Ethan was coming to a stage in his piano where he was bored with lessons and practice and books with no outright goals or personal creativity. The books given to younger kids are filled with ideas and lessons that don’t have the leeway for improvisation. I brought up an idea to the piano teacher a few weeks ago, where Ethan is rewarded for diligent practice by getting to pick out sheet music to learn. She saw where I was going with the idea — rewarding the student by bringing the student back into the subject — and suggested a few sites that offer cheap sheet music downloads. Ethan knew the song from Shrek, and I quickly set him straight about the song’s origins and interpretations, making him listen to the awful Cohen version as compared to Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright, and E held onto the soul of the song fast.
His goal this week is to improvise, to make the song his own. He knows the chords and the melody, but now he’s experimenting with the pedal, rhythm, and breaking up the chords in pleasing ways (alas, the pedal only sometimes works on this piano). The kid who would fight about the idea of practicing for thirty minutes is suddenly spending thirty minutes and more at a time on this song alone.
It was recorded on my cell phone, but you get the idea.
Great stuff! Make sure you keep pushing E on the piano!
Also, don’t forget about http://www.mutopiaproject.org/. It’s an open source sheet music website. Also, there is the site free-scores.com. Plus, there is always the library!
Keep recording his stuff.
I’ve said it before, but if I could guarantee I’d have a kid as awesome as yours, I might think about having children.
Also: One of my favorite songs, played beautifully.
Two links:
*) A collection of Hallelujah covers.
*) Choral Public Domain Library: “Begun in December 1998, CPDL is one of the world’s largest free sheet music sites. You can use CPDL to find scores, texts, translations, and information about composers.”
That’s pretty adorable. The Cohen version is starting to grow on me as his stuff in general has started to grow on me, but Buckley’s is definitely my favorite. Though I also love Rufus and the one by, I think his name is John Cale? that was the one they used on Scrubs in the first season.
And, do try to keep him interested in the piano, even if it means that there comes a point where he doesn’t do formal practicing at all–I played piano for so long but my teacher was very strict and very formal and managed to destroy any motivation I’d ever had for it. Years later I’ve started to play on my own again, but it’s hard going back, and it makes me somewhat sad to think of how much easier it would have been if I hadn’t hated it so much by the time I left that even when I did practice, I wasn’t getting anything out of it.
(my teacher never let me play pop music, or choose my own pieces even–she was very into building by “repertoire” and didn’t even LET me work on fur elise with her because it was too cliche, WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. no faster way to make a kid hate the piano than assigning a six-page beethoven sonata that while no doubt technically brilliant is not conventionally pretty by ANY means when that kid certainly hasn’t had enough exposure to classical music to be able to appreciate non-pretty music–something that only came to me after high school choir, a much less stressful environment)
(sorry this is a little long and perhaps somewhat intrusive, the piano thing hits a bit close to home)
I played flute in band all through high school, and while I was ok (at least good) at it, I never got to a stage where I felt I was expresing myself in any way.