Violin virtuoso trains at Juilliard
11-year-old is part of the Music Advancement Program
NORWALK — Parents have often asked Devanshi Amin, “How do you get your son to practice?”
It’s not a question Amin has had to spend much time puzzling over. Getting her son, Arav, 11, to stop practicing his violin has more often been the issue.
“We’d always get other parents asking us, ‘What’s your secret?’ ” Amin said, seated next to Arav at the kitchen table in their Soundview Avenue home. “Honestly, he just does it. There were days early on where I would be like, ‘OK, you can take a break now.’ He would just go on and on and on.”
Just a few minutes earlier, the Roton Middle School sixth-grader was in the living room, the tiny violin tucked beneath his tiny chin. It doubles as a practice space for Arav and his younger brother Eshan, a pianist and tabla drummer. He moved nimbly through a lively piece by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, whose music Arav loves to play.
It’s a familiar sight in the Amin house, and those hours spent practicing have paid off. Arav has shown an early mastery of the violin, which has earned him a space in the Juilliard School’s prestigious Music Advancement Program,
where he learns from and plays with some of the most talented classical musicians in the tri-state area ages 8 to 17.
Each Saturday since 2016, September through May, Arav wakes up at 6 a.m. to get to the Lincoln Center-based music conservatory by 8:30 a.m., for “Morning Rally,” a session of stretching to rouse the young, sleepy students. He stays there until 5 p.m., taking a variety of classes such as music theory and ear training, chorus and string ensemble. It’s a full day’s work, and it eats up a majority of Arav’s Saturdays. But he’s happy to do it.
“I love Saturdays. That’s the day I’m looking forward to every week,” Arav said.
Arav said he was about 3½ when he first heard the violin, after a Meet the Instruments class at the Suzuki School of Music in Westport.
“In the room right across there were these older kids playing violin and I could hear them when I came out. I was like, wow, the sound is amazing,” Arav said. “I told my mom, ‘I really want to play violin.’”
Neither Devanshi nor her husband, Nilesh, are musicians, so the world their son was about to enter was unfamiliar. But she could tell early on that Arav was serious.
“I kind of had a feeling that there’s something to this,” Devanshi Amin said.
He progressed quickly, surprising his parents and teachers. He tried viola for a time while he was a student at Brookside Elementary School, then returned to the violin, perfecting his intonations and articulations with the bow — created using a variety of gestures — in his lessons at the Talent Education Suzuki School in Norwalk, before it closed three years ago.
It was at that point that Amin decided to audition for Juilliard, where, in the first two years of the four-year program, he’s taken his playing to new levels.
“There are great teachers and I really get supported there,” Arav said.
He participated in his first violin competition last year at Baruch College, placing second, and spent two weeks over the summer at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute summer camp in Lenox, Mass. He has a second competition in January — Arav hopes to one day tour with orchestras as a soloist — and plans on auditioning for the Interlochen Arts Camp for the upcoming summer.
He’s also eyeing pre-college programs at Juilliard and other conservatories he might attend once his fourth year is up in the Music Advancement Program.
It’s a lot for any 11-year-old to manage. Arav also likes to swim and read adventure books, books about Greek mythology and the Harry Potter series. But he is singular in his focus on music, and unwavering in his love for the Juilliard program.
“On Saturdays I’m tired, but then I go to Juilliard and I have the morning rally. It really wakes me up,” Arav said. “I’m too excited for the other things going on in the day for me to just sleep.”