity. It almost never is.
Start Listening
Start with the Schindler’s List theme, because you will recognize it and because it shows what he can do with a very simple line.
Then the Beethoven Violin Concerto for the full-scale version of him, and the Mendelssohn Piano Trios he recorded with Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax if you want to hear him listening to other players rather than leading.
And if you would like to hear him somewhere unexpected, find In the Fiddler’s House, his klezmer recordings. He is unmistakably himself on them, and clearly having the time of his life.
Sign up for a FREE introductory lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
Parents ask us this more often than any other question about age: is my child too old to begin?
Usually the child in question is nine, or eleven, or thirteen. Sometimes a friend started at four and the comparison has been sitting there ever since. The worry is always the same underneath, that a window has quietly closed while nobody was looking.
It hasn’t. The research on this is clearer than you might expect, and the lives of the musicians below make the same point in a way no study can.
What the research actually says about starting age
For a long time the assumption was that an early start was decisive, and it looked that way in the data. Musicians who began young did tend to achieve more.
Then researchers asked a better question. In 2021, a team publishing in Psychological Science studied 310 professional musicians alongside 7,786 twins. When they compared starting ages, the early-start advantage showed up as expected. When they accounted for how many hours each musician had practiced over a lifetime, it disappeared.
The most striking part involved identical twins who had started at different ages. Within those pairs, where genetics and upbringing are held constant, the effect of starting age was exactly zero.
The professionals in that study had begun anywhere between the ages of two and eighteen.
What that suggests is not that starting age is meaningless, but that it was standing in for something else. Children who start early usually accumulate more practice, and it was the practice doing the work. A child who begins at eleven and plays regularly for years is on the same road as a child who began at five and did the same.
Musicians who started later than you would guess
Elvis Presley got his first guitar for his eleventh birthday
On January 8, 1946, Gladys Presley took her son to the Tupelo Hardware Store in Mississippi and bought him a guitar for $7.75. He was eleven that day.
He had sung before then, in church and at a county fair, but the instrument that became inseparable from his name arrived on an ordinary birthday, from a mother on a tight budget. Ten years later he was the most famous performer in America.
Louis Armstrong learned cornet at eleven, at a boys’ home in New Orleans
Armstrong’s musical education began in earnest at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where a teacher named Peter Davis took him on and taught him to play the cornet properly.
He learned quickly enough to lead the home’s brass band before he left in 1914. Everything that followed, and he reshaped American music more thoroughly than almost anyone, grew from lessons that started when he was about eleven years old with a teacher who paid attention to him.
Hector Berlioz started at twelve, on flute and guitar, and never learned the piano
Berlioz began studying music at twelve, quickly teaching himself enough to write small pieces and arrangements. He played the flute and the guitar as a boy. He never learned to play the piano, which was close to unthinkable for a composer of his era, and it stayed true for the whole of his life.
At seventeen his father sent him to Paris to study medicine, and he stuck with it long enough to earn a degree in science before deciding that music was the actual plan. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at twenty-two.
Not knowing the piano seems to have shaped his music rather than limited it. He wrote for the orchestra directly, without a keyboard player’s habits standing between him and the sound he was after, and he became one of the boldest orchestrators anyone had heard. We featured him as our Composer of the Month.
Jimi Hendrix bought his first real guitar at fifteen
Hendrix was fifteen when his father bought him an acoustic guitar in 1958 for around five dollars. He had no formal training and could not read music. He learned by ear, listening to records and working out what he heard.
He had roughly twelve years of playing ahead of him. In that time he changed what people believed a guitar could do.
Fifteen is older than most parents imagine is workable. It plainly was.
Ella Fitzgerald first sang in public at seventeen, and had planned to dance
On November 21, 1934, a seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald stepped onto the stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for Amateur Night. She had come to dance.
The act before her was a pair of accomplished dancers, and standing in the wings she changed her mind and sang instead. She sang Judy and The Object of My Affection, and she won.
She went on to become one of the most admired singers of the twentieth century. We featured her as our Musician of the Month for her extraordinary ear and her sense of time.
Luciano Pavarotti began serious voice study at nineteen
Pavarotti had wanted to play professional soccer. His mother steered him toward teaching instead, and he spent two years in front of an elementary school class before music became the plan.
He started studying seriously in 1954, at nineteen, with a tenor in Modena named Arrigo Pola. Pola knew the family had no money and taught him for free. They worked together almost daily for three years, and the training continued for seven.
His case is the one classical families should know about, because in singing a later start is not a disadvantage. It is the norm. The voice is still developing through adolescence, and most teachers wait for it rather than pushing a young instrument to do things it is not ready for. A thirteen-year-old who has never had a voice lesson is not behind. They are on time.
What actually makes the difference
Across these lives a pattern shows up, and it is not talent arriving on schedule.
