Remembrance - 1

How Do Kids Learn to Love Music?

Teachers. It’s the teachers….

It’s Tuesday afternoon at Rosemont Elementary School and I struggle through math because it’s Music Day, yay! Music is after math, please can math be over and it be time for music? Now? I adore Miss Williams, we all love Miss Williams. We’re like dogs who know when their people are about to walk in the door. We sense that it’s time, and we stop paying attention to fractions just before the door swings wide. The piano rumbles into the front of the room and stops just before bumping Mrs. Thompson’s desk. Miss Williams bursts in alongside, dancing and singing and steering the piano to its parking spot in front of us.

She is tall, willowy, and has white poofy hair that bounces in time to the music. She seems to actually BE the music. “Hello, People! Hello and how ARE you?” She hops behind the piano and plays the introduction to Silver Birch. She sings, “Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver, where still the mighty moose, wanders at will.” We join her on “Boom di-dee yah-dah, boom di-dee yah-dah, boom di-dee yah-dah BOOM.” We accompany our vocal booms on little plastic tom-toms that we have dashed to grab from the shelf.

I love the deep, resonant, repeated piano chords. I love her bouncy hair. I love singing with my classmates and making this gorgeous music that I think should be on the radio or TV. We should be famous, the Rosemont School third grade class. That’s how wonderful we are. The song we sing might or might not be a folk song, and our accompaniment construed as completely disrespectful, but we don’t understand that yet; it sounds beautiful to us. We are fervent in our love of this song. Miss Williams teaches us the songs that she probably sang herself as a kid. The ones they taught her in the music ed program at Temple University. No one questioned the cultural appropriation, the racism, the insulting nature of other songs we were singing. (We sang Stephen Foster tunes in grade school, I am unhappy to say.) And those were the times and I’m very glad it’s different now, that we’re paying attention. That we’re growing wiser and more sensitive and waking up.

            Miss Williams is a font of music. She sings with a beautiful, mellifluous tone, like the flutes in an orchestra, and has an astounding range like Julie Andrews. She speaks sternly when she wants our attention. And she yells like a football coach when (usually the boys) are misbehaving. Miss Williams is the musical expert of our Rosemont school world. Only she can initiate the singing of songs or the dancing of dances. When we shout our jeers on the playground (Nah-nah-nah-nah-NAH-NAH!!!) we don’t know that we’re emitting minor thirds, the universal interval of taunting children. Miss Williams doesn’t teach us that major is happy and minor is sad, and in fact, she doesn’t buy that concept at all. “Do you think the Volga Boatmen were sad? NO! They were angry! They were singing their anger, People! Music can do that for you!” Miss Williams treats us like small individuals, and she likes us best when we pay attention, match pitch, and make music with her.

            In third grade, we learn songs from other nations in addition to songs insulting to Native Americans. For Mexico, I want to be the one to play the maracas. I will do anything to get them. The maracas are glorious, painted with that shiny, glossy, shimmery redness underneath the palm tree decal on one side. The handles are wooden. When you shake them, they make a sound like rain and gravel. I want them so badly that I shove Martha B. out of the way and stretch my hands out to Miss Williams who is presiding over the cardboard box that contains our rhythm instruments. For a moment, the beautiful maracas hover over the box until she hands them to Dave B. I am devastated.

            I get the tambourine. If only I had known about the F-bomb in third grade. The stupid tambourine? The ugly, ridiculous, tambourine? It doesn’t know what it is, a drum or jingle bells and it tries to be both. Miss Williams winks as she hands it to me. It could be a complicit wink or a too-bad-for-you wink, I don’t know. I just feel the crushing disappointment of losing out on the maracas, which Dave is shaking behind my head.

            “People! No playing your instruments while you’re waiting! Deltoids!” When Miss Williams says – actually, yells: “deltoids!” we are to put our rhythm sticks or mallets or maracas on our deltoid muscles and wait patiently. It is a brilliant thing that she does, and decades later I do the same thing with my students. When their rhythm sticks are plastered to their shoulders, they can’t hit each other with them. Miss Williams knew….

Does she understand the power she holds with that box of instruments? Kathy W. gets to have a drum. Matilda M. gets castanets. We are elevated or crushed, depending on the instrument of the day. Drums: cool. Tone bells: almost as cool. Maracas: you’re a star. Tambourine: class loser.

            Miss Williams instructs us to get into formation for the Mexican Hat Dance. A sombrero plops to the floor. The unluckiest kids of all, the ones who don’t get an instrument, have to dance around the hat, and they dejectedly take their positions. Miss Williams pounds out the intro on the piano, the instrumentalists join in on the repeat. The dancers leap. “Olé, olé olé!” we sing. We know as much about anything Mexican as we do about anything Icelandic or Native American.  We shout out the lyrics in our white kid way. The sombrero gets stepped on and finally smooshed down in the middle. I feel a little better because I get a solo, one little spot where the tambourine plays all by itself: smack-smack-shake! I do it perfectly the first time and Miss Williams winks again.

            And then the cardboard box comes out, much too soon, and we have to “place the instruments gently, very gently, People, back inside their box!” The music treasure box then assumes its place atop the piano, and the instruments and Miss Williams roll out the door, not to be seen again for days. I think of the tambourine, hidden in the dark, riding the piano down the hall to its next destination. I wonder where the piano sleeps at night, where in the building it is parked. If it misses us while it’s quiet, wherever that is. I think Miss Williams must stay with her piano, I can’t imagine her anywhere outside of our school, in regular life. She makes music come  alive in the building, so she must live there, too.

RIP Miss Williams, 1923-2022