Off Broadway

The Off Broadway production of Mary Poppins made a stop in Grand Rapids this weekend, and we met it there. Months ago our friends asked us if we wanted to get tickets and we've been counting the days since then. We have great friends in that city that we don't get to see very often, so we got tickets, and made plans to stay with them one night while we were in town. Seeing them alone was worth the trip.

Then...I had forgotten the wonder and magic of a Broadway musical—or perhaps I'd attended so many children's plays with Calvin prior that my expectations had become skewed. The voices, the dancing, and ooooh the set. The set was like a fantastical pop-up book.

Calvin loved very minute of it, and my joy was enhanced by his as he tapped out the rhythms and laughed at the comedy and gasped at the magic, sitting on my lap to better be able to see.

A stop for dinner at the local brewery (a big favorite of ours)—one more chance to see good friends—and we were headed back home with good memories in tow. We'd bought a CD of the live production so we listened to it all the way home, the timing so perfect that we were just finishing the curtain call as we pulled into the driveway, shortly after a usual bedtime. And that was a perfect day.

Journal to follow shortly.

7 days: Music in the air

Today was recital day. We baked treats, we started a crock-pot dinner, we practiced the piano like crazy, we straightened the house. The recital went well. Some of Jon's students have come and gone over the years, but a couple of them have been around for us to watch grow up. There's a certain joy in that. I realized today that I've been baking for recitals for about seven years now, although it feels a little different now that our own child is among the performers. Calvin seemed to take it all in stride, and he did well, but apparently I got nervous enough for him that I forgot start the video camera on time, and I failed to take any stills while was playing. Thankfully we shot his practice session at home.

After the recital we came back to our house with all four grandparents for that crock-pot dinner and some more piano, this time some good old fashioned Christmas carols. The art of caroling through the neighborhood seems to have perished, but carols around the spinet are another matter, at least in our house. We each have our favorites, be they traditional or more modern, and we have enough piano books around here, and piano players, to have every song covered, so we play and sing a lot and it was fun to share it with our families, too. Calvin did the playing tonight from his newest Christmas book.

Obviously we're music fans around here, and Christmas music is something that we collect—not just for the piano, but recorded music as well. Like with Christmas books, we buy each other a new album, or at least a new song or two, every year. We have sort of eclectic taste, and our collection ranges from big band swing to traditional classical, and some more modern pop collections. Some of our favorite albums from over the years (not in any order):

Lou Rawls's Merry Christmas Baby
Sufjan Stevens's Songs for Christmas
the Singers and Songwriters Christmas album
Stevie Wonder's Someday at Christmas
James Taylor's At Christmas
Ray Charles's Spirit of Christmas
the Goodyear Presents Christmas Favorites album (a holiday collectible from the tire people back in the 90s)
the Kohl's Cares for Kids Ultimate Holiday Collection 2008 (Merry Christmas Baby, by Otis Redding!)
A Charlie Brown Christmas (of course)

And O Holy Night as performed on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip by Trombone Shorty and a group of musicians from New Orleans just getting back on their feet after hurricane Katrina—one of our all-time favorite finds. It's a stunning and emotional arrangement worth hearing, although I'm not sure it's still available or download anywhere.

Plus we're always open to new suggestions if anyone has any...we're still looking for this year's awesome, eclectic album to add to our collection.

Children's Concert Series

This afternoon Calvin and I went downtown to the Michigan Theater to see the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of their children's concert series. Over the past few days, in preparation for the event, we'd been listening to the program pieces (via YouTube concerts) and reading a bit about the composers and their compositions. Knowing that Calvin really will sit through a concert and enjoy it, I opted for seats in the front row of the balcony, thinking that the stage would be clearly visible from there, but other squirming children would not be. It was a children's "training concert", after all, and squirming and some disruption were to be expected.

I had not expected the mayhem that actually took place, however. Parents playing tag or hide-and-seek with their children, and another group of families that sat in a circle on the floor attacking each other with tickles, all eliciting excessive screaming and screeching in the lobby. And during the concert the occasional seat kicking, semi-loud exclamations of excitement, or standing to listen and bouncing to the beat are happily expected, but the children playing hopscotch in the aisles or holding loud conversations about toys and/or school were too many in number, and disruptive in a different, not enjoyable, way.