It depends partly on the instrument. Piano and violin do reward an early start, which is why our youngest students begin at four. Voice runs the other way, for the reason above. Guitar sits comfortably in between. So the honest answer to “are we too late” begins with which instrument, and for most of them the window is far wider than parents assume.
Regular practice, sustained over years. This is what the twin study isolated. Not intensity in bursts, but returning to the instrument often enough that the work compounds.
A teacher who pays attention. Peter Davis is not a household name, and Louis Armstrong’s career began in his classroom. The right teacher at the right moment does more for a young musician than any starting age.
Music the child actually wants to play. A student who is interested practices without being asked, which is the whole game. This matters more at eleven than at five, because an older child has opinions and those opinions are useful.
Time to be a beginner. Older beginners often learn faster, since they can concentrate longer, understand explanations, and practice deliberately. What they need is permission to sound like a beginner for a while.
Starting music lessons at nine, twelve, or fifteen
An older beginner is not a late version of a young one. They are a different student, and in some ways an easier one to teach.
They can hold an idea across a week. They can be told why a passage is difficult and use the answer. They usually have a reason for being there, which is worth more than any head start.
What they need from a school is a teacher who takes them seriously rather than treating them as behind, music chosen for where they actually are, and a first year that builds confidence instead of testing it.
At CCM we teach piano, guitar, violin and voice at our Sunnyvale, Fremont and Redwood City locations, to students who begin at four and students who begin at fourteen.
Beginning
If your child has been curious about an instrument, that curiosity is the thing worth acting on. It is more predictive than their age, and it does not always wait around.
The simplest first step is to meet a teacher and see what a lesson feels like. We offer a free trial lesson for exactly that. Your child meets their teacher, sees the school, and plays a little music. There is nothing to prepare, and if you do not have an instrument yet we can provide one for the trial.
Elvis was eleven. Berlioz never did learn the piano. Hendrix was fifteen. Pavarotti was teaching school. Ella had come to dance.
Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music and find out what your child makes of it.
Every week, a parent asks us some version of the same question. Their child’s week is already full—school, homework, soccer, dinner, bed. Does music actually do anything for them, or is it one more thing?
The short answer is yes, though not necessarily for the reasons you’ve heard. You’ve seen the headlines: music lessons raise IQ; music students do better in math and science. There is research behind those claims, and it would be convenient for us to point to it and move on. But the evidence is less conclusive than the headlines suggest. Compare children taking music lessons with children participating in another structured activity—a sport, a second language, a chess club—and much of the apparent cognitive advantage disappears. Families who enroll their children in lessons often differ in ways that have nothing to do with music.
Here is what the research does support, and what we have seen ourselves across fifteen years of teaching.
Music students do better in math and science
The largest study on this followed 112,916 students through high school. Those who took instrumental music scored significantly higher in Grade 10 mathematics and science, and in English.
What makes the study unusual is how hard the researchers worked to rule out the obvious objection. The association held after the researchers accounted for earlier academic performance, language and cultural background, and neighborhood socioeconomic status. Those controls make the finding more persuasive, though an observational study cannot prove that the lessons caused the higher scores.
The effect was strongest for students who played an instrument rather than sang, and it grew with how long and how seriously they were involved.
A separate analysis using data from the large American ABCD Study found that children consistently engaged in music training for two years scored higher on several cognitive and language tasks, with the clearest gain over time appearing in picture vocabulary.
What a randomized trial found about IQ
Correlations are one thing. The stronger test is to assign children to lessons at random, and that has been done.
Researchers at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto took 144 six-year-olds and randomly assigned them to keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama, or no lessons at all, for 36 weeks. Every group gained IQ over the year, since all of them had started school. But the children who received music lessons gained about three points more than those who did not.
It is a modest number and the study is one of its kind, so we would not want to oversell it. But it is a properly randomized trial published in a leading journal, and it points the same direction as everything else here.
Reading starts with the ear
Before a child can read a word, they have to hear that it is made of separate sounds. That skill, phonological awareness, is one of the strongest predictors of how easily a child learns to read, and music training improves it.
A meta-analysis of thirteen studies found a small but statistically reliable gain. Its model suggested roughly forty hours of training might be needed before a reliable effect appeared in rhyming skills, though the authors urged caution about that figure. It did not find a statistically reliable overall improvement in reading fluency. For children with dyslexia specifically, a randomized trial with a proper comparison group, though a relatively small one, found that rhythm-focused music training improved phonological awareness and reading accuracy. The proportion of children still classified as very poor text readers was roughly half that of the comparison group.
Hands and ears, measured
These are the least-discussed benefits and the best evidenced.
Manual dexterity and two-handed coordination. Children who learn an instrument improve on standard tests of fine motor skill. In one study, which used group-based music training rather than private lessons, the gains were still present four months after the training ended. A separate two-year randomized school trial also found improvements in fine motor skill and auditory memory, though it did not produce broad gains across every outcome it measured.
