Music Together

Wow, I'm catching a nice strong signal from my neighbor's wireless at the moment so I'm going to seize the opportunity and do a blog entry. (Don't worry, I'm helping pay for the signal--I'm not stealing it!)

We had our first ever family meeting a few weeks ago to figure out what our top priorities are, as a family. Healthy eating, exercise, music together, and art came out on top, so we've been concentrating on those things lately. Since music is my thing I'm incredibly delighted that others found this so important.

I've been changing my mindset about music from having music lessons at the core musical activity to playing with others as the centerpiece. To become a good musician, you need to put in a lot of hours playing your instrument, which is much easier to do when you're having a good time. Also, to learn to play well in a group, you need to play a lot with other people. Fortunately, the very funnest thing about music is being able to play with others. With A, who takes piano lessons, I'm realizing that the drudgery of practice is killing her love of music. But, she does love to play when she is doing chords for fiddle tunes, or playing the right hand melody line along with folk songs or Christmas carols. And, since we've been playing so much, she has not only spent a lot more time at the piano than usual, but she is getting better and better at listening to what else is going on AND she actually got inspired to write a song yesterday, for the first time ever. I'm not saying that music lessons are unimportant, but I'm figuring out that music lessons don't necessarily create a love of music, which is the thing that will really keep you playing all your life.

For M on cello, I'm not that familiar with Suzuki, since I didn't do it myself, but I think I'm taking a philosophically similar approach. I want to start with playing by ear for a good long while before pulling in music or notation of any kind to help him develop his ear and his memory. As long as he is happy playing songs with mostly or only open strings, we'll stick with that. I think I'll introduce the idea of playing a melody every once in a while, on the assumption that one of these times he'll get excited about it and be ready to put up with the difficulty of figuring out how to use his left hand correctly for the fun of being able to play a recognizable song. In the mean time, I have probably a hundred songs I can pull up that involving almost exclusively the notes C, G, D, and A for a bass line (or could easily be transposed to use them). And if we plug away at these songs in the fiddle, folk song, and traditional song repertoire, he'll have a lot of great songs in his ear after a while. And, he can spend a nice long time developing his bow arm and hand, his sense of rhythm, and his listening and ensemble skills. Again, I do plan on hooking him up with a real teacher as soon as he seems ready to practice, but in the meantime I think we can make lots of progress and have lots of fun along the way.

Also, we've gotten D playing with us, and since he likes blues and rock and mainly likes to improvise, he has pulled in a whole new dimension that is great for all of us. The kids don't really know how to improvise yet (not that I'm any good at it, either), but they are hearing D and I playing around with it and starting to get the idea, and every once in a while one of them will grab a drum or something to try to play along with us. Very cool!