Lucinda's violin

Lucinda has been taking violin lessons for the past six weeks and she's learned the basic four notes and fundamental hand and arm positions.



It's pretty intense because she's getting a private lesson during what was expected to be a 1-hour group lesson at Nishimachi. And sometimes it's a struggle to convince her to practice, though my friends here assure me that that's a near-universal problem for children who take music lessons.

Lucinda seems (to me, the untrained eye) to be quite good at sight-reading. I think she has a strong visual memory and fine motor skills, which makes sense considering how much she likes folding origami and practicing hiragana.

Next step: learning how to finger the strings to add the other whole notes. We'll have to see if she's willing to continue lessons past this semester.

Music town

Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood has lots of music stores and record stores - there's still a Tower Records there (even though it's gone out of business in NYC) and lots of small shops selling vinyl records.

I went there this weekend to buy Lucinda a music stand for her new violin lessons and checked out a few stores. This one looks like guitar heaven.


I found the music stand in this store.


It also had dozens of guitars, including a shiny "Hello Kitty" number.

Trying new things

Lucinda has taken her first violin lesson. The classes are after school at Nishimachi, so they're reasonably priced -- and how lucky! - she is the only student in the Tuesday class.

I thought Lucinda would continue to take hula lessons, but she'd seen and heard friends play instruments during "music sharing" days at school and wanted to give music a try. We'll see how it goes this spring.

Japanese New Year

It's very quiet in Tokyo during the week of the New Year. Offices close and many people leave the city to visit family elsewhere.

Last weekend, while the city was still mostly empty, we wandered over to Roppongi Hills to find a super-dynamic taiko (drumming) performance. Taiko is very Japanese in its orderliness.

For some stupid reason, I shot my taiko video sideways and can't rotate it, but here it is anyway - look sideways!



There were also some favorite Japanese games set up, which I assume are favorites to play during the New Year's holiday.

A group of girls were taught by older women to juggle little beanbags. In the foreground, you can see the girls' shoes, which were removed and neatly arranged before the girls stepped onto the tarp; this is a common sight in Japan when you go on picnics.


Here, a half-dozen boys competed with small, polished spinning tops. They used string to hurl the tops onto a drumlike table, then cheered as they watched the tops bump one another off the side until one top was left.

Drumming

The same Saturday, we went to the Drum Museum near Asakusa.

The Drum Museum is small but so much fun - easily one of my favorite places to take young children. Lots of instruments to play, no one else there, and the room must be decently soundproofed because we did not leave with headaches.

The museum is on the 4th floor of this brick building; the ground floor is, reasonably, a percussion shop.


The museum is a medium-sized room filled with a few hundred percussion instruments.


We tried most of the instruments in about an hour. There were drums and shakers and jigglers made of wood and skins and horns and a turtle shell. A big hollow stick filled with rice (or something similarly small) sounds like falling rain when you flip it upside down.

Short videos seem like the best way to show and tell.

Here's Arno with an instrument from Indonesia:



Lucinda with this neat jiggling thing, maybe also from Indonesia?



Blaine with a Korean drum:



Lucinda plays a steel drum from Jamaica.



Drumming by our friends, Rena Singer (her husband, John Murphy, works for the Wall St. Journal) and her two children, Benjamin and Eden:



And finally, these pleasant Tinkerbell bells: