It's been a long week.
Last Saturday, we had our piano tuned. We bought this piano for $25, which basically covered the cost of the ad and hauled it home in the back of a friend's truck. Before we adopted it, it had lived in a coat closet for eight years,; and who knows where how often it had been played before that. As you can imagine, it was significantly out of tune.
The Father of one of the Maestro's classmates at school is a piano tuner, and he was happy to take some time with it. Parts of it were a half step off, which made for an interesting sound, you can be sure. The pins are all in good shape, and he said it is a $500-800 piano, all told. He tuned it twice, and it now sounds like a piano that needs to be tuned, which is actually a huge improvement.
The Maestro and I had to leave during the process. The periodic banging of one note was driving him mad. As we drove to my lab, I asked him how the noise makes him feel. He said that it hurts his feelings. I asked how his body felt, and he said it was good. So, loud noises hurt his feelings. The Maestro is three, so hurt feelings don't carry the same meaning for him of being offended that it does for me. I think he means that his response to loud noises is emotional. Riley says that noise makes her feel frantic.
We got to 100 bow-holds! The Maestro has a pair of cousins a few years older than he is that are taking cello and violin lessons. It took him about three minutes to figure out that he ought to learn to play the viola so they could have a good trio when we move next door to them. He's been walking around all week with some kind of viola, usually two sticks or a piece of PVC pipe. Riley has simply had to say "Is that your bow hand?" and he would adjust to a proper bow-hold. We've even been able to get him to play the Tuck-a rhythm on his "viola" a few times.
This week his ancient violin bow lost its last three hairs.
The night before his lesson, Riley came down with what appears to be food poisoning, and we had to postpone the lesson until today. Fridays are really not good days for lessons, even mini-lessons, and even lessons at Hildegard's office on campus. He is usually tired, and likes to show-off to her friends a little too much. Tomorrow wasn't going to work, however. Hildegard was coming for dinner tonight, and experience has shown that lessons before a social engagement work better than lessons soon after one.
The report I got was that he showed her one phrase of Tuck-a rhythm, and then was more interested in showing her his home-made bass. He's moved on from the viola…
Oh, and we don't have any plans to move next door to his cousins. That's the plan he came up with, all by himself.
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