November 27, 2006 - Monday
"What did you want to listen to today, Jeremy?" I asked, trying to hurry him a little as he stood in front of the CD rack trying to pick music for the four minute car ride to Mary's house (Monday is "Mary day" each week).
"I don't know."
"Oh wait," it struck me, "I know what we should listen to."
"What?"
"The Christmas Oratorio." For the last several years I've generally put that on during pancake breakfast on the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, but yesterday I forgot for some reason.
"Is that this one?" he asked, immediately pulling the Christmas Oratorio double CD out of the rack. I cannot imagine how he knew it was the right one. Did he remember from last year? I don't it, but I certainly haven't played it since then. Although, I seem to remember several weeks ago that he pulled it out as he was looking for morning music and I surely would have told him that was a Christmas CD and that we'd probably want to save that one until after Thanksgiving. Jeremy seems to have a very good memory for that sort of thing. He also seems to have a very good knowledge of the roughly 350 CDs we have there.

And that's not just a knowledge of the cases and cover art. Mommy put on Mozart's Magic Flute Friday morning and apparently after not very long Jeremy piped up and said, "I know this. Is this the Magic Flute?"

I suppose on the one hand both of those feats might be surprising coming from the average 5-year-old. But I'm not sure it's really as special as it might seem. Jeremy's been picking CDs just about every day for more than a year and so you'd expect him to have learned something about what music is there. And although it certainly seems precocious for a typical 5-year-old to recognize the Magic Flute, or the Brandenburg Concerti, I'm not sure that it's anything more than a child learning what they're exposed to. The whole idea behind the Suzuki violin/cello method, as I understand it, is that children have a great capacity to learn new words each day just by exposure, and if they are exposed to musical sounds at a similar rate they could just as easily build a musical vocabulary. I think Jeremy is proving that theory to be true.


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