Hearing. Trained musicians discriminate pitch far more finely than untrained listeners, and performed better on one study’s attentive sound-tracking task, with the groups matched for IQ. Worth knowing: the same study found no advantage in understanding speech against competing talkers or background noise.
Fine motor control and careful listening are valuable in their own right, whatever a child eventually chooses to do.
What fifteen years has shown us
Research can tell you what happens on average. It cannot tell you what a Tuesday afternoon looks like. This part is ours.
Five minutes is enough to start. Parents rarely believe this. A young beginner practicing five careful minutes a day will get further than one practicing thirty distracted ones. We say practice makes permanence, not practice makes perfect, because whatever a student repeats is what they learn, mistakes included. The research agrees here: when practice is measured properly rather than self-reported, sheer quantity barely predicts the quality of the playing.
Showing up matters more than the length of the session. We run practice challenges for exactly that reason. Thirty days earns a ribbon and a certificate, fifty earns a medal, and a hundred days earns a trophy and a name on our Wall of Fame.
Progress rarely looks like progress. The signs parents tend to watch for, playing faster and louder and moving through the book, are the ones teachers trust least. The real markers are quieter. A child who stops at a mistake and works on that one measure instead of restarting the whole piece is practicing well, even though it sounds worse from the next room. A child who has become fussier about their own playing has not got worse. They have started hearing things they could not hear a year ago.
Milestones do not run on a schedule. Parents often arrive wanting to know when their child should be reading music, or playing with both hands, or performing from memory. We understand the impulse, but the honest answer is that every child arrives at these things on their own timeline, and a child who is slower to one is frequently quicker to the next. What we can say with confidence is that time spent early on posture and technique is the best investment available. Students who are set up properly at the beginning learn faster for years afterward, and students who are rushed spend that time later undoing habits instead.
What makes a beginner take off is remarkably consistent. Practice happens daily, even briefly. Lessons happen every week rather than when the calendar allows. Home is encouraging about it. And in the early years, a parent sits in on the lesson and helps at home during the week, which does more than almost anything else we could ask for.
Where it can lead
Our students have won the Guitar Foundation of America’s Junior, Senior and International competitions, and the Parkening Competition. They have performed on NPR’s From the Top and Tiny Desk, been recognized by YoungArts, and have organized their own fundraisers raising thousands of dollars for charity.
We mention this not because we expect any of it from a beginner, but because it is the honest ceiling of what a music education can become when a young person and a good teacher stay with it.
What students take with them
The ones who stay through high school tend to leave with four things.
Music becomes part of their college application, and in an admissions process where thousands of strong students look interchangeable on paper, years of serious musical work is a genuine differentiator. They keep a relationship with their teacher that often outlasts the lessons themselves. They take the instrument with them when they go. And they find their people, because musicians tend to locate each other quickly wherever they land.
None of that shows up in a study. It is simply what we have watched happen.
Common questions
Do music lessons help with math?
The largest study on the question, following 112,916 students, found that those who took instrumental music scored higher in Grade 10 mathematics and science, with the advantage holding after family background and prior achievement were taken into account.
Do music lessons make children smarter?
A randomized trial of 144 six-year-olds found that a year of music lessons produced a gain of about three IQ points over children who did not take them. Researchers continue to debate how much of the wider academic advantage is caused by lessons and how much reflects who chooses them, but the association itself is consistent and large.
What age should a child start?
Earlier is not automatically better, and the evidence for a hard cutoff is much weaker than it is usually presented. Professional musicians in one large study had started anywhere between the ages of two and eighteen. In practice the right moment is when a child is curious and can sit with an adult for a few minutes at a time. We teach students from age four.
How long should my child practice each day?
Less than you think, especially at the start. Five minutes of careful work is genuinely enough for a young beginner. Their teacher will tell you when it should grow.
Which instrument should we start with?
The one your child is drawn to. Interest predicts whether they keep playing better than almost anything else we can measure. We teach guitar, piano, violin and voice, and we are happy to talk it through before you commit to anything.
Is it too late for my child to start?
Almost certainly not. Adults learn instruments successfully all the time, and so do teenagers who have never touched one.
Coming to see us
The California Conservatory of Music has taught guitar, piano, violin and voice for fifteen years, in Sunnyvale, Fremont and Redwood City, to students from age four through to adults picking up an instrument for the first time.
The research above is encouraging, but it is not really why families stay. They stay because a child who could not play anything in September plays something in June, and because standing up in front of a room and doing it well changes how a young person carries themselves.
If you would like to see what that looks like, we offer a free introductory lesson.
Where this comes from
Claims about research should be checkable, so here is what the above rests on.
- Guhn, Emerson & Gouzouasis, “A Population-Level Analysis of Associations Between School Music Participation and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 2020. The 112,916-student study.
- Schellenberg, “Music Lessons Enhance IQ,” Psychological Science, 2004. The randomized trial.
