Music in the dark

March 13, 2010 by Barbara.

Reid woke yesterday morning in the middle of a dream about her glockenspiel. She was explaining about forte (loud) and piano (quiet) sounds and woke in the middle of the sentence. Without missing a beat - couldn’t resist the pun - Reid continued, telling me that the bars on the glockenspiel weren’t different just because they each have a different letter on them. “The low notes are from longer bars,” she said, “and the high notes are on short ones.” I knew all of this, learned it only since Reid started playing a glockenspiel but still.

Reid loves teaching things and her Kindermusik class is giving her lots of opportunities lately. Her homework this week was to play an 8-note melody and to help Ken and me to do the same thing. We needed to play, A, C and D in the right sequence to sound like part of “Lucy Locket”. Reid’s glockenspiel has the note name engraved on the key but the music sheet on which the melody is written (obviously) does not. I recognize C, since that is written on the staff, but I didn’t know whether the A and D were above or below the C. Reid knew, though, and happily told me. When it comes to reading music, I have only vague memories of grade 5 and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Reid showed Ken how to play the melody, offering lots of encouragement along the way. She also explained that you can “erase” a musical error with a glissando. I don’t know if that is Reid’s rule or her teacher’s but it’s a beautiful way to restart.

In Kindermusik today, the teacher brought the rhythm bars, which we’ve only called ti-ti and ta, together with the note heads to be full-fledged notes. It was terribly exciting in a geeky, hoping my kid will actually understand music, kind of way. Reid now has her first song to learn from start to finish - all six half-notes and two full-notes of it.

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