If you’re a musician and you have a young child, do you start him on an instrument? If so, is it the same instrument you play? If so, do you teach him? Or do you make sure your kids steer clear of the musician’s life?

These are questions we ask ourselves all the time regarding our three kids! But a generation ago, Nathan’s parents were asking them. And Nathan’s father’s father asked the same questions a generation before that.

So in this special episode, Nathan takes advantage of a parental visit to chat with his parents about all this and more, including the path they chose for him through the Suzuki landscape of the early 1980s.
Transcript
Nathan Cole: Hi, and welcome back to Stand Partners for Life.
Nathan Cole: This is a very special episode because today I have none other than my two parents here with me. Usually I’m saying “hi” to Akiko and thanking her for being here, thanking a guest for being here, but in this case I might as well say, “Thank you for bringing me into the world.”
Nathan Cole: But why don’t you guys say hello?
Gordon Cole: Hello.
Khristine Cole: Hello.
Nathan Cole: They’re visiting from Kentucky, where I grew up. Yeah, it’s a treat to talk to you guys because you’re really the only two that know most of the real story about how I got started on the violin. As Akiko and I have mentioned in some previous episodes, both of you guys are musicians, professional musicians, and that, of course, had a certain bearing on my growing up. But talk a little bit if you would, each of you, about just a quick overview about how you grew up and got started in music.
Nathan Cole: Who wants to start?
Gordon Cole: Well, I’ll start. My father was a flutist in the Philadelphia orchestra. The school that I was attending, grade school outside of Philadelphia, gave students an aptitude test at the end of third grade, and we were assigned instruments, and we were supposed to come back then for the beginning of fourth grad and play in band. My father had in mind that I should be a horn player, and he had arranged for Mason Jones to give me lessons. But the school sent me home as a flute player.
Nathan Cole: So Mason Jones was at that time-
Gordon Cole: Principal horn in the Philadelphia orchestra.
Nathan Cole: Okay.
Gordon Cole: But the school decided I would be a flute player since they knew that my father was a flute player. So my brother became the horn player, and I became a flute player. Nice.
Nathan Cole: Now you didn’t study with your dad right away.
Gordon Cole: Yes.
Nathan Cole: Okay, in the beginning you did.
Gordon Cole: Yes, I have no memory of what lessons may or may not have been like. He had me play on a Moennig flute that he had purchased in Europe on one of their trips. It was wooden with plated keys and a plated head joint, metal head joint. I can’t imagine what the band sounded like ’cause there were at least three metal clarinets-
Nathan Cole: Metal clarinets.
Gordon Cole: … in this grade school band. They were pretty common after the second world war, but I can’t imagine what the band sounded like and, thankfully, I have no memory of it.
Nathan Cole: So how was it studying with your own father?
Gordon Cole: Well, I really don’t remember much of anything until we moved from Philadelphia to Wisconsin, where my father taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During my teenage years, evidently I was not very receptive to any sort of suggestions that he might have on how I should play something, so he farmed me out to a very good teacher in Madison for my sophomore and junior years, maybe ninth grade, I don’t remember.
Nathan Cole: Can’t imagine not being receptive as a teenager to your parents. To jump to your part of the story too, Mom, but you studied with your dad then in college.
Gordon Cole: Yes, and senior year in high school, I decided that I was mature enough then to take his suggestions as that and not as criticisms, personal criticisms. So I switched back to studying with my father my senior...