- Habibi et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The ABCD Study analysis, nearly 12,000 children.
- Gordon, Fehd & McCandliss, Frontiers in Psychology, 2015. Phonological awareness meta-analysis.
- Flaugnacco et al., PLoS ONE, 2015. The randomized trial in children with dyslexia.
- Martins et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2018, and Neves et al., Cognition, 2025. Motor skill and auditory memory.
- Madsen, Marschall, Dau & Oxenham, Scientific Reports, 2019. Pitch discrimination.
- Duke, Simmons & Cash, Journal of Research in Music Education, 2009. What effective practice actually looks like.
Sign up for a FREE introductory lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
In 1913 a nineteen-year-old walked into the most prestigious competition in French music, went up against men six years older than she was, and won it outright. Lili Boulanger was the first woman ever to take the first prize for composition, and our Composer of the Month for August. She wrote a small body of remarkable music in a short life, and people are still discovering it a century later.
Early Life and Inspirations
She was born into a musical household in Paris. Her father Ernest was a composer who had won the Prix de Rome himself, decades earlier. Her mother Raïssa was a Russian singer. Her older sister Nadia, six years ahead of her, would go on to become one of the most influential composition teachers of the twentieth century, the woman who taught Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla and Quincy Jones.
There is a story from the family that their father, already elderly, asked six-year-old Nadia to promise she would look after her baby sister. Nadia kept that promise for the rest of Lili’s life, and for sixty-one years after it.
Lili was two when she caught bronchial pneumonia. She survived, but her health remained fragile for the rest of her life. She could not attend school reliably. What she could do was sit in on Nadia’s lessons at the Paris Conservatoire, absorbing harmony and counterpoint before she was old enough to enroll.
The Prize No Woman Had Won
The Prix de Rome was the most prestigious award in French music. Berlioz won it. Debussy won it. Women had only been permitted to enter the composition competition since 1903, and none had taken the first prize.
In 1913, at nineteen, Lili entered with a cantata called Faust et Hélène. She was the youngest competitor by six years. She won the Premier Grand Prix with thirty-one of the thirty-six votes.
The press coverage was enormous, and much of it focused on her age and her gender rather than her music. What the music itself showed was a composer who already knew exactly what she wanted: long unfolding lines, harmony that moves in unexpected directions, and an unusual gift for setting text so that the words keep their shape.
Five Extraordinary Years
Her health shaped how she worked without ever stopping her. She wrote from a chair, or from bed on the harder days, and in the five years after the Prix de Rome she produced many of the works for which she is now best known.
Two pieces from that stretch show her range better than any description could. Psalm 130, “Du fond de l’abîme,” is enormous and slow and shadowed, written for choir and orchestra and dedicated to her father’s memory. D’un matin de printemps is five minutes of spring light, quick and bright and full of air. She was working on both at the same time, which tells you something about the size of the imagination involved.
Her last piece was a Pie Jesu, dictated to Nadia when writing had become too difficult. Lili died in March 1918, at twenty-four.
Nadia lived another sixty-one years, and spent a good deal of that time making sure her sister’s music was published, performed and taught. It is largely thanks to her that we can still hear it.
What Students Can Learn from Lili Boulanger
There are two things in her story worth passing on to a young musician.
The first is that she was in the room. Long before she was old enough to be a student herself, she was sitting in on her sister’s lessons, listening to material she was not supposed to understand yet. Being around music you cannot play yet is not wasted time. It is how the ear gets built.
The second is that she wrote what she wanted to write. She was nineteen and the entire French musical establishment was watching, and she did not produce something safe. Students often think there is a correct thing to make. There usually isn’t.
Start Listening
Begin with D’un matin de printemps. It runs about five minutes, it exists in versions for orchestra, for piano trio, and for violin or flute with piano, and it is within reach of many advanced students. It sounds like a morning.
Then try Psalm 130 if you want to hear the full scale of what she could do, and the Pie Jesu if you want to hear the last thing she wrote.
Listen for the restless movement in D’un matin de printemps, the way the colors keep shifting under a line that never quite settles. In Psaume 130, listen for how gradually it expands, and how much scale she builds from a quiet opening.
Many of her scores are available through IMSLP, though copyright status varies by country and edition. There is not very much of it. That is rather the point.
Sign up for a FREE introductory lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
This August, we are delighted to feature guitar student Constantine Chua as our Student of the Month! Constantine is 16 and has been taking guitar lessons at our Sunnyvale location for five years, studying with Teacher Abshir. Outside of music he runs varsity track and cross country, and he brings that same consistency to the instrument. Read more about Constantine’s experience at CCM below!
Student of the Month Questionnaire – Constantine Chua
What is your name?
Constantine Chua
How old are you?
16 years old
Who is your teacher?
Teacher Abshir
How long have you been taking guitar lessons?
5 years
What advice would you give to a guitar student just starting out at CCM?
