Musical Kids

Charlie and Dominique were playing the piano in the local music festival the other day. Neither won his class, but each did well. The winners in each class were truly exceptional, and clearly practice far more than our kids.

We take a reasonably light touch towards music: we want them to learn instruments and enjoy them, for a variety of reasons, but we do not expect any of them to become professionals (knowing a few professional musicians, I am not sure I would wish that on anyone!). So we insist they practice regularly if they want to continue having lessons, but only for a short time each day (charlie and Bernie often play for a lot longer just for fun, which I take to be a good sign).

This light touch approach has got both Ant and Bernie to grade 7 or thereabouts on a couple of instruments each - and still enjoying them. It will be interesting to see if Ant keeps up either or both when she heads off to University this autumn.

And, just for fun, we occasionally convene the family jazz band and busk our way through things like the Muppets theme tune.