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.
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