Only learn pieces that you enjoy and can get excited about playing!
What piece are you looking forward to learning someday?
Zapateado
What is your favorite thing about playing guitar?
The wide variety of repertoire
What is your favorite food?
Clam Chowder
Do you have a pet?
I have a Jack Russell Terrier named Cleo
Do you play any sports or do any other activities outside of music lessons?
I run varsity track and cross country.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I haven’t decided yet, but I aim to inspire people and be able to contribute to society.
What is your most memorable experience at CCM?
I enjoy showing up to my weekly lessons with Teacher Abshir, and always coming out having learned something new!
Parent Spotlight – Evelyn Chua
Regarding guitar instruction, what are you most proud of your child accomplishing?
I am most proud of Constantine’s growth from a young beginner into a dedicated and accomplished guitarist. He has developed the confidence to perform and continues to challenge himself while retaining a genuine love for the guitar.
What advice would you give a new parent starting in the program?
Find a teacher who understands how your child learns and what motivates them. Teacher Abshir has been an excellent mentor who adapts his teaching style to bring out the best in Constantine. Consistent practice is important, but so is allowing your child to enjoy the music and develop at their own pace.
Why did you decide to give your child a musical upbringing?
Music provides a lifelong source of joy, creativity, and self-expression. We hoped music would become a meaningful part of Constantine’s life, something he could continue to enjoy and share with others for many years.
Congratulations, Constantine!
Sign up for a FREE introductory lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!
The violin took its modern shape in northern Italy in the first half of the 16th century, somewhere between about 1520 and 1550. No single person invented it. Andrea Amati of Cremona is the maker most often credited, though he settled the instrument’s proportions rather than dreamed it up, and makers in nearby Brescia were building violini at the same time. The oldest violin that still survives with a date on it was made by Amati in 1564.
That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, and it corrects a few things you will find repeated confidently across the internet.
Who invented the violin?
Nobody, in the sense the question usually means. There is no inventor’s name in the record and no moment when a first violin appeared.
Andrea Amati (c. 1505–1577) gets the credit because his workshop in Cremona produced the earliest instruments that look and behave like violins as we know them. What survives of his life is civil paperwork rather than anything about the instruments themselves. A Cremona census in 1526 lists him as a liutaro, a lute maker. In 1539 he rented the property that became known as Amati’s Stall. His son Antonio is recorded working alongside him by 1556. A payment record from 1572 mentions a violin of his going to the French court. He died in 1577 at seventy-two.
You will often read that Amati built his first three-string violins in 1542 and 1546. Treat that carefully. Neither instrument is authenticated, and when Count Cozio di Salabue examined one in 1861 he criticized its workmanship and said the label merely “looks like it was written in the sixteenth century.” He was hedging, and so should we.
The competing claim belongs to Gasparo da Salò of Brescia, who a handful of 19th-century writers credited with inventing the violin outright. The dates rule it out. Gasparo was born in 1540 and first appears in Brescia in 1563, by which time Amati had been running his own shop for more than twenty years.
The more serious challenge comes from Brescia generally, where guild records name makers producing violini as early as 1524. That is earlier than anything documented for Amati. The problem is that no Brescian maker of that era dated a label, and the surviving Brescian instruments have been cut and remodeled so heavily that their original form is hard to read.
Britannica puts it about as well as it can be put: the earliest makers, among them Gasparo da Salò and Andrea Amati, had settled the violin’s average proportions before the end of the 16th century. Plural. No inventor.
When and where was the violin invented?
Northern Italy, across roughly three decades in the early 1500s. The anchor points, in order of how solid they are:
- 1523. A Savoy treasury record dated 17 December pays for “trompettes et vyollons de Verceil,” from Vercelli. One of the earliest written uses of the word.
- 1524 and 1527. Brescian guild and tax records naming makers of violini.
- 1529 to 1536. The paintings of Gaudenzio Ferrari, which give us the first unambiguous pictures. His Madonna of the Orange Tree in Vercelli dates to 1529 or 1530. The cupola he painted at Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno between 1534 and 1536 shows violin, viola and cello shapes among fifty-six instruments.
Scholars still argue about whether Ferrari’s instruments have three strings or four. The standard reading is three, with a counter-argument that a fourth peg sits hidden behind the pegbox in the Saronno fresco.
As for Cremona against Brescia, both cities have a case and neither wins it outright. Brescia has the earlier documents. Cremona has the surviving instruments, because Brescian makers never dated their labels. It is worth noticing that Ferrari’s paintings are in Vercelli and Saronno, which are neither city. The violin looks less like one town’s invention than like something the whole of Lombardy arrived at together.
The oldest violin that still exists
It lives in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: an Andrea Amati dated 1564, known as the “Charles IX.” The label carries the year in Roman numerals and is now almost illegible. W.E. Hill & Sons gave it to the museum in 1939.
