Music

The hubby gave me a short and dirty music lesson. Since I am completely musically-challenged it is difficult for me to understand much about music. I like listening to it, but heck if I can name more than 3 instruments that are being played in any particular piece. The hubby said, "don't you just love how the ____ and the ____ do ____, then ____ ..." um, sure? I don't get it, I hear pretty noise. I'm not able to discern between notes or sharps or flats or whatever it is that is happening in the song. I'm lucky if I can figure out who the artist is.

My dude then played short snippets of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven - not necessarily in that order. Anyway, he dissected each piece for me and helped to discover the true beauty behind each lovely sound. He then went on to explain when each piece was created and what each composer's available tools included, how instruments are costly to construct, how they work together, how the composer's effort to put to paper then to sound the illustrations they envision. Very powerful stuff.

This mini-lesson was inspired by our trip to the Montessori school yesterday when Carl and I "played" with the sound cylinders. We started with four cylinders, and shook each to listen to its unique sound. We continued to shake them until we matched them up. Very easy when there is only four cylinders with a total of two sounds to differentiate between. When we moved on to twelve cylinders total with six distinct sounds total... I was blown away. It was quite challenging. The differences were very subtle. I had to rely on the weight of the cylinder and tried to figure out from other senses which cylinders matched up with one another.

Music is so beautiful and I would not want to imagine life without it, but dang if I can truly understand all the acute, penetrating, and elusive notes. Maybe someday.