it's a new year

So the year has changed. It's like 557890 now. I have no idea actually. I made a dumb joke to Christopher the other day about how lucky Jewish Chinese people living in America are. Three new years.
On Thursday the quartet recorded some songs for a pop singer here, Daphna Dekel. Hilla told us that she's Itamar's(her five-year old) favorite singer. During the war, she made a song for kids about how soon everyone will be hugging each other and we'll all live in peace. Hilla said the video was on TV three times a day, and every time, Itamar dragged her in front of it and told her she had to watch it again because it was such a beautiful song. When you're recording string tracks, usually the singer isn't even there, but Daphna stayed through the whole session, and kept offering to bring us coffee. She was probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and I secretly made a plan to go over to Hilla's so I could sit on the couch and watch with Itamar. Every time she'd stick her head in, I'd nudge Hilla, like, "get her autograph for Itamar!!" How happy would you be if you found out you were a five-year old's favorite? I guess when you get to a certain level of fame, you just know you're popular with a lot of kids. But it's got to always feel good.
One of my students in Jerusalem has, well the only way I've found to put it is a "little-girl crush" on me. Whenever she plays, even if she should be looking at the music, she's looking up at me to see my expression. It makes me giggle, and when I giggle she giggles, and it's a very funny vibe for a lesson. Both of us like, awww, she likes me. She's 8, and practices everything I give her. I've never had a studio before, I've only subbed for friends. That feeling, when the kids comes in and has practiced? Priceless. Now I understand everything! And on the other hand, when you have a kid who clearly doesn't want to play at all, it's torture. Luckily, my one student who was like that decided she wanted to play guitar. I tried to find music at her level that was fun to play, to draw her in. I tried playing for her. I tried simple duets we could play together. And I liked her a lot, she was sweet and funny. But I'm not doing this for the money, you know? I wish I could make someone want to play who doesn't, cause we should have little kids everywhere playing. There should be orchestras in every school. But classical music is so irrelevant to most little kids' lives now. It's super sad to say, but true. That New Yorker article I mentioned before is great because it talks about a program that's introducing music to kids in an awesome way- through ensemble playing. It's so classic, the kid who can't play with his friends cause he has to practice. Alone. There's this self-fulfilling culture of isolation in classical music. The other program mentioned was a school big band in Newark, where the teacher encourages kids to arrange music they listen to, stuff on the radio, to play in school. I will never forget Lenny Smith, who taught me to play "Boom Boom Boom Let's Go Back to my Room" on my violin while we were on a Synagogue retreat in the Poconos. I was 8. When I played a bit of Dvorak's "Humoreske" for my 10-year old viola student, telling her it was the next piece I was going to give her, she exclaimed, "That's a cell phone ring!"