Music, Musik, Musica

No matter what language you say it in, our girls love music! At any given point on a Sunday afternoon you can hear an array of music pouring from the open windows of our house. It's not always orderly, and not always in perfect key or pitch, but it often sounds quite good. Possibly because I have never had any ability in this area {and even more likely because I am their mom}, it just amazes me and I love to listen.

Over Mother's Day weekend, Alyssa competed with our church in her first Fine Arts Festival. A group of at least twenty churches from Wisconsin and Northern Michigan met and had a whirlwind day of competition in just about every area of fine arts you can imagine. Below is a video of our church's youth choir singing. It is just a cell phone video and hard to make out individuals, but she is in the front row, the third from the left.



Alyssa also competed in a solo event {this was the first year they offered a junior division in vocal solo events, otherwise she would have had to wait until 9th grade to compete}. I was so, so proud of her! She has certainly sung for a larger audience before, but never in such a high pressure situation where there were judges critiquing her voice. She got some really wonderful and helpful feedback. I have a cell phone video of that as well, but it is pretty bad quality. I think she will be singing the same song during a Sunday night service coming up soon at church and I am hopeful that will be a better opportunity to get a good video of her singing. She also asked me if she could write a post about her Fine Arts Festival experience, so I will try to have her post that and a clip of her singing at the same time.

And here is a clip of Emma's recent piano concert. I remember the weekend when she finally got the song from the Wizard of Oz. She had been practicing it for a couple weeks, and was so happy when she got the correct tempo down.

The week after her recital she was so proud to show me her piano report card. She worked really hard at reading music this year and playing what she calls "real" songs. I get such a kick out of how much the girls love anything musical and I am thankful for all the different opportunities they have at church and school to explore these kind of activities!