The Cello was a late comer to the violin family. The earliest ones we know of were built around the middle of the 16th century and the first mention of the violoncello in print was in 1556. The instrument was first called the bass violin then violoncello which literally means “big little violin” in Italian. Go figure. Mercifully, the name was eventually shortened to cello. The first known maker (but not the first actual maker) was Andrea Amati who built cellos for Charles IX

Ah yes, that is the question. It is one that has been debated and discussed frequently by both parents and educators. We recently had an excellent guest blog entry on our site from our friend and local violin teacher Christine Goodner about pre-school children and music. I would highly recommend that you go back in our blog entries and read that article as well but I thought that I would throw in my two cents. Forty years ago the typical answer might have been 8 or 9 years ol

For much of human history people could not read music. That isn’t to say that there were not great musicians. They just could not read music primarily because it either was not written down or it was not written down in a very complete system. The earliest example of music notation of any type is from Sumer (Iraq) about 4000 years ago. This and other methods of notation from the ancient Middle East were something akin to tablature and were quite crude by modern comparisons. T