Project OpenBook

I think this is a fantastic idea (and I'm getting involved):

*Used with permission

Check it out here

Music Resources for Children

The annotated bibliography I've been working on is up and running now--just click on the page above to see it.  I'll keep working on it; there are still many books to read, but if I wait until I'm finished you'll never see it.  So here's what I've got so far...hope it is a useful resource! 

I'm thinking someday it would be nice to have pages for art and literature, too.  We'll see...

A Thought

“A man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.” (G. K. Chesterton)

I came across this quote in an article about teaching worldview, and it really struck a chord. How often do we make a decision about the truth of something based on pure logic or scientific reasoning? And how do you measure that against the strength of a story, poem, song, painting, or movie? Or the roadmap of a life? Or a moment in history?

It seems to me that those who can grasp a philosophy and make it crystallize within a work of art, or a single act, or a life well-lived wield something very powerful.

Capture my imagination, capture my heart.

Captain Arsenio: Inventions and (Mis)adventures in Flight

Captain Arsenio: Inventions and (Mis)adventures in Flight written & illustrated by Pablo Bernasconi, Houghton Mifflin Books, 2005
Captain Arsenio is an engaging character—a dreamer of a different sort. Maybe some people would call him a fool, but there’s something about his optimism, creativity and lack of critical thinking skills that, well, I guess it reminds me of my kids. In a good way. You know the elaborate plans kids make for building robots, creating works of art and constructing castles? This book is an embodiment of those dreams, and what might happen if somebody actually acted on them.

Manuel J. Arsenio was a careless cheese master, blacksmith, scuba diver, and ship captain. Though he was given the easiest of missions in each of these careers, he still couldn’t complete any of them successfully. This problem may be the reason he left those jobs behind to enter the distinguished pages of aviation history.

This is a fictional work told as a biography, full of quotes from Captain Arsenio’s 1780s “diary”. It documents six of the projects he came up with in his quest to build a flying machine. The inventions are ridiculous and fun: the Motocanary, the Aerial Submarine, and the Illusion Burner, among others. Although Arsenio always has high hopes, (“It cannot fail!”) the pages from his flight diary reveal the true story. It pays to read all the fine print in this book, too: the notes in the flight diary give blow-by-blow reports of each flight, showing “panic points”, maximum height reached, and time elapsed, accompanied by dry notes like, “A complex way to demonstrate a total unawareness of the laws of physics.” You’ve got to love the guy for his cheerful persistence in the face of failure.

My kids and I laughed at him, but there’s something just a little familiar about him, too.

The Motivational Power of Chocolate Chips

Middle has been working hard on violin. She listens well, she’s precise and energetic, and she really does a beautiful job. But she’s also a little dreamer-girl (no surprise there). Recently we’ve been dealing with some sound and bow-control issues that I suspected were a result her looking everywhere except at what she was doing. Getting her to watch her bow has been a challenge; it’s not easy to focus on something so close to your face, and besides, there’s so much other interesting stuff to look at!

So today during our practice session I put a handful of chocolate chips in a dish, brought it out to her, and told her, “We’re going to play a game. These chocolate chips are all yours. But every time you look away from your bow or your fingers while you’re playing I get to take one for myself. You can eat whatever is left at the end of our practice.” And what do you know, watching what she was doing wasn’t nearly as hard as we thought! She kept every last chocolate chip.

This wasn’t my original idea; I first heard about it from another teacher years ago. I used it today because nothing else I tried was working and I wanted results. But there was a funny side-effect I hadn’t considered. Middle heard the difference in how she played when she was watching her bow, and she liked the results. Suddenly it wasn’t only about the chocolate—she began to understand what attentiveness means, and she caught a glimpse of what it could do for her playing.  I don’t know if it will stick—we’ll see what happens tomorrow, and next week, and next month. But because of the external motivation I offered, she got a taste of the kind of internal motivation that could help her for the rest of her life. And here I thought it was just a bribe.

On Refusing to Condescend

I ran across these words from Jack Prelutsky last night, on what he didn’t like about a lot of children’s poetry from the late 19th and early 20th century:

It was a Victorian tradition, and it had two unfortunate tendencies. One was a sort of greeting-card verse that was sickeningly sweet and condescending and had no literary merit. The other was poetry that was moralistic and pompous; everything had to have a message, and that was condescending, too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Children aren’t stupid. The main differences between children and adults are that children have had fewer experiences—because they haven’t been around long enough to have as many as we have had—and they are short. Children love to learn. They learn quickly. So I never condescend when I write for children.

