“At eleven, I felt that I might actually play anything on this violin,” writes Catherine Tice, the daughter of two musicians. Her essay in Granta, “A Brief History of Musical Failure,” raises the question of what it means to have “the makings of a prodigy,” and whether, in order to succeed, one must be immune “to the dark side of self-criticism.”
Still, Tice believes that she almost “gave [herself] over to the violin completely.”
