Happy Birthday Maestro

As I have mentioned before, The Maestro likes novelty, but only if it is routine.  This makes cello practice a challenge sometimes, because he would rather play than practice.   Our favorite eastern musical philosophers might say that play and practice are not different, but The Maestro doesn't care about Eastern Philosophy much.

 

The most efficacious technique so far has been the puppets coming to visit during practice time.  As with everything else, it has run its course.   I had to leave for a week to visit my parents recently, and when I got back, he was done with the puppets.

 

This past week, enough people involved were sick that there was no lesson.  The main event last week was the Maestro's fourth birthday.   The Maestro has changed in the past year, that even now I am sometimes agast at how he handles things sometimes.  I started to write this post a week ago, and ended up writing a food blog post instead.  He is the same, yet not the same. 

 

He still loves music- that is for sure.  While I was in Canada, he asked Riley if he would still have his cello after he dies.   When she tried to explain that he couldn't take it all with him when he dies, he started to cry and yelled "But I LOVE my cello!"  His lack of enthusiasm for practicing is not to be confused with wanting to give up cello lessons, apparently.

 

For his birthday, our friend who is the Bassist in the City Symphony gave up comp. tickets for their annual family concert.   Before-hand, the Music Shop put on an instrument petting zoo that I took him to.  He got to play a 1/10^th size violin – complete with good cello bow hold, the zoo-keeper pointed out – a French Horn, Clarinet, Trombone, Guitar, and Flute.   He had some problems getting a sound out of the Flute, but finally succeeded.  He wanted to take a closer look at the Cellos, but we needed to get home to get Riley.   Hildr and Hildegard were both sick, so they camped out and kept each other company whilst Hildr enjoyed and Hildegard tried to avoid analyzing a Little Einstein video.

 

The concert was great.  My experience with concerts has been that they often expose you to music that you wouldn't choose to listen to on your own, and that there is often a good reason for me to make that choice.   So, I was delighted to learn that they would be doing Winter from Vivladi's Four Seasons, as well as Smetna's Moldau, two pieces I really enjoy.  It turned out that the music was organized around a theme of visiting places through sound, kind of like a musical world tour.  We also enjoyed Ferde Grofe's Sunrise, from the Grand Canyon Suite, and Morning on the Ranch, by Aaron Copeland, from The Red Pony Suite.   I didn't care for the Rainforest of Puerto Rico, which may be why I can't remember what it was called.

 

The concert was about 15 minutes too long for the Maestro, but he sat well.  The longer it went, the quieter he got, actually.   At the beginning, he would point out all the instruments when they played, and ask questions like "What is making that sound?"  I would point something out to him, like "Do you hear the trumpets?"   He would either say yes and smile, or ask "Where ARE the trumpets?"  I at first thought that he wanted their physical location, but no, he wanted to know where the sound was.   When they played again, I could say "There they are!"  He already knew that they were in front of the Timpani.   The more tired he became, the further back he sat in his chair and the less he talked.  He was particularly interested in the percussion section.   They make great sounds, without a readily recognizable timbre.  Besides which, they are often small, and hard to see.

 

When the concert was over, we went on-stage to talk to Bass Player and her family.  Bass Player's husband is Celiac Faculty Member, and their daughter, Princess, is in the Maestro's class at pre-school.   While I was in Canada, they came over to play, and did a Bass-flute duet for the Maestro.  Cool people.  They had a set of CDs for the Maestro, and we got to take a closer look at some of the percussion instruments as they were being put away.  The Maestro has been listening to Tubby the Tuba ever since. 

 

 

Checklist

Riley's email update to Hildegard about progress this week.

I'm making up a computer spreadsheet with our practice items. It's time to whittle down the list a little bit, so I was thinking of having "toes tickle". Beginning bow, use foot chart, come off the chart. They have become so routine that I don't think I need to check them off. I was thinking of having a "warm up" spot on the checklist. Would you consider knuckle knocks, ski jumps, bird wings, "up like a rocket" and rock and roll to be warm up? Some of these have lost their appeal, or aren't much of a challenge, so maybe I can come up with a way to reinvent them… Are there others that I'm not thinking of? Sirens, and the "I like apple pie" slap base are still a stretch for Evan, so I was thinking of having those in a diff. section. How do you feel about me leaving plucking to Death and the Maiden off the chart for now, based on what we'd previously discussed? Our progress on last weeks assignments has been mixed: moderate with "I like apple pie" and have gotten resistance on "roll to the cool string". He is now up to 105 bow holds with his real bow. His four fingers are staying more and more in their place as he saws, but his dear thumb still reverts right to its tight hold on the whatchamacallit (nice huh? The thing with the "moon")

Back in Town

Hildegard came back Friday.  Riley and the kids picked her up at the Shuttle depot, while I hurried home to make sure the dinner didn't burn.   After dropping her things off at her apartment, they all came home and we had dinner.  Hildr was pretty excited that Hildegard was at our house.   I know this because she kept dancing around the living room, saying "'Cited!  'Cited!"

 

After dinner, I asked the Maestro if he wanted to play his Cello for Hildegard, and he did.  He had his whole ambivalent nervous enthusiasm thing going on, in which he really wants to do something and gets upset if you talk about not having it happen, but drags his feet and gets distracted by anything when he needs to do something to get ready.   When we finally got Carolyn out, he was happy to show off many of the things he had been working on.

