Children’s Music Books from 40 years ago: A walk down Nostalgia Lane

I am in nostalgic mode this month, in the books I am reflecting on. This is possibly an outcome of the nightly ritual of reading books from my childhood to my 9yo son. Many of these were read to me by my mother. I would often beg for just a little more, just one more chapter, and often she would oblige. Currently my son and I are partway through Redcap Runs Away by Rhoda Power, first published in 1952, a mix of history and music that just suits his interests. Redcap, the sweet-voiced smith’s boy, runs away with the minstrels in search of his flame-haired uncle. It’s a gentle view of the feudal system with its accompanying hardships, and in the end love of family wins out over Redcap’s love of singing. On the way, we learn much about medieval life and the music in it. I remember well my delight at learning the tune of the Boarshead Carol a few years after making its acquaintance in this book, and even at university, echoes of the story resounded in the Medieval and Renaissance module.

I was a hungry reader. We lived in a small city in New Zealand with a large library; it covered two floors of an enormous building, with the children’s section taking up two whole rooms. The fiction books decorated the walls, while the nonfiction was on free-standing shelves in the middle. The amount of choice at times paralysed me, but I read widely. Novels and biographies were my first choice, though I realise just how many of my favourite books were about music. I used to go upstairs to borrow song collections from the adult section, taking them home to learn enthusiastically - my sister still laughs at the memory of my frequent renditions of favourites such as The Man-Eating Shark:

“The most chivalrous fish in the ocean,
To ladies forbearing and mild,
Though his record be dark
Is the man-eating shark -
Who will eat neither woman nor child.”

And then I would descend the stairs again to prowl the shelves of the children’s section. I was only permitted eight books each time, and choosing was an agony of pleasure and pain. Which ones were safest to leave in the hope that they would still be there the following week? Did I want to read comfortable familiars, or branch out into new territory?

I wonder what happened to all those old books when the library and its collections were updated? I used to love hunting through the “cancelled” book box, buying up titles that still grace my bookshelves. Several favourites at different times of my life are in the pile ready to be read to my son when their turn comes. 

Music books often made up the majority of my selection. I enjoyed the Opal Wheeler fictionalized accounts of composer childhoods, with excerpts from their works dotting the pages. Brahms turned up in the cancelled book box, and I played the Intermezzo op.117/1 over and over. (Later I would play it for my Grade 8 exam, a choice fueled almost entirely by that earlier acquaintance.) The Lark in the Morn and The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont, the story of a Quaker girl who must choose the kind of singer she wants to be, introduced me to Schubert through An die Musik.

The one for the youngest reader that I recall was The Wood Street Group, by Mabel Esther Allan. I never really got into her more magical, older books, but this one I read more than once. It’s the story of a group of children who are bored enough in the miserable cold of a British midwinter to start their own band, making their own instruments where necessary and eventually staging a concert for their appreciative families. How I wished I could persuade my friends to do the same! I imagined gathering in our garage with pipe, drum and ukulele; sadly it was not to be, and I had to wait until I had the captive audience of a primary school music class before I could fulfil my ambition in some way.

Another book, rather more exotic to my Antipodean sensibilities, was Seraph In A Box by Robina Beckles Willson. This is the second of three books about Sarah and Alistair, the slightly complex back story having been set up in the first book of the trilogy, Pineapple Palace. It is the story of a glass harmonica, an instrument that I fear went over my uncomprehending head, but the intrigue around the sinister man on the motorcycle, and the letter in the hand of Leopold Mozart, kept me reading. Eventually that information, so lightly offered in the core of the storytelling, was filed away in my memory, and when I finally heard the Mozart Adagio that is the music of the story, Beckles Willson’s book was a warm pillar of understanding in my listening.

But there were two books that I read again and again, perhaps betraying my pianistic soul early on. The first was Prelude by Clare H. Abrahall, a romanticised account of the early years of Australian pianist Eileen Joyce, and the less-than-ideal circumstances from which she came. Eileen’s long, bare legs play a prominent role, a symbol of her freedom in the Australian countryside, and a foil to the sparkling fingerwork on the piano. But there was enough music, the beckoning lights of London kept me gripped, and it’s also worth noting that Abrahall knew Joyce personally, persuading the pianist to recount her story, and accompanying her on tours around the globe. 

My favourite book, the one that was read while I dreamed of glory, was Kitty Barne’s She Shall Have Music. Barne was a favourite author anyway, and I read many of her books. But this one came from a place of deep identification on the part of Barne, who had studied music at the Royal College of Music, before having to give it up when surgery caused deafness in her left ear. When I look back on it with my adult eyes, I am quite horrified by some of the experiences that the central character undergoes. The public assassination of her musicality in her first competition makes me shudder, as does the rather savage portrayal of her first teacher’s attempt at an overdone Bohemian musicality. But as a child I devoured the experiences of Karen, the heroine, from her first hunting for the notes of Drink To Me Only on Aunt Anne’s stiff piano, through the ups and downs of terrible technique and scale regimes, to the triumph of the scholarship at the London Institute of Music. I wished I could entertain my friends the way Karen could, and I wished I could soak myself in music all day every day. All these book fed my love of music, almost as much as the music itself:

“‘Now play us something properly,’ shouted a girl who was a music-lover herself.
‘go on, but for goodness’ sake don’t given them any of your high-brow stuff,’ hissed Judy in her ear. Karen was coming off splendidly; she mustn’t be allowed to spoil it.
So Karen gave the ‘Rocket’ – nothing high-brow about that. A scream with the back of her hand scraping up the keyboard – that was the rocket going off. Seven singing notes for the stars. Thunder in the bass with a loud pedal down for the applause. It was a great success and she tried something more.
‘Listen. This is a dancing bear.’ She played the passage where he lumbers in, out of the Haydn symphony that Aunt Anne always called ‘The Bear’.
They laughed at that. ‘Jolly good,’ said the head girl, and Karen’s spirits began to bubble.”

The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, by Ruth Wajnryb

“My research and this book are about silence – the many faces and meanings of silence, the communicative power of silence as it fills the pauses and cracks and crannies of our discourse, of our relationships and of our lives. And I suppose too, though I dislike the word, the pathology of silence. It rests on a pragmaticist’s approach to silence which obliges meaning to be drawn from context. Just as words do not carry their meanings around them but are infused by their context, so too the meaning of silence is infused by its context and draws its meaning from there.”

Once a year in the MMus class at the Royal Academy of Music, we ask both teachers and students in the class to bring a piece of writing that they love. It can be on anything, not necessarily music; the only stipulations are that it must be non-fiction, and you must bring it because you love the use of language, the way the author uses words and syntax and grammar to weave the linguistic tapestry on the page. 

It is always wonderful to see the extraordinary range that comes to class. We’ve had writings on computer games, Shakespeare, history, sociology, and even, occasionally, music itself (!). I have discovered many a new author through the enthusiasm and love shown by students for the things they read. I too have brought many examples throughout the years - Pina Bausch is one recollection - but recently I have alighted on one particular book that ticks so many boxes, including the one of pure love for the written word, that I can’t bring myself to choose something different. It’s Ruth Wajnryb’s deep exploration of “how tragedy shapes talk”, simpy titled The Silence.

I discovered Wajnryb’s book fifteen years ago, when I was in that stage of my PhD of searching for the right language to describe my findings. I had been looking at songs by three mid nineteenth-century German women, and what struck me was not so much the phrasing, but the way in which that phrasing encapsulated silences that felt deliberate. I knew what I was seeing in the music before me, but I could not find the way to demonstrate verbally how fundamental I believed it to be in constructing a performance practice.

I can’t remember now how I found Wajnryb. I don’t think it was even as part of my research, but simply a book I picked up elsewhere. And within a page, I was gripped, in part by the writing, but also in part by a sense of recognition on a personal level. Wajnryb is a linguist, and the book is ostensibly a linguistic textbook. But it is far more than that, and Wajnryb writes for a far wider audience than her fellow academics. She starts from her own painful and poignant story of growing up in a family scarred by the Holocaust, of being a descendant of those who witnessed the atrocity firsthand. Her emphasis is on the second generation – she tells the story of Susan, whose only link to her ancestors is a photo of her grandmother knitting: “Susan’s statement, ‘I know that she liked knitting’, in fact speaks volumes, but not about her grandmother and not about knitting. It speaks about what is not known by one generation and what has not been said by another[…]” Wajnryb’s search for meaning is in the gaps in the stories handed down to her, for handed down they are, despite not being verbal. Wajnryb talks of “fragments and echoes”, of learning “to probe the gap between what is said and what is meant”. The history with which she is working is, as she says, indeed unspeakable, too large and too terrible to find adequate words. The shutters on the cover of the book say it all. We know there is a room within, one that has a description that we can fashion, but the barriers are there, though perhaps so much part of our lives that we barely see them. Wajnryb finds correspondences in other types of trauma, drawing large lessons in communication within all relationships. While there are differences in “nature and function”, she writes, the silences contain a “regrouping and reconstructing” of a story, and carry their own messages. Wajnryb’s willingness to confront silence in this way, and to allow it to be itself, rather than to try and replace it with verbalized language, was what struck me as so powerful, and gave me the tools I needed for the equally non-verbal silences in the music I was trying to understand.

