Making Music

Sophia has been interested in music since she was born - she dances when there is music on the radio, and smiles when we sing to her. She has a little toy piano with 4 notes, which she loves to bang on, and any container with pebbles or beads in it becomes a rhythm instrument in her hand. Also, she loves to smack things together - any two solid objects are claves for her, even the cheap wooden claves we bought for her. Also she has a triangle which she plays.

But till now, it's all been percussion instruments - smacking things. She is very good at these, and quite enjoys them, but I figured she needed a new challenge.

She has been reading (well, convincing adults to read for her) a children's book by Robert Mccloskey called "
Lentil." She loves this book and reads it over and over, especially for the beautiful hand-drawn pictures. Her Uncle Todd read it for her many times while she was here. So what does this have to do with music making, you ask? In the book, Lentil plays the Harmonica. While Sophia was having Grandma read this book to her this morning (for the umpteenth time), I thought I would see if she was interested in playing an actual harmonica. I went downstairs and got one of my harmonicas and gave it to her. She didn't really know what to make of it (do I hit things with it? I usually hit things with things like this) but when I showed her, played for her, and Grandma pointed out Lentil's harmonica in the book, she started to figure it out.

As an aside, she has been practicing blowing bubbles in the bath (videos withheld for mild nudity) and so she is getting better at the whole "expelling breath from your lungs" thing. With this practice, it turned out to be the perfect time to try harmonica.



This is all very new, within about 5 minutes of her seeing a harmonica for the first time, she was able to make noise. We'll post again as soon as she is able to produce recognizable melodies and play the blues.

Note: The "smacking the harmonica around" thing she does in the video is because when the harmonica got full of her spit the first couple times, I took it and tapped it on my knee to remove the spit. This is a long-standing and time-honoured harmonica-playing technique that all the pros use, I swear. Our Sophia is pretty bright, and picked up on the spit-tapping as well as the playing. Or perhaps she just likes to hit stuff with stuff.