Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.