One of Wajnryb’s points is that silence isn’t necessarily solely external suppression, although it often is, but often has a self-imposed element in the face of a seemingly insurmountable task. Such silence often tells a different story to the one offered by people who are comfortable with being verbally explicit. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s definition of a man’s sentence, as one where “‘Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.’ That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use.” This seems to me to be not about the literal structure of the sentence, or even surface content, but rather to be a conscious rejection of Bloom’s concepts of influence, of the idea that women carry the same anxieties and experience as men do, not just in the everyday world, but also creatively. Success and habit, at least habit unbroken by other demands on the creator, are often not indigenous to women in the same way as they are to men, and thus the inflection within the language, and the context from which meaning is drawn, is very different.

The concentration on a second generation was also a drawing point here. Many of the women composers we tend to put under the spotlight are not pioneers, despite our attempt to make them so. Our constant reinvention of the woman-composer wheel may seem superficially to celebrate women, but we run the risk of negating the struggle for everydayness. Sometimes it’s harder to allow someone to be seen as one of the crowd, to accept that someone is part of us, then to crown them with superlatives, such as “transcending barriers”, or “unique”, or “stand-out”, all words I’ve read recently on historical women.

Wajnryb’s language itself is beautiful and lyrical. I am captivated anew with every reading. Her description of what research is and why it matters is woven in with the personal and the statistical; I find fresh insight with every reading. I close with one of her personal anecdotes, one of the many that knit her narrative together in the courageously personal way that lends such authenticity to her book, and is a model to us all. Her three-year-old daughter has found a photo of her grandmother, Wajnryb’s mother, and has asked where she is. Wajnryb explains that she died two-and-a-half years previously, but Laura refuses to accept this explanation:

“Later in the same day, as I passed the shelf where the picture frame stood, I moved it up to adult height, thinking Laura wouldn’t notice, and that would be the end of the matter. A cowardly, evasive act, I conceded, and one that backfired. The next time Laura passed by the shelf, she noticed the photo had been moved to a higher shelf. With a slick, imperative tone in her voice, she said, ‘Bring it down here!’
Compliantly, silently, I did as I was bid and she added, ‘And now, leave it there!’ She ran off, tossing over her shoulder as if it were an afterthought or a Greek chorus, ‘That my mum’s mum. She not dead.’
[…]
A few days later she passed the same shelf where the photo was, as ordered, at her eye level. She was smugly pleased about this. She picked up the frame again, possessively. As if aware of her mysterious power to ‘work’ this conversation to her own ends, she caught my eye and said, ‘She your mum, look. She not dead, Mum.’ I fought the impulse to remain silent. I looked about for an answer that would in the circumstances, some sort of compromise between her three-year-old reality and mine. ‘Yes, Laura, that’s my mum. She’s not dead. Not in the photo.’”

Little Lady With a Big Drum by Elayne Jones

Elayne Jones book.jpg
“Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind..”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Virginia Woolf’s description of the way in which memory works is a fine description of Elayne Jones’s book, Little Lady With A Big Drum. It has been advertised as “the official autobiography” of percussionist Jones. It has also been described as “the story of one woman’s remarkable life and career in her own words; a journey from meager beginnings as a self-described ‘skinny little girl from Harlem,’ to the highest echelons of classical music; with a musical talent and personal drive that enabled her to transcend racial and gender barriers.” 