In all fairness, though, I think I was the only one of the two of us who was actually distracted. We made instruments, tried out real instruments, and decorated elephants before the show, then settled into our seats to enjoy the music we'd learned a bit about at home. There is only one more concert in the series (the pair?), but that doesn't come until March, so I will be looking for other symphony opportunities in the meantime.

The Story of Babar, Francis Poulenc

Toy Symphony, Leopold Mozart

Sorcerer's Apprentice, Paul Dukas

Exciting

Today was full of exciting.

It didn't start that way. We woke up and spent some dreary moments staring out the window at a cold, gray morning, puddles filling every depression in the lawn and garden. We cuddled in the reading chair and read for a while. We both practiced the piano. We straightened some of the house, though not as much as it could use. We almost started lunch, but then Calvin remembered his previous excitement over a middle ages and renaissance experience and decided instead that he wanted to read a little in a book that we'd brought home from the book sale a few weeks ago about King Arthur. That's when exciting started. We read the opening page to King Arthur's Knight Quest, and it was over an hour before we actually got to lunch. The book is a hidden pictures sort, with a lot of rich illustrations depicting the costumes and outfittings of the knights and the story and backdrop of the fantastical world of King Arthur. Because Calvin views every book now as a full life experience we ended up starting work on suit of armor, beginning with the shield. Each page is a new part of the quest, and each page means finding (thus making) a new part of the armor, among a host of other things. There will be a lot more to our quest this week, and that's exciting.

At lunch, to continue his exploration of the middle ages, Calvin wanted to read Cowardly Clyde to me. And he did. I am still blown away by his reading progress, and that's exciting for me.

And exciting was Calvin composing music. He started it this morning after we practiced, playing around with the damper pedal. He continued in the afternoon, then he got some help from his dad in writing it down. Discovery is a very exciting thing.

Then, of course, there's the castle, which is growing and changing slowly, one addition at a time. It's another project that has been and will continue to be ongoing this week. Calvin is teaching me the exciting lesson of coming and going, the ebbing and flowing of creative energy.

And that's exciting.

Music on a Monday afternoon

We'd intended to spend today in Africa, and I love that if we change our minds we can easily change our day as well. There is no prewritten script, no lesson plan to follow. We said hi to the elephants and lions we got to know last week, and while shelving books at the library in the afternoon we found a few neat books with African art that we flipped through before they hit the shelf, but the rest of our day was spent at home, glorious home.

Instead of traveling we were creating. Creating clean laundry, creating clean spaces, creating new cities in the play room, creating music, creating in the sewing room, creating art.

We explored our new guitar this afternoon. Along with the piano, which both Calvin and I are still diligently pursuing, the guitar is something I have always wanted to learn. I love folk music and the sound of a good voice accompanied by acoustic guitar. I have (possibly unrealistic) dreams of sitting around our fireplace at night singing to the guitar with friends. A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to collect a pretty nice guitar from another Freecycler. It's been sitting in the corner calling my name ever since and I've been too nervous to pick it up. I'm doing pretty well with the piano, but I need a little more understanding of chords. Jon, on the other hand, has years upon years, a lifetime, of training under his fingers. Tonight we played our first duet, although Jon was concentrating too hard to sing.

It's a fun instrument for Calvin to explore. He's learned a lot about the piano already, and the guitar uses the same method for sound with a similar focus on chords so it's a logical connection for him. I love the music that fills our house each day, even the discordant kind. Music was Calvin's introduction to math. It was his introduction to history when we talked about composers. It is geography when we learn about the origin of pieces, it is anthropology when we learn about its cultural connections.

Music is in everything we learn, or everything we learn is in music. It is joy, is life expressed, and we express a lot of it. It adds much to each day.

Calvin cam

It's not a hootinanny yet, not the kind my dad talks about from his longish hair days back in the sixties, but we all had a good time. And after all, I'm not sure my dad ever really had longish hair.