 

Hildegard was as impressed as I had hoped she would be.  After she read him his three bed-time stories and he was down for the night, we talked for quite a long time about what is going well, and why we think so.   The main thing is not that any one thing has made such great progress that it is ready to be passed off.  The main thing we are all excited about is that everything (qualifying talks with Riley and Hildegard are sure to follow that superlative) is making baby-step progress.

 

Practices are like real practices now, where noticeable progress is made.  Twice on Friday, in the afternoon when it was time for dinner and in the evening when it was time for bed, he had to stop a lengthy cello practice before he was ready.   He feels like he is making real music now, and it gives him more patience with receiving correction and suggestion on how to do things better.

 

The puppets are really making a huge difference.  He is really a natural teacher himself, you know.   He likes to stop people in the hallway at church or at school so he can tell them about bassoons or the Bach suite he was listening to.  He doesn't suffer fools gladly, and if you want him to tell you something that he figures you already know like which number finger that is, he plays games instead.   Now puppets, on the other-hand, have never had any music lessons before, so he is incredibly patient to explain and demonstrate anything they ask.  Finally he has a curious audience that allows him to show off everything he has learned.  This is the first time, really, that anything has worked for reviewing.   He loves pointing out to Dog or Snake what his fingers are doing.

 

The other thing that Hildegard pointed out, that we hadn't thought of, was his creativity in "composing" new songs.   A couple of weeks ago a friend gave us a copy of Disney's Fantasia.  For anyone who hasn't seen Fantasia recently, it is essentially a classical music concert by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, with an animated storyline.   One scene that had particularly impressed the Maestro was one with Dinosaurs in an Earthquake.  He wanted to know why the ground was doing that.   I tried to explain why earthquakes happen, but he wouldn't believe in plate tectonics.  We had to get several books from the library to get the details right, with good pictures, before he believed me.   Then he started stopping people he saw to tell them "There are earthquakes in California!"   He started playing an earthquake song on his cello.  Sometimes he will explain before he starts what all of the parts are, such as "When I play on my D string, that means the rocks are falling down."   I think that the earthquake song has shown up in every practice this week.

 

It seems to me that music as an artistic expression of a non-musical event, like an earthquake, is pretty advanced abstract thinking for an almost four-year-old.   Granted, he got the idea from watching Fantasia, but he did get the idea, and he uses it to come up with his own expression.   The earthquake song is his most advanced piece, and involves bow circles, playing on multiple strings, and often has spiccato and cello or left-hand pizzicato.

 

Riley also has him playing the dinosaur song, which is long slow bowing on the C and G strings.  This is good for moving his elbow, and for tone.   We have a dinosaur puppet that absolutely loves this song and requests it every time.  Friday he was excited to show us "That grating sound" in the dinosaur song.   I hadn't seen this before.  Earlier, he had liked to show me how he could get his string to spin by pulling slow on a bow.   Riley had borrowed some Bach cello suites transcribed for Bass in which a few of the notes were really low and rumbling, almost like grating.   He decided that he wanted to duplicate this and figured out how to get it to happen by pushing quite hard on the string with his bow.  It really sounds not good to me, like something is going to shake apart.   He was very excited and demonstrated this several times.  Afterwards, I asked Hildegard if that was a good thing, because she had complimented him on it.   She said that it is too much, and he will need to back off it.  It is too much of a good thing that it is often hard to get kids to do, so doing it too much at this point is really not a problem.

 

Things are going pretty well, I'd say.

Puppet Friends Come to Visit

It seems like my hope for the Maestro's practices this week is holding true.  A friendly fireman finger puppet came to practice Monday; Tuesday it was a mouse and a snake.  Another new puppet friend came to practice today.  It sounds like Riley is maintaining variety while trying to ride this puppet shtick while it will still work.  The Maestro told me today that he likes having visitors come to his cello practices, so it sounds like a good plan to me.

 

The Maestro really likes to use him imagination.  On Sunday he came into my room and starting telling me about his friend Spack.   Spack is a girl amd is a teenager who can drive.  She is taller than another friend of ours, and she lives in the Western United States.  Sometimes she drives to our town to visit other people, not us.  Sometimes she flies here, though, on an airplane.   When she is in town she comes over to play, and they play Bow and Arrow, and she watches him shoot targets.  He came up with all of this, and Spack isn't really real in our world.   He made all of that up and told it to me with a straight face.  After all that, why would giving a concert to a dog puppet be a big deal at all?

 

He had gotten pretty good at holding his feet in the right spot on the carpet and having his bow hold adjusted.   The emphasis this week is on maintaining a proper bow hold while playing.  When he saws on his cello, Riley noticed that he almost immediately shifts his thumb over so he can hold it more tightly.   Yesterday the mouse wanted to see him keep a good bow hold for a quick count of ten.  The snake wanted to see a good bow hold for a slow count of ten.  

 

Tonight I asked the Maestro how his practice went and he said it was good, good.   Riley said that it went really good, good.  He held his good bow hold for a good long time with springy curved fingers and thumb.  This is good.   The tighter you hold your bow the worse your tone is, as I understand it.  Hildegard gets back this weekend, and we are hoping that he can maintain a good hold while playing for extended stretches by the time she gets back.