Aidan's private violin teacher holds recitals twice per year for all her students. Aidan played Ode to Joy at Christmas, but when it came time to select a piece for the year-end recital, he didn't really have any material on account of never getting into a regular habit of practicing.
He likes to play around on the violin, getting different sounds and playing pieces in different keys. He hadn't been confident with sight-reading music, and had convinced himself that he may never be able to, so didn't really try.
Anyway, he hit his lowest point on May 25, when his teacher was frustrated that he hadn't been practicing and didn't have a piece for the recital. She proposed that perhaps he shouldn't play in the recital this time. It's true that he could only play a few bars of Brandenburg No. 5 (from Strings Explorer 1), then couldn't read the notes or rhythms for the rest of the song. In our car after the lesson, through ten minutes of tears and an analogy about raindrops (a longish story, but beautifully told by Aidan), he resolved to rise up and challenge himself to perform in the recital.
He put many things aside and made Brandenburg his priority for the next two weeks. He would play the song through, up to 20 times per day and we recorded him once on most of those days.
This evening, the recital was held at the Mount Seymour United Church. Aidan played beautifully and did particularly well with the rhythm and the final note (which had been out of tune on many practice runs). He played the song as a duet with his teacher.
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