I'm sitting here between a silver laptop and a dusty golden chiwini, clicking away at a million little tasks that together make up the skeleton, the working backbone of my passion.
Fine tuning another aspect of the website, check!
Balancing one registration platform that is comfortable, like my favorite hiking shoes, and one new one with the flash and promise of a more organized private studio, but takes more time and investment of my mental capabilities than I honestly might have ... Check!
Seeing new names come in and imagining new faces joining our studio family to grow roots and branches in our collective and individual musical growth. Neurons firing and connections being made and discoveries, oh, the discoveries!
Discoveries that sometimes look like pulling in, sometimes bursting forth in a colorful display of new and exciting ability.
Discovering we are more than we thought, and can achieve more than we dreamed possible ... check!
This is my favorite part. The discovery. The confidence.
A tired mom singing out when she calms her baby with a lullaby.
A two year old anticipating and finishing a musical phrase with abandon, in tune and rhythmically accurate ... or not (yet!).
A child who is nonverbal mimicking a tonal pattern their parent has sung and a new way of communicating being born.
Going in to a library with 35 other members of the human family of all ages and hesitant singing giving way to boisterous sound by the end of a 45 minute community class.
Discovery. Musical discovery. Musical expression. They bind us. They honor vulnerability while breaking down walls.
And I am proud to be a part of it.
I can't wait for a new year of music making!
(This picture is from about 5 years ago when I decided to add teaching early childhood music to my studio offerings and was creating my own curriculum based on Orff, Kodaly, and without knowing it, research by the esteemed Edwin Gordon. This was before I found the best ever Early Childhood curriculum, Music Together - which I am a proud licensed teacher and director for now! ❤️❤️❤️)
