four&twenty

Carpe Diem

It's that time of year again: Standardized Test Season.

I've had students want to crumple, rip, burn, chew, even fold and fly their standardized testing bubble answer sheets. But this year Taylor takes the prize, "I am going to turn this into a piece of music."

And so he did. Yep, it's true. So far he's translated his vocabulary bubbles to a little Schoenberg-esque ditty.

Vocabulary

Can't wait to hear Reading Comprehension! This is what I call new heights!

Industrial Animation

Back in the summer of 2003, I took my children to Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sketchbook and pencil in hand, I patted each of them on the back and set them free to explore the works as they saw fit. I love observing the creative process. I felt fortunate to wander with them among works that we have admired from afar in books and on the web.

The exhibition, a collection of works by Modigliani, his friends, and contemporaries, might have been better titled “Conversations from Montparnasse” because the collection was a reunion of works developed long ago in a bohemian Paris neighborhood. I was excited to see how my children would join the conversation.

My oldest son Taylor was nine. He had been studying piano for a bit more than a year, but seemed at the time more interested in visual art. Three works captured his imagination at this exhibit: Dancer, Second Version by Sonia Delauney 1916, Black Hair (Young Seated Girl With Brown Hair), Modigliani, and The City, Fernand Leger 1919. These are the works he decided to study. I watched him study and sketch the first two carefully. When he came to the third, Leger’s painting, he simply stood there, soaking the image into his imagination.

Later that day I heard Taylor plunking away on the piano, but didn’t give it much thought until this past spring when he won a competition for an original piano composition and had to write program notes:   

Industrial Animation, a composition for piano by Taylor Bredberg

The story behind this piece began seven years ago after visiting an exhibit, Modigliani and the Art of Montparnasse and after watching a set of short films called Masters of Russian Animation. Here I learned to appreciate industrial beauty and fell in love with the dissonance of Russian music that inspired the main melody. The next part of the journey is very dull considering that the melody sat dormant until recently. In a moment of composer’s block I began to sift through some of my older sketches and came upon the melody. It was unrefined but still had something to it, so I took to it and started working. Prokofiev and Shostakovich, being two of my favorite composers, heavily influenced its mood and shape. Soon enough, along with four brand new melodies, the work is finished, an Industrial Animation at last.

Industrial Animation

Da Vinci’s sketchbooks come to mind, page after page teaming with elaborate ideas, “Art is never finished only abandoned.” All those years ago when we visited the LACMA exhibit Taylor was simply encouraged to abandon some of his ideas into a little sketch book.

Guess it was worth the trip to the local art museum.

– Kim

When Work Becomes Meaningful

Taylor began tackling a concerto back in October. The process of moving from notes on a page to music was grueling, not only for him but for all the inhabitants of our home. For the piece to resemble music, he had to break the thing into sections to be played repeatedly. Whenever he made a mistake he would repeat that section… over and over, leaving notes to bounce off 1800 square feet of walls and tangle somewhere in the center of my brain.

I was relieved when the notes were at last learned, thought I would enjoy 3 to 4 melodic hours a day. Nope. The next stage was to add dynamics, which entailed playing Ravel’s ridiculously fast composition in fast motion… then slow motion through absolutely everything in between while stopping at sections where his fingers slipped to, you guessed it, fix each mistake three times. I pride myself a fairly patient person with broad musical appreciation, but any given section of this piece taken out of its entirety is fingernails on chalkboard. So this is how it went for three months straight.

When Taylor at last performed Ravel Concerto in G Major, III. Presto,

Presto... 

I was shocked, “What?!!!” I had no idea! Then his music teacher’s comment hit me on the head: “Taylor’s come into his own.”

My internal voice whispered in response, “Who was it up to before tonight?” It slowly dawned on me that the work of the teacher/mentor is implied in that overused phrase. As parents, Willie and I have never pushed or prodded Taylor to become a musician, but we have tirelessly encouraged him that his work matters. Taylor has worked hard to form this habit, but his teacher is right, he has at last embraced the work as his own.

Not only does Taylor play music, he writes music. Here is a recent composition:

Industrial Animation

This past week Taylor was sick and his one complaint was that he would not be able to work at his music… it’s true.

We are ridiculously busy in this world, at times too exhausted to chase our own dreams. As a teacher, my students readily share their dreams of being a prima ballerina or an astronaut or a paleontologist, or, in the case of my son, a performing composer. But what happens when we answer, “Yes you can,” pat them on the back and watch them while away hours on the X-Box? Dreams shrivel when students form enduring trivial habits.   

Becoming Juilliard material was never our goal. Fighting for a habit of purpose is costly in more ways than one, but we find a way. There is no doubt Taylor's skill serves him well and hopefully will encourage others to engage in the work of chasing a dream.

When the phone rang and a writer from the Los Angeles Times wanted to speak to Taylor... wanted to interview my son, I speechlessly handed over the phone. He has certainly come into his own, one note at a time. What I see developing in my oldest son's character is something that a standardized test will never measure.