Let’s unpick both of these descriptions a bit, particularly the language used here. For a start, I am uneasy about the ‘transcend’ rhetoric. This is the story of the first black, female  percussionist in a well-known American orchestra. Jones is forthright in describing the obstacles she encountered from the very beginning of her acquaintance with the piano at age six, and the political occupies the foreground of her story much of the time, not least because of her involvement in many initiatives, and her determination to make music available to as many as possible. Access is a horribly overused and misunderstood word, but this is exactly what drives her. She loves the music that weaves itself through her life and wants everyone to have the opportunity to experience it from the inside out. She is very clear – it’s not a matter that somehow, if you’re talented enough, all those pesky barriers won’t matter, and if you didn’t succeed, you just weren’t good enough after all. It’s about having good teachers from the very beginning, and ensemble opportunities, and exposure to good playing and music through listening to concerts and gigs. And it’s about being heard on your own merits, rather than through the warping effects of bias and corruption. I am also wary of these ‘highest echelons’ – what is it about certain classical institutions that allows them the cultural authority accorded by such a description? What exactly is the ‘excellence’ that is assumed of these places? Elayne Jones, in her long career, was timpanist of the New York City Opera, the American Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. She freelanced across a wide variety of genres from jazz to music theatre to classical, gave workshops and lectures, taught percussion. Which bits of that extraordinary richness of music-making is permitted to call itself the ‘highest echelons’, and which aren’t?

Thus, Jones’s book is the story of a not-so-historical era that still underpins how much of the classical music world still operates. It is the story of systems and hierarchies, and how they are so often seen as more important than the wonderful, glorious music about which Jones herself is so passionate. It is her own story, indeed an autobiography, but what is that? There have been many explorations of the white-and-male-dominated idea of what an autobiography really is, with the assumption of a teleological structure that maps to a subject’s external chronology. There is little sense that this strict adherence to the idea of time passing is what is important for Jones, or indeed at times even her own position in her own story; I am much more put in mind of Audre Lorde’s finding meaning in recognising difference; of Adrienne Rich’s careful combination of personal grounding and theoretical observation; of Maya Angelou’s examination of “some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths”, and Carolyn Heilbrun’s search for autobiography in the actual living of a life, in all its chaos and incoherence - all ways of making our personal narrative interact with the people and places and ways of thinking that are the things that shape us. 

There is an integrity to this way of writing, a veracity that is pulled out into the open by an unashamed adherence to it. It gives a hierarchy to Jones’s story; it’s very easy to see what is important to her. It is also because one gets the feeling that much of her life is private to her, or so engrained, so much part of her, that she would be surprised if someone asked for words to fit it. She does not explicitly speak of her divorce, although she reflects on the reasons for it in her customarily frank yet humanitarian and empathetic way. And there is surprisingly little musical detail, especially in the later sections,. Jones does recount being asked why she wants “to play music by white men”, a question she avoids to a large extent. This falls into the category of so obvious that it doesn’t need saying – Jones loves this music – but still, I’d like to know if she sees gaps in the repertoire – if she wants music by black composers, female composers (she once shared a dormitory at Tanglewood with composer Julia Perry, though they remained acquaintances rather than friends). She does touch on the technical complexities of her life as a percussionist, and one particular description delighted me as a non-drummer:

“Timpanists must tune the instrument, hear the notes they need either by having absolute pitch, or knowing the music well enough to use relative pitch for chordal structure […] while singing and tuning the note at the same time, I must keep the count of where I am […] I am kept extremely busy and for the most part I am all alone like swimming in a sea of sharks waiting to devour me.”

At the same time, in the midst of this contextualised way of writing, there is also a sense of the fragmented experience that belongs to us all. Jones is clear that this can only be a snapshot, no matter how wide-angle. Her experience as a black musician in NYC was already different from those of black musicians in the South. Her confrontation of issues arising from the collision of motherhood and creativity is also particularly foregrounded here. She writes about this act of juggling, the expectation of the world that if women are brash enough to think they can do both, that the conflicts and mess must be kept hidden. (There is a meme currently doing the rounds of social media, that says “We expect women to work like they don't have children and raise children as if they don't work”. There is more than a grain of truth here.)

The  whole book could have done with a good edit. There are repetitions, sometimes literal, typos and misspellings (Aaron Copland’s name being one example). But that’s my English teacher grandmother channelling herself through me, and I’ll put that part of me back in its box. 

This book should be required reading for anyone engaging in classical music through outreach, concert-giving, education, or any of the other ways that music reaches people. Despite Jones thinking that racism is here to stay, she writes with hope, and with such humanitarian empathy. 

As she says, “Dreams motivate us to do better, whether they are real or not.”

Elayne Jones plays timpani in this 1953 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5.