Musical month

We have just finished a very musical month. It won’t be topped for ages or at least until the twins start playing an instrument or two. In the past two weeks, Tori played in a cello concert, a band/percussion concert and a piano recital. While it all seems a bit crazed looking back, we got here with the best of intentions. There we were just supporting the arts as a concept and luckily at a school that offers music classes. And now we are avid concert goers with a piano and cello in our front room. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the drum set to arrive but I think that has to be a non-apartment living addition.

For the past two years, Tori has taken cello classes at school. She has cello class twice per week and then keeps track of her practice minutes at home. She is required to practice 400 minutes per month and generally does. Over time, she has gotten slowly better. We saw rapid improvement when her teacher passed out the theme song for Harry Potter. Tori, a huge Harry Potter fan, practiced that song over and over again until we felt like we were living in the movie. The twins started asking Tori to play it before I did my nightly Potter reading to them (almost done with Book 6 thank goodness!) but it got to be a bit much. Before Tori’s strings concert, her already high practice time increased. On the day of her concert, Tori had a 2 hour practice during school and then a 2 hour warm up and then the 2 hour concert. She turned professional in terms of time commitment, though output wise you had better just judge her on that Potter song.

Percussion is something Tori picked up just this past semester. She played all sorts of percussion instruments in a once a week after school club and loved it. We really had no idea what to expect as we never heard her play anything drum like at home. The concert was great. Tori played at the front of the group on a bigger drum and seemed to know what she was doing.

Our last musical event was Tori’s piano recital. Tori has played with the same teacher for the past four and half years. Tori played well, performing a four page song that seemed pretty complex to me. Again, we all clapped and thought she was great. Then one of the dads got up and played. He played beautifully for about ten minutes while we all stared open mouthed. He finished and told the kids that he played the piano seven hours a day until the age of twenty, at which point he switched over to a career in banking. He made a strong case for the arts enriching one’s life. Tori nodded along with him as did I. I am counting on enrichment by association, at least for this month.