My 5-year-old wants to learn the piano, but it’s a nightly battle to get him to practice. To him, musical notes are like a bunch of tadpoles in a swamp. He just can't be bothered.
Sadly that’s how we teach. I want to show him that knowing these tadpoles would make him a magician.
Star Wars is his favorite story. Every night, he asks to play the Darth Vader theme. So I show him the three notes on the keyboard: G, E and B flat.
He was ecstatic when he hear the music coming out from the keyboard. He asked, why is that black key? I said mysteriously, that’s because it’s in G Minor. Minor keys give you a dark sound.
And just like that, he was hooked. He was so eager to learn the rest of the sheet. And he learned the positions of G, E, and B on a staff, as well as concepts around keys and rhythm.
Now, instead of pushing my son to practice, I help him understand how he can use musical notes, beats, sounds from different instruments to express himself. Music is like a secret language to express our external and internal world.
It’s so much easier to learn when we are on a quest you care about.
Finds
How often do you have the chance, for example, to hear mathematics performed as you do in Bach? Right. Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped.
- Eric Weinstein
David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. In 1977, Bowie recorded this with the intention of introducing his then 6-year-old son to orchestral music. The composition tells the story of a boy named Peter who travels outside the garden to find a big bad wolf. Different musical instruments represent different animals: a clarinet as a pet cat and a trio of French horns as the wolf.