I know what song Lucy wants to work on today because I hear her singing it as she comes up the steps. Walking right past me as though I’m invisible, she makes a beeline for the piano. Lucy always knows what she wants to do. She thrives on the freedom to choose. When we began together two years ago, I wasn’t sure that she knew what she was doing, and she was likewise unsure that I knew what I was doing. She spent awhile testing her freedom. Now we’ve become comfortable – we trust each other.

Lucy sits down and plays her song again and again in different octaves, with and without harmony, experimenting with articulation and tempo. Usually, almost no words are spoken during these twenty minutes. I might offer a suggestion – sometimes she takes it and sometimes she doesn’t. If I start to play a harmony part along with her, she sometimes accepts it, but other times she shakes her head with a definitive rejection. Lucy knows it is okay to do that here. After a long, intense period of concentration, she will abruptly stop, turn to me and tell me about an upcoming trip or her favorite cartoon. After a few minutes of this, she will either return to the piano or go to a drum or the autoharp.

This reminds me of bread dough. You knead it for awhile, then set it aside to rest. When you return to it, it is once again pliable and ready to stretch. After an intense period of concentration, Lucy senses that she needs to rest, so she talks about cartoons. After a few minutes, she returns to whatever musical thing she was working on. In the beginning, needless to say, I felt quite uncomfortable each time she would stop and talk about something that had nothing to do with music. I even made the mistake of trying to urge her back to music, which turned out to be a silly and fruitless thing to do. It took me almost a year to catch on.

While I am entirely comfortable with my role here, it would be difficult to articulate exactly what that role is. Certainly the musical vocabulary Lucy uses has been acquired from me, but how and when has been up to her, not me. The songs she’s learned to play with two hands are arrangements she’s learned here, but she has picked them up mostly by watching, listening, imitating and figuring them out by ear, with a little encouragement from me. While my presence appears to be passive, it is not, but what it actually is defies description. I did an experiment once. While Lucy was playing her song, ignoring me as usual, I got up and left the room for a few minutes. While I was away she gradually stopped playing, but resumed when I returned. A puzzle. This child’s parents say that ever since she began Music House, she’s been very excited about music. She says she wants to keep coming to Music House until she is a very old woman.