It belongs to a set made for the French court, and the instruments carry the motto Pietate et Justitia painted on their ribs. Sources differ on how many survive, generally putting it at eight or nine. You can find them at the Ashmolean, at Tullie House in Carlisle (England, not Scotland, whatever half the internet says), at the Museo del Violino in Cremona, at the Musée de la musique in Paris, and at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, which holds the “King” cello, the oldest surviving cello in the world.
One complication worth knowing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns an Amati violin it dates to about 1560 and calls the earliest surviving example. Tarisio’s archive dates the same instrument to 1570. Because it carries no date on its label, the argument cannot be settled, which is why the Ashmolean instrument keeps the title of oldest dated violin rather than oldest violin outright.
While we are correcting things: you will read that Charles IX took delivery of thirty-eight Amati instruments in 1534. He was born in 1550. The figure comes from a French writer in 1780, more than two centuries after the fact, and only one contemporary payment document survives, for a single violin in 1572.
What came before the violin
The violin descends from the medieval fiddle, or vielle, by way of the lira da braccio, an Italian instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries. The lira is the closest ancestor. It was held on the arm the same way and its body was traveling in the same direction.
The rebec is better understood as a cousin than a parent. It gave the violin its tuning in fifths but not its construction, since a rebec is carved from a single block with the body and neck continuous.
The rabāb sits further back still. Bowing itself reached Europe from Central Asia and the Islamic world sometime before the 10th century, through instruments of that family. But the rabāb is not the violin’s ancestor in any structural sense, and it is Persian rather than Arab in origin. Arab writers themselves said they had it from the Persians.
The violin’s own contributions arrived in Lombardy in the early 1500s and have no single precedent: four strings tuned in fifths, f-holes, overhanging edges with purfling, a scroll and a lateral pegbox, and arched plates carved separately from the ribs.
How has the violin changed over time?
Enormously, and here is the part most people find surprising: almost every surviving Cremonese violin has been rebuilt. Stradivari’s and Guarneri’s included. The instrument a soloist plays today is not the instrument that left the workshop.
- The neck was lengthened by around 30 millimeters and angled back, then mortised into the body rather than nailed on. Nearly every violin made before about 1830 has had a neck graft, keeping the original scroll and splicing on a new neck below it.
- The bridge grew taller and more arched, which follows from the tilted neck and gives the player clearance on each string.
- The fingerboard lengthened and became solid ebony, extending the upper register.
- The bass bar roughly doubled, from about 120 millimeters to somewhere between 175 and 280, to carry the higher string tension.
- The strings changed twice over. Everything was gut at first. From the late 1600s the G was overspun with silver or copper wire, and by the 1730s wound gut had taken over the lower strings. Steel E strings arrived in the early 1900s and became near-universal during the gut shortages of the First World War. Synthetic cores followed in 1970, when Thomastik-Infeld launched Dominant.
- The chin rest did not exist at all until the violinist Louis Spohr invented it around 1820. It was not for the player’s comfort. It was a block meant to keep chin pressure from cracking the tailpiece. Comfort was the reason later violinists took it up, and it was not standard equipment until close to 1900.
What drove all this was music itself. Concerts moved out of courts and into large public halls, concert pitch crept upward, composers wrote further up the fingerboard, and around 1785 the Tourte bow arrived with its concave stick and higher tension. Violins had to be louder. The wholesale conversion happened around 1800, much of it carried out in French workshops.
Stradivari, Guarneri, and the secret that isn’t
Antonio Stradivari worked in Cremona from about 1644 to 1737 and made roughly 1,100 instruments, of which around 650 survive. His “golden period” runs from about 1700 to 1720.
Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù for the sacred monogram he began putting on his labels in 1731, lived from 1698 to 1744 and was the last maker in his family. Only about 150 of his instruments survive. His final years produced his most admired work, bolder and less regular than a Stradivari and darker in tone, which is why Paganini played a Guarneri of 1743 and called it his cannon.
Now the myth. The idea that Stradivari guarded a secret varnish is not supported by the evidence. Jean-Philippe Echard and colleagues at the Musée de la musique in Paris spent seven years analysing five Stradivari instruments and published the results in 2010. The varnish turned out to be an ordinary oil-resin system with common colorants, made from materials used broadly across 18th-century decorative arts. There was nothing proprietary in it.
A separate hypothesis from Joseph Nagyvary at Texas A&M holds that the wood was chemically treated, probably against woodworm and fungus, with acoustic effects as a side benefit. The minerals are genuinely there. Whether they were deliberate is still argued over, so it is a hypothesis rather than a finding.
The most striking evidence comes from blind listening tests run by the acoustician Claudia Fritz and the violin maker Joseph Curtin, published across three papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014 they gave ten professional soloists six Old Italian violins, five of them Stradivari, and six new ones, in a rehearsal room and a 300-seat hall. Six of the ten chose a new violin as their favorite. New instruments outscored old by roughly six to one, and the players could not tell which was which above chance. A 2017 study extended the test to audiences in Paris and New York, who also preferred the new violins and judged them to project better.
