More on music

Note: There is no cute anecdote or punch line below. Just observations. You've been warned.

Wild Thing is wild about musical instruments. Our local farmers' market attracts a variety of amateur musicians, and we found ourselves wandering from group to group for a while. We'd watch the folk combo with a flute player for a while; then it's "I want to see the banjo again," so we're over to the folk combo with the banjo player.

This interest began (as interests so often do) with a placemat. He's got one of those educational placemats with pictures of a variety of musical instruments on it, and he's been trying to sort them all out for months now. It's been a little tricky, since the drawings are not really to scale, so the viola and the bass look to be pretty much the same size, distinguishable only by the peg, which is rather too small to make much out of anyway. Also, it includes portraits of several instruments which one doesn't typically see or hear without special effort--the lute, for instance. (Though there was a lute player at the market today.)

To support the interest that the placemat generated, I started pointing out instruments heard on his favorite CDs and such in the car. Now no song can pass through his ear canal without him asking what instruments he's hearing. This can get a bit dull after a while, since I can count on one hand the number of songs that he will sit through that feature anything other than a guitar, a drum set, and/or a keyboard of some sort. Happily, there's a great track on this album that features a muted trumpet and a tuba, among other things.

Unfortunately, none of this has led to much interest in listening to CDs other than those for which he has already memorized the playlists, but that's a project for another month, I suppose.