A Love of Music
The first week of January, I joined our church handbell choir. I am playing the big bells - C3-F3. It has been a lot of fun. I haven’t played handbells since church handbell choir way back in my middle school/high school years. When I played in grammar school age church choir, the music pieces were much more elementary than this adult choir. This is a challenge, but I feel ready to learn and contribute.
Yesterday evening and this morning, our handbell choir participated in a handbell festival. Didn’t know of such an event until recently. At the festival, we had a guest conductor who gave us constructive feedback to aid us in properly playing the music pieces. After hours of rehearsal, we were ready to play in a worship service the pieces that we have been working on the past 6 weeks. I can’t wait to get back to practice on Wednesday evening and discuss all that we learned at the festival.
It is always fun to pick up the kids from childcare on Wednesday evenings. At church we first have dinner and then I go to handbell practice while my mom keeps the boys for a half hour until childcare opens for prayer meeting. When I am finished with rehearsal, I go into prayer meeting and then get the boys and go home. J always asks me, “Did you get to play the BIG bells?” He is fascinated with them. Last Wednesday evening, before rehearsal, I took the boys into the practice room with me and let them play the bells with my mallets (the bells are too big to pick up easily). They loved it.
I am also teaching them how to play piano - I have color tabs taped to 3 octaves of our piano keys with a color book to match. C is enjoying learning “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” although he calls it the alphabet song. Hopefully they will learn to love music as much as I do. I know C loves to listen to music. Each time he learns a new song that he likes, he asks me or B to burn him a CD of it to play repeatedly on his CD player in his bedroom. Who knows… maybe I am raising the next Beethoven or Mozart?!