Quin had his first violin recital yesterday. He started in September and is doing really well. I was reflecting on important moments in his musical journey and found some cute pictures and videos of musical Quin through the years.
We sang to him and I played the piano while I was pregnant with him, I guess his musical journey started at 4 months old, when I started taking piano lessons at age 21. I had the most amazing teacher. She would set up a pack n play for Quin with toys to play with while we had our lesson. I took lessons for about a year and played for primary (the children's ministry) at church.
Quin and I watched a lot of YouTube videos together when I had terrible all-day sickness with baby Ammon and needed to lay on the couch most of the first trimester. We watched a lot of Muppets, but one of our favorite things to watch was the Piano Guys. At age 2 Quin was enamored by the cello player. He had a cheap souvenir ukulele from Hawaii (from my aunt). He would hold it like a cello and use whatever stick or lightsaber he could find to play along with the Piano Guys. He always referred to it as a violin and asked to take lessons for years.
He mostly immitated Steven Sharp Nelson (the Piano Guys cello player) but occasionally he would pretend to be Jon Schmidt.
I started teaching him piano at age 3. He was too young and we were hit and miss with having a baby brother and then a baby sister. He was my guinea pig for teaching.
I bought a preschool piano method book for him when he asked me to teach him like the student I had. We had only gone through a couple pages when he snatched the book off the piano, threw it in the recycling, and went over to the bookshelf and pulled out the yellow pre-reader piano method he had seen me use with my student. He liked the Faber method much better than the other one!
I ended up making my own preschool piano music with color coded notes for Quin and my students.
He played at my first piano recital as a teacher at age 4. I arranged a little snippet of Beethoven's 5th Symphony for him and color coded the music and the keys. Sadly, the video is tiny and blurry, but I guess that makes it feel nostalgic.
Quin was obsessed with Beethoven at age 4. We loved watching Fantasia 2000 together and listening to his symphonies in the car. His favorite, like so many other people, was Symphony #5. He called it "Beethoven Smith."
One day he asked to hear "Beethoven 76." I told him, "Beethoven only wrote 9 symphonies and then he died." Quin insisted that Beethoven has written more than that. I asked if he thought Beethoven was writing more symphonies now in heaven. He replied "Yes. He's up to 654, that's how many he's up to now."
He likes to make up songs. Here he is pretending to play the organ. I started playing the organ at church when he was 3 years old. At the end of the meeting or while I was practicing at the church I sometimes let him try playing it gently.
Improvising the background music from Minecraft.
Composing a lullaby.
Age 7, playing the Star Wars theme at my "music from the movies" recital. He dressed in black to look like Luke from episode 6. I wore a beard and played "This is Me" from the Greatest Showman.
Age 8, playing a duet with me at my last recital in Oregon.
