The autoharp! Now that’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time. A very long time. When I was in elementary school every teacher had one. Nowadays they seem to have vanished.
Our music teacher had one and he used it all the time.
Yeah, autoharps… I don’t remember if every classroom had one, but there was at least one.
What a humiliating experience! My sympathies. At my elementary school, referenced earlier, any kid who couldn’t sing was labeled a “monotone” and forbidden to sing in the Christmas pageant. I remember my best friend being publicly called out for this. It probably scarred him for life.
Can you actually hear music and follow a melody or are you simply unable to reproduce it with your own voice? I remember either seeing or reading a piece by newscaster Andy Rooney. He said that he could not actually hear music. It just sounded like discordant noise. Apparently, about 4% of the population has this. The brain is simply unable to decipher what the rest of us hear as music.
I enjoy music quite a bit. Going to concerts and music festivals is one of my main recreational activities. I think I “hear” music, but whether I hear it the same way that other people do is, I think, an unanswerable question. How would I know? I do have trouble identifying notes, not only absolutely but even relatively. I once tested myself by imagining the tune “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and for each pair of notes, writing down whether it was a rising interval, falling interval or the same note. I got about half of them correct. I can certainly detect when I hear a wrong note played in a song that I know, I just can’t reliably tell whether it’s too high or too low. I also think I don’t have good control over the pitch of my voice.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, much like we can’t fully comprehend how someone who is colorblind sees the world. I hear music in a particular way but have no clue as to how anyone else hears it. For you, the important thing is that however you hear it, music is a pleasant, enjoyable experience.
Andy Rooney was a cranky guy anyway, but I kind of felt sorry for someone who couldn’t hear music as pleasant at all.
I have a better than average speaking voice (after 50 years of using it professionally) but I can’t really sing because I have a limited range. I envy people who can sing. For me a song has to be in just the right key or I top out or bottom out.
I suspect they provided inspiration for a famous bit from literature:
I do not, of course, think of this quote during winter music performances. Nope, never.
My mom and aunt were both elementary music teachers focused on choral experiences with glockenspiels, xylophones and international/world instruments of all types. A woman who was in their classes told me that they enriched her life.
Great.
Now I have “Asham was a Tootin’ Turk” as an earworm.
Thanks a lot.
I remember my elementary school music teacher- Mr. Hunter. He was “old”…no idea what age that really was…older than my parents at least.
The song I remember most was the one about the grandfather clock “And the clock. stopped. never to chime again when the ooooold maaaan dieeed.”
In 4th grade I remember his sister died and he…changed… he was sad…melancholy all the time. I remember in the middle of a song (maybe it was the grandfather clock song even?)…he stopped us…“Stop. Stop. Stop…that song is too sad. Let’s not sing that anymore.”
And then he’d tell us stories. Music Class stopped being about music and was just stories from Mr. Hunter–usually sad stories about his life. One he told us was about going to Mexico on his honeymoon and seeing a street kid begging and then a few days later they saw the same boy slumped over in a gutter…with rats crawlng over him.
Our regular teacher used to leave the room for music class…but after that incident she no longer left the room. She just stayed at her desk in the back of the room.
I believe he retired over that summer.
My grade school music left me with a half century old riddle- how can you fix a hole in a bucket with a straw?
I always thought Georgie was an idiot, and dear Liza should get a smarter guy.
I have wondered that too. You could maybe make a mat of straw and mud as a temporary cover to the hole, and it would be enough to use the bucket a couple of times before it failed again.
I believe the song specified 'a" straw, ruling out a mud mat.
Early versions left out the “a”. And they should, as that extra syllable ruins the meter.
Wiki says nothing about the actual procedure: “Henry’s bucket leaks, so Liza tells him to repair it. To fix the leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs a knife”. That doesn’t help.
Okay. Air tight logic probably wasn’t at the forefront during its formulation.
Music was haphazard at my elementary school. Oh, we had a school choir, completely voluntary, but outside of the teachers letting us sing traditional folk songs for a half-hour, once every week or two, we didn’t get much. Certainly, there was no actual teaching of music: no attempts to teach us how to read it, for example.
In middle school, we had a “vocal music teacher” who really didn’t teach us vocal music. Maybe he had had it with boys whose voices were changing. Anyway, he mostly played records or read us stories. Tests consisted of questions like, “Who recorded ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’?”
Thankfully, I had been taking private lessons on piano since I was seven or eight, so I was quite familiar with music. Thus I was ready to take up a band instrument in high school, and played in the band there. Later, I’d play in an R&B garage band (we tried hard, but amused ourselves more than anybody else), learn a few more instruments, and finally learn how to sing.
Today, music is an enjoyable hobby, but those early piano lessons were a great help. If my impressions of music were formed by having so little music at elementary school, I don’t think I ever would have taken it up, even as a hobby.
My first exposure with grade school sing-alongs was with my Grade 3 teacher. We used to start school by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but she had a guitar (and long hair like Crystal Gayle) and we would sing the pop version by Sister Janet Mead (not the full radio version!).
In later grades, we learned the ukulele and we would sing various pop/folk songs, such as:
- “Queen of Hearts” by Juice Newton
- “Morning Has Broken” by Cat Stevens
- “Fly Little White Dove Fly” by The Bells (Canadian content!)
- “One Tin Soldier” by The Original Caste (more Canadian content!)
I had a similar realisation as an adult. It’s a very bitter and jaded song, especially the chorus: religion is a lie and the hypocrites who preach it will lie, cheat and murder while pretending to be doing God’s will. Pretty strong stuff for an elementary school sing-a-long!
I’m old enough for it to have been traditional folk songs (they once got us maypole-dancing), and since it was a church school a hymn every day at Morning Assembly.
BBC radio did/does a range of age-appropriate music programmes for schools. Somehow this for the teeny-tinies got broadcast before less innocent ears got to hear it:
