My daughter has really begun to stretch her musical muscles lately; among other things, she loves to sing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ as loudly and phonetically as she can. Her latest obsession has been Touch the Sound (2004), a documentary that my wife brought home from the library a few days ago. The film is directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer — who also directed Rivers and Tides (2001), which made my top ten list a few years back — and, while I have not sat down and watched the film myself, I gather it concerns a near-deaf solo percussionist named Evelyn Glennie and has some of the same meditative qualities that Rivers and Tides had. I don’t belittle the film at all by saying that the bits of it I have caught here and there have reminded me of one or two of the Mister Rogers episodes that our kids often watch; he, too, was interested in the magic and mystery that could be found in music, and in the possibility of finding music in everyday objects, and I wonder if the similarity accounts for my daughter’s interest in this film. At any rate, my daughter is only two years old, and she reaches for this disc whenever she sees it on the shelf, and she watches it attentively whenever we pop it in the player. Should we be thinking about getting her music lessons already?
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