DailyKos is five years old! And so were all of us, once.
Five year olds love music. Give any five year old a wooden spoon and a cabinet full of pots and pans, and out comes a percussion glutton! Watch them explore the piano keyboard if they're allowed to.
Even if you can't remember back to when you were five, odds are all of us have a story about making music as a kid. Smack that pot, click "There's more" and read on.
I have two distinct memories of music and childhood. The first is how much I loved the piano, because it made so much sense. I've written about this before, and many musicians have described the same feelings so I'm not going to go on about that.
It's when music didn't work that I really remember. In second grade we listened to some recorded story for children, which was on a phonograph record (hey kids! remember these?) and each time the teacher changed the record it would begin with the same little musical snippet. And this theme was extremely annoying. And with every record change, there was that theme again, more and more annoying each time. I don't care if it was written by Beethoven (which I found out years later, when I recognized it while listening to the classical station), I didn't like it and I remember wanting to get up, walk across the room, and fling the records out the window and watch them shatter on the school steps.
No, it wasn't anything good by Beethoven. I actually like Beethoven. This was some little theme in some country dance somewhere, that went 5 3 3 3, 5 3 3 10, 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 4 5... If you can identify it, great... I've forgotten its name plenty. I can't explain what it was I didn't like, other than that even at age seven I had decided that this was "children's music" and it was therefore boring and not worth listening to.
My other memory of bad music was the excruciating pain of listening to myself play the violin. The piano was effortless for me, the violin was not. And face it, nothing sounds worse than a bad violin being played by an even worse performer. I couldn't continue with the lessons beyond a few weeks because it was so hard to listen to how bad it sounded.
Share your stories of making music, or listening to it, as a child, especially if you can remember back to your fifth birthday!
This is a community diary. All topics on musicians, music, and other noise are welcome.
Previous Music Room Diaries
#10 - 5/20/07 What do you play when you travel?
#9 - 5/12/07 What are you trying to improve?
#8 - 5/05/07 Cinco de Mayo Edition!
#7 - 4/29/07 Requests You Won't Play
#6 - 4/22/07 Crossovers and Genre Jumps
#5 - 4/14/07 Inane Song Structures (Pachelbel)
#4 - 4/07/07 Ear Playing vs Sight Reading
#3 - 3/31/07 Perfect and Relative Pitch
#2 - 3/25/07 Music Lessons
#1 - 3/18/07 Jokes & Stories