Meeting Musical Instruments

Curiosity

The littlest ones want to know everything about how sound comes out of instruments. They stick their little faces into the bell of Rex’s tenor sax like they’re searching for something. They’re getting the idea that a human has to do something to make the saxophone sing.

We wander over to the grand piano and they want to climb inside. I wish that they could, to feel the vibration of the strings, the soundboard, but of course they can’t because: danger. Like a Venus flytrap, the lid would fall and little Susie would never be seen again. And all she wanted was to know how the piano makes its sounds.

I want adults to rediscover this kind of curiosity, but they sit out in the lobby with their phones. Often they say to me, Oh I wish I could still play the violin but it’s too late for me. Why aren’t they curious about that? Not about why they quit but why they think it’s too late for them to learn.

My attention returns to the Meet the Instruments class. Now the kids are lining up to peer into the end of a flute. Then they lie on the floor to look up a clarinet. “I don’t see anything! But I can feel it!” says a girl in a Frozen t-shirt.

Next is a guitar. “It looks like a big auditorium in there,” a small boy named Nelson says, peering into the soundhole, his eyes wide behind his glasses. The rest of the class runs over to look, too, and they fall all over each other like a herd of puppies. Each one in turn is amazed. When they’re finished, Michael takes the guitar, strums a few chords and then begins to play a Bach prelude.

“WHOA!!!” They arrange themselves at his feet, rapt. They talk about what it must sound like in the room inside the guitar, and how it would be SO COOL to be in there, where the air always sounds like music.

The prelude finishes and the kids are thoughtful. “So, someone puts all these real sounds into a computer and that’s the music we hear but we don’t know what it looks like,” Nelson says. His little forehead is crinkled up, trying to figure this out.

“Something like that,” I reply, a little in awe of his deductive thinking.

“I would rather be inside real music, not computer music,” he decides. He looks like a miniature Neil deGrasse Tyson. His classmates agree. It might be scary inside a laptop, wouldn’t it? But not scary inside a guitar.

And then we scramble over to the bass, way taller and wider than any of them. They take turns hugging it while the teacher plays a few jazz riffs. Watching their faces. I think: this is everything. A little kid hugging a bass. Everything.