--From “In Search of the Addle-pated Paddlepuss”

Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children

ed. by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990

Good stuff. We love Prelutsky’s poetry. I think the best thing about his writing is the fun he has with words—their sounds, their rhythms, their meanings, the images they conjure up. Just think what his poems would be like if he assumed children wouldn’t be able to handle certain words! I’m so glad he refuses to condescend.

Song of Middle C

Song of Middle C by Alison McGhee, illustrated by Scott Menchin, Candlewick Press, 2009

I used to have temper tantrums over art and music. Other things, too, I’m sure, but I remember getting the most intense about drawings that didn’t turn out like the picture in my head and practice sessions that didn’t go the way I thought they should. During one of those meltdowns my mom told me once (in exasperation), “A real artist can make something out of her mistakes. Things rarely turn out the way you want them to. But a true artist can use what she’s got.” I don’t know how well I heard those words at the time—I remember thinking she had made it up on the spot to calm me down—but they sank deep and stayed with me.

Song of Middle C reminded me of my mom’s wise advice. The girl in this story is about to play in her first piano recital, and she is completely prepared. She’s been practicing her piece, “Dance of the Wood Elves”. She listens to what her teacher Miss Kari says. She’s excited and confident and wearing her lucky underwear. But things change when she gets on stage and it’s time to perform (that’s the tough part, isn’t it—things are never the same when you get up in front of people!) I love her solution (wish I had that kind of spunk), but I love her teacher’s response even more.  As a teacher and a musician, I spend a lot of time working on both technical and musical precision. That covers a lot of ground, but there’s more to artistry than that. In Miss Kari’s words, “True artistry requires—” –well, I think you should read the book.

An Introduction to Gilbert & Sullivan

The Fabulous Feud of Gilbert & Sullivan by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Richard Egilski, Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009

Arthur Sullivan wanted to write serious music, but his friend W.S. Gilbert kept writing the same silly opera plot over and over again. It looked like their friendship and opera-writing partnership were finished until Mr. Gilbert came up with something entirely new--“The Mikado”, and it was a huge hit.




It’s my understanding that these two had more than one feud of this sort, but this was a great introduction to who these men were and what their relationship and their music were like. I discovered this book at our local library a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to dig a little deeper. So we borrowed The Pirates of Penzance from the library and had a middle-of-the-week movie night. Definitely time for something light around here. It was lots of fun. Kevin Kline makes a great pirate king—I’ve been watching this number over and over all week.

I’m not aware of many other children’s books that deal with Gilbert & Sullivan operas, but I did find these vintage goodies:

The Gondoliers

The Pirates of Penzance

The Yeomen of the Guard

Iolanthe

H.M.S. Pinafore

The Mikado

These Curtain-Raiser Books (Franlin Watts, Inc.) are from 1965 and 1966, and are retellings of six G & S operas. The illustrations are by Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone.  A great follow-up to Jonah Winter’s book to see just how similar some of Gilbert's plots are.

I just had to throw this in, too: Anna Russell on “How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Opera”

Enjoy!

As Iron Sharpens Iron

Talk about a rich environment. Shinichi Suzuki got the opportunity to live in Berlin as a young man in the 1920s. He was there to study violin, and because of high inflation in Germany at the time (at first the exchange rate was 600 marks for 10 yen, but towards the end of his time there the rate had soared to 100,000,000 marks for 10 yen) he was also able to take in an enormous amount of culture. He studied composition and orchestration. He spent time in the homes of prominent Berliners.He went to concerts almost every night; he saw Richard Strauss, Glazunov and Furtwangler conduct, and heard performances by Fritz Kreisler and Artur Schnabel, among others.

