The house is loud. Up until recently it has only been a circus of non-stop exhuberance and children running amok, vascillating between listening and not listening to their parents, wreaking havoc, creating waves of destruction and leaving trash in their paths. Now, it is a musical circus of all of the above. They've discovered not only how to listen to it, download it, but also how to make music, to play it and things may never be the same. It's like teaching a man to fish rather than just giving him some. They're hooked.
There is a trombone, violin, piano, guitar, ukelele and the obligatory recorder at present. They are loud, frequently off-key or out of tune or sound like the mad alien spaceship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" if anyone remembers (I love that flick). My son does a perfect overblown trombone rendition of mad alien spaceship.
As we bridge the gap from made up notes to real, off-key to on, out of tune to in, I'm devising a way to bring the chaos into unison, to join together the piano, trombone, guitar, ukelele, violin into some semblance of a band with a common focus, like playing the Thanksgiving prayer rather than saying it this year. Parental tactics of diversion are just as handy in the tween years as the infant and toddler stages if well disguised.
I blame myself for all of it, I knew what blasting the stereo while pregnant would render and this is it.
When I'm not tuning an instrument or giving gentle guidance on playing techniques, note fingering, etc. I am still that old lady blasting the stereo much too loud in the car as I travel from patient to patient. Here are some current favorites on repeat:
Anything(!) by Ben Howard but especially Only Love
Most anything by Bon Iver
Stay by Justin Rock
So much by Jose Gonzalez
A little Grace Potter
Coldplay as always
...and I'd better stop or the list could get much too long...
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