This does not mean old Italian instruments are bad. It means the mystique around them is harder to defend than the price tags suggest, and that a very good modern violin is a genuinely competitive instrument. For a student, that is encouraging news.
Common questions
When was the violin invented?
There is no single date. The four-string violin emerged in northern Italy between roughly 1520 and 1550, and its proportions were settled by makers working between about 1540 and 1580. The earliest written reference is a Savoy treasury record from 1523.
Who invented the violin?
No individual is documented as the inventor. Andrea Amati of Cremona is usually credited with giving the violin family its lasting form, working alongside makers in Brescia who were building similar instruments at the same time.
Where was the violin invented?
Northern Italy, in Lombardy. Cremona and Brescia both have a claim, and the earliest surviving pictures of violins come from Vercelli and Saronno.
When was the first violin made?
Unknown. The oldest violin that survives with a date on it was made by Andrea Amati in 1564 and is held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Who made the first violin?
No maker can be identified. Records of makers producing violini in Brescia go back to 1524, three years before the earliest surviving reference to Andrea Amati as a maker of bowed instruments.
How has the violin changed over time?
The neck was lengthened and angled back, the bridge raised, the fingerboard extended, the bass bar strengthened, and gut strings gave way to wound gut, then steel and synthetic cores. The chin rest was added around 1820. Almost every surviving violin from before 1830 has been rebuilt along these lines.
Learning the violin
Five hundred years of refinement have produced an instrument that is still, at the beginning, a piece of wood and four strings under a bow. That has not changed and it is part of the appeal.
The California Conservatory of Music has taught violin for fifteen years, to students starting as young as four and to adults picking the instrument up for the first time. You can find us in Sunnyvale, Fremont and Redwood City. If you have been curious, our violin lessons page explains how we teach and how to book a free introductory lesson.
Where this comes from
A good deal of what circulates online about the violin’s origins is repeated rather than checked, so it seems fair to show our working. The dates and attributions here come from museum collections and published research rather than from other websites.
- Tarisio’s Cozio Carteggio, for the Amati family records and John Dilworth’s account of the Brescian school
- The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and The Strad, on the 1564 “Charles IX” violin
- Britannica, on the violin and the rabāb
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on its own early Amati and the “King” cello
- Echard and colleagues, “Stradivari’s Varnish,” Angewandte Chemie, 2010
- Fritz, Curtin and colleagues, three studies of new and old violins in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012, 2014 and 2017
- Roger Hargrave, “Period of Adjustment,” on the conversion of baroque instruments
- Strings magazine, on Louis Spohr and the chin rest
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Our July Musician of the Month is Hiromi, a pianist whose concerts feel less like recitals and more like fireworks shows.
Nothing makes a young pianist’s eyes light up faster than thirty seconds of Hiromi playing live. She grins, she bounces off the bench, she attacks the keyboard like it owes her money. Underneath the showmanship is technique so complete that jazz, classical, funk, and progressive rock all come out of it whenever she wants. Nobody watches Hiromi and asks why anyone would practice piano. They ask how soon they can start.
Early Life and Inspirations
Hiromi Uehara was born in 1979 in Hamamatsu, Japan, the city where Yamaha builds its pianos. She started lessons at six, and at eight her teacher introduced her to something not on the syllabus: jazz. Both loves stuck. She trained classically while learning to improvise, and the combination showed early. At fourteen she performed with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.
Then came the night that changed everything. At seventeen, through a chance meeting in Tokyo, she played for the great jazz pianist Chick Corea. He liked what he heard so much that he invited her to perform at his concert… the next day. She said yes. That pretty much tells you who Hiromi is.
From Jingles to the World Stage
Before the world knew her name, Hiromi paid her dues writing advertising jingles for Japanese companies. In 1999 she left for Berklee College of Music in Boston, where the legendary pianist Ahmad Jamal took her under his wing and co-produced her debut album, Another Mind, released in 2003 while the ink on her diploma was barely dry. In Japan it sold more than a hundred thousand copies, remarkable numbers for a jazz record.
The career since has been one long crescendo. She won a Grammy Award in 2011 with the Stanley Clarke Band. Her Trio Project, with bass legend Anthony Jackson and drum virtuoso Simon Phillips, sent the album Spark to number one on the U.S. Billboard jazz chart. In 2021 she performed at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, playing for a global audience of hundreds of millions. And in 2023 she composed and performed the piano for Blue Giant, the acclaimed anime film about a young jazz musician, introducing a whole new generation of kids to her sound. She tours today with her band Sonicwonder, and a Trio Project reunion tour is planned for this fall.
