Getting Better at the Baby Stuff

Back in February I wrote about how I'd gone out to buy more examples of what a piano teacher I had when I was a kid dismissed sneeringly as "baby stuff"—pretty little piano works, often written by people like Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, that sort of thing. What I do is sight-read them cold, and it's coming along. Little by little my sight-reading is improving. I plan to stick with it, playing just for a few minutes every day, in the hope that in six months or a year I'll be able to sight-read stuff that isn't for babies—sonatas and so forth, the real deal. Not the truly hard music, but at least music that's actually meant for adults to play.

But until then there's a great deal of pleasure in just playing baby stuff. It's pretty. And just getting better at the sight reading is gratifying. You get through a piece playing it more or less right, and it feels good. I'll tell you what: If you watch this kid playing a piece of baby stuff and look at her expression at the end of it (it lasts 17 seconds), you'll know how I feel when I successfully play the same sort of thing: