Images of the Child as Musician

Images of the Child as Musician Music is one of the few universal languages: most people in any culture enjoy it in some form, and children may respond the most naturally of all to its appeal. Making music is more specialized , though; many people would like to be musicians, but few have the combination of talent and perseverance required to succeed as performers. As adults, we know this, but in the books we write for children , what images of musicians do we present? And can one artistic medium (words) ever adequately convey the features of another (music) to an audience? To answer the second question first, interrelationships between artistic media offer a compelling area of scholarship. It's no accident that Romantic music was being composed and performed as Romantic poetry was being written and read. Even an artist as consummate as Maurice Sendak acknowledges his dependence on another medium—words—for inspiration: With me, everything begins with writing. No pictures at all—you just shut the Polaroid off; you don't want to be seduced by pictures because then you begin to write for pictures. Images come in language, language, language : phrases, in verbal constructs, in poetry, whatever . I've never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished—when my editor thinks it's finished—do I begin the pictures. Then I put the film in my head (60). The relationship that Sendak acknowledges between words and art should also exist between words and music, though perhaps in reverse order. That is, books about children making music should begin with the music, and the verbal images that follow should be true —to both the music and to the child musician. An examination of selected picture books and books for older readers1 that feature children making music reveals these images as sometimes facile, sometimes narrow, and sometimes true. The first category—facile books—presents the musician as magician. To be sure, making music can be one of life's great pleasures, but this pleasure usually comes after arduous practice , sometimes with discouraging interludes. However, facile books like Arthur Yorinks' picture book< Bravo . Minski suggest that a quick fix—in this case, a chemical formula whose secret ingredient is tea—will enable anyone who drinks it to sing to acclaim at the Milan opera house. 83 Less blatant but still unrealistic is Kristin Hunter's The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. Set in a large city, this novel has a melodramatic plot that hardly does justice to its best characters, including members of a family struggling to stay off welfare, as well as gang members. The musical component of the book has promise: Blind Eddie Bell, an aging and impoverished blues pianist, teaches Louretta Hawkins to play the blues. His instruction rings true: the basis of blues piano is three chords, and playing the blues is "simple. . . but it ain't easy" (76). Yet this promise degenerates into a contrivance when Louretta and some of the gang members are heard on a television newscast singing blues/gospel at a friend's funeral. By invitation, they make a record that sells sensationally when promoted by local disc jockey Big Mouth. Shortly afterwards, "The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou" become rich and famous. Hunter moderates this ragsto -riches story a bit by inserting a paragraph toward the end about how "the excitement of improvising the first songs and making the first recording had become the hard work of rehearsing and perfecting numbers for the second" (246), and how Louretta 's money does not buy her happiness, but by this time the book's melodramatic twists have prevailed in the reader's mind. Rosie and the Dance of the Dinosaurs by Betty Ren Wright is less contrived than The Soul Brothers, though its props include a false-bottomed oak wardrobe. Rosie, an appealing child with only nine fingers, is having trouble on several fronts, including her father's job transfer, a prowler in her house, and her inability to perfect "The Dance of the Dinosaurs" for her piano recital. At her father's telephoned suggestion, she realistically solves one part of her musical problem—memorizing the piece—by making up a story about a family of dinosaurs that the music could accompany. The unrealistic solution to the second part of Rosie's musical problem occurs during the recital when she is able to play perfectly a difficult run that she has never mastered in practice, thanks to the diversionary tactics of a mischievous little boy in the audience. Although such a phenomenon could happen, it is so unlikely that Wright seems to have written a false note when she included it. Another kind of book does not make music seem too easy, but it presents a narrow image of the child as musician: music is either all pleasure or all pain. Although F. N. Monjo's fictionalized autobiography of Mozart, Letters to Horseface. technically falls into this category, Monjo is exonerated because of his subject . Mozart was a genius for whom composing music was as natural as breathing, a fact that neither his father's early promotion nor Mozart's own financial mismanagement could later dim. Monjo's hypothetical letters from the young Mozart to his sister Nanerl ("Horseface") show this pure joy in music. For lesser talents than Mozart, such a one-sided image rings false. A mild instance of such a presentation is Robert McCloskey 's Lentil . about a boy whose harmonica substitutes for the singing voice he lacks. Although Lentil's frequent practicing is 84 realistic, his ability to fill in for an entire marching band strains credulity, as does his unique ability to resist the lemon-slurping menace. Old Sneep, whose antics have disabled the adult band members. Dicey' s Song by Cynthia Voigt also presents an image of young musicians that has some realistic features but fails to give a rounded picture. Dicey Tillerman's younger sister, Maybeth, is musically talented; her teacher, according to Maybeth 's grandmother , says "that in over ten years of teaching, Maybeth is the most exciting student he has ever had" (31). Her private success at the piano helps remove some of the stigma from Maybeth' s serious difficulties in reading words—a realistic compensation. Yet Voigt later skims over the technical requirements of making music: when Dicey questions Maybeth about how she knows when to play a Bach piece "loud, or fast, or smoothed together," Maybeth simplistically replies, "It's just the way it sounds, when it sounds right" (98). However, if Maybeth has learned from her teacher how to play Bach successfully, she probably understands notations for volume, tempo, and phrasing. Another character. Dicey' s friend Jeff, plays ballads and other songs on his guitar; readers learn that Dicey enjoys his music, but we never hear him practice to perfect it. In fairness, music is a motif and not a theme in this book, so Voigt may be excused for not developing it more. Yet she chose Dicey' s Song for the title, and she has Dicey acknowledge that music is one thing she uses to "choose people by"; we