The Little Pianist

Natalie started piano last week on the first day of school. We have noticed for a long time that she is naturally musically talented and we decided we shouldn’t wait to guide her towards that. I was worried that she would fight us on practicing for the full 30 minutes and that she’d even pay attention for 30 minutes in her lessons. So far (2 weeks) my fears are unfounded. Her teacher says she has been doing well in lessons and that they’re able to get pretty far because of that, and then at home she’s happy to practice her 30 minutes. Not only is she happy to practice for 30 minutes, but many days within an hour of finishing her practice she is back at it on her own.

Then, yesterday, she started to write her own songs. Granted its very “primitive” – I mean she’s only calling notes by the numbers that correlate with her fingers, but she drew on a paper a pattern of quarter, half and whole notes (both with the staff pointing up and down so there were right and left hand notes in it) and then numbered them. She wrote a total of 3 lines and added a repeat at the end and then promptly sat down to play her song. She made a few changes after playing it and then quickly sat down to write another one. Once she was happy with that she decided her songs were complete she decided they needed names. She came up with Live Laugh Love for song #1 (it is on a sign in the kitchen so she copied it from there). Song #2 was eventually named “Sweet Dreams.”

Maybe we have a composer on our hands?