An Unintended Music Lesson

Tornado Boy has had a long term (in his world!) fascination with violins. I’m not sure what started it exactly, but I do know that every time that we walked into Target, he wanted to hear the “Mozart’s Violin” music samples in their music department. About a year ago an older man approached us while we were listening and he recommended a different selection – to which a then 3-year-old TB said “I want to hear Mozart’s Violin – it’s number 17″ (can’t remember the actual number, I just know that he was accurate). The man was quite taken aback and then laughed and let him have his way.

For Christmas this past year, Tornado Boy was absolutely insistent that he wanted a toy violin that he had seen in Cracker Barrel. The toy is very delicate and the recommended for ages 8 and up. However, TB was relentless in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Santa Claus delivered, and Tornado Boy was thrilled. This is definitely a toy that requires “SUPER-VISION!!!” (he always says this word as though this is a super power). The violin plays the right note when you draw the bow across the strings, but being delicate is really somewhat against my little boy’s nature. He does work hard with this toy, though. This morning he told me that he wanted to “play a concert” for his stuffed animals, so I let him play with it for a bit.

Practicing for his "concert".

After the “concert”, Tornado Boy asked me what the knobs on the neck of the violin were called. I had no idea. I played clarinet growing up; but I’d really never learned much about the violin beyond the fact that it was very challenging to play. Internet to the rescue! We looked up the parts of the violin together and learned that the knobs are called “tuning pegs”. We talked about how they’re used to tighten the strings on a real violin in order to impact the sound of the note that is played. We talked about how we can change how the notes sound in his ‘tub flutes‘ toy by adding and removing water and how that is similar.

Parts of the Violin - Diagram from Mad Visuals

I don’t really have an official music curriculum that I use, but I do try to make sure that Tornado Boy has some exposure to it and that he has a chance to hear some new music each week. A couple of fun music resources that we enjoy are the music section on Starfall – in particular the Mozart selection. Another is the wonderful Pandora music service. You can listen to it on the Internet, through some Blu-Ray players and on some phones. It is an amazing tool that allows you to seed a music feed with a particular song, composer or artist and it will create a station based on that. The service is based the “Music Genome Project” and is just an amazing free resource. The service also has some pre-created music stations and allows you to share those or the ones that you create – so here’s a link to one of their violin stations. I highly recommending checking out Pandora even if you don’t care to use it as a teaching tool.

I keep mulling over music lessons for Tornado Boy. He is definitely interested – especially in the piano (keyboard) and violin but I have serious concerns about his inability to sit still. I’m really not sure if I can find a teacher that might be able to deal with his active nature, or if it would be better to wait about until he matures a bit. We may try a week of music camp to see how it goes. We’ll see!