Playing the piano

It occurred to me last night that I haven't written anything about Albert and the piano. But really, it’s remarkable all that he's been doing. Every so often, he wonders by the piano and then sits down and starts to play. While it’s true that this is often when Louise is playing, it’s definitely not just about bugging her, but rather I think because her playing simply reminds him that he wants to play too.

Anyway, he sits down and generally starts to play Beethoven's Ode to Joy (from the Ninth Symphony). Last year sometime I had written down the notes (in numbers) for Louise and she had learned to play most of it, and we also listen to the actual orchestral version on the iPod relatively frequently. But Albert picked it out on the piano himself. Nobody told him the notes, and indeed if I try to help, he immediately gets mad at me and clearly wants me to stop. There was a time when he was skipping some of the sections that repeat or half-repeat, and it was bugging me (not a lot, just that I’d be listening absent-mindedly and then would notice when the song didn't go where I expected it to), so I tried to teach him how to do the repeats. The first couple of times he got annoyed, and I quickly went away, but then I noticed he went back later and figured out how to do it himself.

Now that he's gotten more bored with Ode to Joy he plays it in speed-style. And he plays it all over the piano. That is, he plays it in every possible octave, and he has discovered that you don't have to play it starting on E, but that he can start on B just as well. And on every B on the piano. And that it doesn’t work starting from other notes. Then he started trying to figure out “Do your ears hang low?” I'm not sure exactly why this song, perhaps there’s a bit of it that he just happened upon, and now he’s figured out the rest.

Currently he’s working on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I started playing it one day and he was watching and quickly picked up the first bit (which is a lot of repeating one note) and then started picking out the rest. Louise tries to teach him the things she’s learning in their piano lesson, and he gets them very quickly, though he resists using both hands (like me...)

It’s curious how little he wants us to intervene and yet how we can offer bits of help if they are small enough and well-timed. I love seeing him explore all the notes, but I try hard to hold back. Yesterday when he was explaining how you can start Ode to Joy on the “white key that’s above the two black ones or also the white key that’s above the three black ones” I casually mentioned their names and he quickly incorporated them into his vocabulary. But I’m sure any more information than that would have been unwelcome, to say the least.