might wish that Voigt had made the book's musical images a little less narrow. Of all the books examined, only Betsy Byars' The Glory Girl is negatively narrow with regard to music. Perhaps that is because Anna Glory, through whose consciousness the book unfolds, is the one member of her family, the Glory Gospel Singers, who cannot sing. However, even the singing Glorys derive little pleasure from their music; only their audience reception seems to fulfill them. Consigned to sell tapes and records at their performances , Anna lets us glimpse the gritty, negative side of a low-financed musical production: struggling for bookings, long hours in a dilapidated bus, dreary practices, and internecine squabbles. When the rather contrived plot nears its end, Anna's encouragement comes not from music but from her recently-paroled Uncle Newt: "You're the best of the bunch—you know that?" (119) The rest of the Glorys sing on while Anna digests the compliment; to this family, music is business and not pleasure. The remainder of the books examined present the realistic image of a child musician experiencing both pleasure and pain as a result of his or her passion. For example, Ben's Trumpet by Rachel Isadora is a superb picture book whose black-and-white artwork reinforces its focus on the city jazz scene. For most of the book, small Ben plays an imaginary trumpet as he hangs around the Zig Zag Jazz Club, longing to make »the music he hears coming from inside. At the very end, the trumpeter whom Ben has idolized invites the boy into the club one day. The last page shows Ben sitting on a stool awkwardly blowing a trumpet, cheeks puffed 85 out; the jazzman is showing him how to hold the instrument and promising, "we'll see what we can do." The jazz band's regular practices are as realistic as the provisional promise Ben gets at the end: he does not fill in for an entire brass band, as does Lentil, but someday he j\ist might make a good jazz trumpeter. Another balanced image of a young musician appears in Patricia MacLachlan's The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt. A young cellist with talent, Minna takes frequent lessons at a conservatory in her city, where she plays string quartets—most often those of Mozart—with three other young musicians. The conservatory scenes, characters, and concerns have a convincing verisimilitude . MacLachlan's impressionistic style in this book allows her to present a number of personal relationships, ranging from Minna's with Lucas, the quartet's violist, to that of a street musician with Lucas's family's housekeeper. The plot centers around Minna's longing to achieve a vibrato in her playing; to MacLachlan's credit, Minna begins to acquire her vibrato not during the quartet's important performance at a competition, but later that night in her own room. Unfortunately, the realistic portrayal of Minna as a young musician fails to compensate for the lack of coherence in the remainder of the book. The acquisition of a vibrato is simply too thin a line on which to hang differences in family lifestyles, questions about gender roles, musings on the distinction between facts and truth, a roomful of contraband frogs, and other disparate concerns. The most balanced and complete portrayal of a child musician in this group of books is that of James Johnson in Katherine Paterson 's Come Sinaf Jimmy Jo. The music is country, and the feelings are real in this book, both the pleasure and the pain. A reluctant public picker and singer, James is urged onto the stage with his performing family by their newly acquired manager and the manager's surprising ally, James's beloved grandmother. "You got the gift" (28), she tells him; "The Lord don't give private presents. . . . If he give you somethin', it's only because he thinks you got the sense to share it or give it away. You try to keep the gift to yourself, it's liable to rot" (29). Paterson deftly weaves a plot that includes many of the same difficulties that the Glory family experiences in Byars' novel, with the addition of other elements ranging from the appearance of James's hitherto unknown natural father to his friendship with the black youth who rules the school. Unlike Byars, though, Paterson presents the positive side of performing music too: the practices that occasionally go well and the after-concert high that James feels as he rides home in the back of the station wagon after his first overwhelmingly successful stage performance: James was too excited to sleep. Lying there, he could feel the humming of the tires in his belly, in his teeth even. He sang songs in his head to the rhythm of it, as though it were a guitar with only one chord, a chord that went with nearly everything. He saw himself singing everywhere—on the porch and in the kitchen at home, on the stage at Countrytime . He had seen pictures of the Grand Old Opry's huge stage, so he put himself on that, 86 too, but then backed off. He didn't want to dream so big it would pop in his face (42). Many problems await James and the family; paterson resolves some of them and at the end has James feel reassured, not burdened, that he has the gift. A real musician must both have the gift and develop it through instruction and practice. Some of these books present images of children who meet both criteria. The authors' styles range from MacLachlan's impressionism to Byars' naturalism, though most of the books would be classified simply as realistic. Style seems to have little bearing on the accuracy of the musical image, though; nor does the age of the reader—Isadora's Ben is as probable as Yorinks' Minski is impossible, and both are the protagonists in picture books. As Paterson 's James Johnson does, perhaps some authors have the gift: they can tell a story well for their public and resist the temptation to present the making of music as any easier or any harder than it actually is. Notes 1My thanks to Selma K. Levi, head children's librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, for her assistance in compiling these titles. Works Cited Byars, Betsy. The Glory Girl. New York: Viking, 1983. Hunter, Kristin. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou. New York: Scribner's, 1968. Isadora, Rachel. Ben's Trumpet. New York: Greenwillow, 1979. McCloskey, Robert. Lentil. 1940. New York: Penguin, 1978. MacLachlan, Patricia. The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt. New York: Harper, 1988. Monjo, F.N. Letters to Horseface. Illus. Don Bolognese and Elaine Raphael. New York: Viking, 1975. Paterson, Katherine. Come Singr Jimmv Jo. New York: Dutton, 1985. Sendak, Maurice. "Visitors from My Boyhood." Worlds of Childhood : The Art and Craft of Writing for Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. 49-69. Voigt, Cynthia. Dicey' s Song. New York: Atheneum, 1983. Wright, Betty Ren. Rosie and the Dance of the Dinosaurs. New York: Holiday House, 1989. 87 Yorinks, Arthur. Bravo . Minski . Illus. Richard Egielski. New York: Michael di Capua, 1988. Frieda F. Bostian Department of English Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061 88 ...