A Style With No Fences
Ask Hiromi what kind of music she plays and the honest answer is: hers. A single set might swing through a jazz standard, detonate into progressive-rock odd meters, quote Beethoven, and land on something tender and completely improvised. Critics have spent twenty years trying to file her under one genre. She keeps not fitting.
What makes it work is the foundation. All that borderless freedom rests on rigorous classical technique built from age six — the scales, the études, the discipline. That’s the part every music student should hear: the training isn’t the opposite of freedom. It’s what freedom is made of.
What Students Can Learn from Hiromi
Hiromi’s lesson for students is simple: joy belongs on stage. She is one of the most technically formidable pianists alive, and she plays with the open delight of a kid who just discovered the instrument yesterday. Somewhere between the metronome and the recital, students sometimes forget that music is supposed to feel like that. Hiromi never did.
Start Listening
- “Place to Be” — solo piano, tender and personal. Proof the fireworks come with a soul.
- “Spark” (The Trio Project) — the title track of her Billboard chart-topper. Buckle up.
- “The Tom and Jerry Show” — her cartoon-chase showpiece. Find a live video; kids replay it endlessly.
- Blue Giant soundtrack — her film score about a young musician chasing a dream. Perfect family listening.
If Hiromi’s videos leave your child eager to try the piano, our piano lessons at CCM are a great place to start.
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Our July Composer of the Month was born on July 7, 1860: Gustav Mahler — the most famous conductor of his age, who wrote some of the biggest music ever composed, entirely during his summer vacations.
Every beginning music student knows Frère Jacques. Mahler is the composer who dared to put it in a symphony: slowed down, shifted into a minor key, turned into a strange, haunting funeral march. Audiences in 1889 didn’t know what to make of it. Today it’s one of the most famous movements in orchestral music, and it tells you everything about him. Mahler took the simple tunes everyone knew and built cathedrals out of them: folk songs, marches, birdsong, children’s rounds.
Early Life and Inspirations
Mahler grew up in a Bohemian village, the son of an innkeeper, in a family that knew real hardship. Around age four he discovered a piano in his grandparents’ attic, and he essentially never came back down. By ten he was performing publicly; at fifteen he was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory. The sounds of his childhood — village bands, military bugle calls, folk dances, church bells — never left him. Decades later, they surface constantly in his symphonies, sometimes tenderly, sometimes twisted into something darker.
The Busiest Musician in Europe
Mahler’s day job would have consumed three ordinary careers. He climbed the ladder of European opera houses one podium at a time until, in 1897, he won the most powerful position in classical music: director of the Vienna Court Opera. He held it for ten years, conducting more than six hundred performances and driving singers, orchestras, and stage designers toward a standard of perfection that made him admired, feared, and imitated across Europe.
Which left exactly one season for composing: summer. Mahler built himself a series of tiny one-room composing huts: one in a lakeside meadow, one in the woods above another lake, one in the Dolomites. Every July and August he retreated there at dawn to write. Nine completed symphonies and some of the greatest songs in the repertoire came out of those sheds. The man conducted an empire ten months a year and still made time for the work that mattered most to him. There’s a practice-schedule lesson in there somewhere.
Triumph and Heartbreak
Mahler’s music asks enormous questions, about love, death, nature, and what comes after, because his life kept asking them of him. In a single devastating year, 1907, he lost his four-year-old daughter, was diagnosed with the heart condition that would eventually take him, and left Vienna. He crossed the Atlantic to conduct in New York, at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
He got one unqualified triumph before the end. In September 1910, in Munich, he conducted the premiere of his colossal Eighth Symphony, nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand” for the sheer number of performers it requires, before an audience of three thousand. The ovation went on for half an hour. Eight months later he was gone, at just fifty.
“My time will yet come,” he had once insisted, when critics dismissed his music as excessive. He was right. Half a century after his death, a generation of conductors, Leonard Bernstein above all, put Mahler at the center of the orchestral repertoire, where he has remained ever since. Today, more than a century later, his symphonies sell out concert halls faster than almost anything else written for orchestra.
What Students Can Learn from Mahler
Two things. First: big feelings belong in music. Mahler put grief, joy, terror, and wonder into his work without apology, and that honesty is exactly what audiences love him for. Second: the busiest person you know still has summers. Mahler wrote nine symphonies on vacation, in a shed, before breakfast. Twenty minutes of practice a day suddenly sounds achievable.
Start Listening
- Symphony No. 1, third movement — the Frère Jacques funeral march. Play it for your kids; watch their faces when they recognize the tune.
- Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 — written as a love letter to his wife, Alma. Strings and harp alone, and one of the most beautiful things ever composed.
- Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” finale — the closest an orchestra gets to the sky opening up.
- Symphony No. 8, opening — the “Symphony of a Thousand” erupting into Veni creator spiritus. The 1910 premiere audience lost its mind; you might too.
Mahler wrote some of his most beautiful music for singers. If someone in your family loves to sing, our voice program is a great place to start.
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