He also had some remarkable friends. One man, a doctor and friend of the Suzuki family, left Berlin early on in Shinichi’s stay to become Dean at Johns Hopkins University. So he asked another friend to take Suzuki under his wing in his place. Do you know who that friend of a friend turned out to be? Albert Einstein. Evelyn Hermann wrote in Shinichi Suzuki: The Man and His Philosophy:

        Einstein’s circle of friends included many people of prominence in their particular fields of endeavor, but they all shared a love of art, and all were extremely modest and kind. Here Suzuki learned that in order to achieve harmony, one must be able to compromise gracefully. He also learned that it is nobler to be the one who yields than the one who forces the other to compromise. Harmony cannot be achieved in any other way. This, then, was the great attribute of character that Suzuki learned from Einstein and his friends. It would later become the basis of Talent Education. Suzuki’s aim is to develop young Japanese children, who will grow to be fine adults, who can enjoy their music together, and who will develop as high an intellect and sensitivity as possible. The purpose of Talent Education is not to train professional musicians, but to train fine musicians, and then through music, the student will show a high ability in whatever field he might choose.

        Einstein was only 16 when the idea of relativity first occurred to him. Einstein said that he discovered it by intuition, and that music was a driving force behind intuition. Einstein’s parents began his study of the violin when he was six years old, and Einstein himself has said, “My new discovery is the result of musical perception.” It was an exhilarating experience for Suzuki to associate with people of such high intellect, sensitivity, and good will.”

That distinction of Suzuki’s goal, “not to train professional musicians, but to train fine musicians” who would then show “a high ability in whatever field” they chose, is huge. The Suzuki Method has produced many fine professional musicians. But the whole point of it is so much more than job training. The thing that impressed Suzuki most about Einstein was neither his scientific prowess nor his skill as a violinist. It was his character. I think sometimes we think of character as a separate quality from skills and accomplishments, or as an accomplishment in itself. But if we rearrange our thinking to envision skills and accomplishments as a stepping stone to who we are as people—doesn’t that change things radically?

The Call

You know how things just come together sometimes? I’ve been reading The Wind in the Willows to the kids for a while now, and we’ve been enjoying it thoroughly. This is my first time through it, and I’ve been surprised by the depth—I knew it was a classic, but somehow all I expected was cozy stories about animals. Good stories, but just nice and cozy. Silly me—I should have known it was a classic for a better reason than that.

We hit the following passage on a Friday afternoon a week and half ago. We were at the end of a get-through-it sort of a week, and I figured the best Language Arts lesson we could have at the end of a week like that was a good long read-aloud. So I read, and read, and read. And we got to “Wayfarers All”, the chapter about the Water Rat’s restlessness as other creatures were heading south for the winter and he was left behind, and it struck me deeply:

Restlessly the Rat wandered off once more, climbed the slope that rose gently from the north bank of the river, and lay looking out towards the great ring of Downs that barred his vision further southwards—his simple horizon hitherto, his Mountains of the Moon, his limit behind which lay nothing he had cared to see or to know. To-day, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; to-day, the unseen was everything, the unknown the only real fact of life. On this side of the hills was now the real blank, on the other lay the crowded and coloured panorama that his inner eye was seeing so clearly. What seas lay beyond, green, leaping, and crested! What sun-bathed coasts, along which the white villas glittered against the olive woods! What quiet harbours, thronged with gallant shipping bound for purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in languorous waters!

He rose and descended river-wards once more; then changed his mind and sought the side of the dusty lane. There, lying half-buried in the thick, cool under-hedge tangle that bordered it, he could muse on the metalled road and all the wondrous world that it led to; on all the wayfarers, too, that might have trodden it, and the fortunes and adventures they had gone to seek or found unseeking—out there, beyond—beyond!

I started a post later that afternoon, but before I could finish our computer was accidentally pulled off the table and the screen shattered, and I’ve been unable to access it until yesterday. Here’s what I was thinking that day:

Our family is getting a glimpse of two worlds right now. I don’t know how else to put it. We are going through our daily lives, busy with end-of-school-year activities, thinking about summer, doing dishes and laundry, fighting colds. At the same time, a loved one is dying. Each day this week our day-to-day, regular life has been interspersed with calls from my mom with updates on Gram’s physical and spiritual state. She is at peace. She smiles even in her sleep. She is in a physical state of decline. We are at peace; we rest in the faith that she is on her way to heaven, and that this is not a final goodbye but a long separation.

My grandma died that night. We miss her terribly, and are thankful for many good years and the chance to say goodbye before she passed. That time between worlds—well, it feels like a door has closed for now. And it may be a small thing, but I find I have a new friend in Kenneth Grahame, who wrote a book in 1908 that spoke into my life in 102 years later in a way that he probably never intended, but that I will probably never forget.

“To-day, the unseen was everything, the unknown the only real fact of life.”