Romans 9:8
That is, it is not merely the children born through natural descent who were regarded as God’s children, but it is the children born through the promise who were regarded as descendants.
If we consider young children as perfectly malleable microcosms of our own culture, we should consequently consider ourselves as acting solely to serve their growth whenever we are around them. Every action has a reaction with a child, and their futures are weighted inevitably on our pasts. This is sounding sappy & strange, but it has a point (as these meanderings so rarely do): whereas music is a cultural lynch pin, & whereas children are the future of culture, teaching music to children has shown to be a timeless activity, & an incalculably important one at that.
Though there are countless examples – I think mainly of Pete Seeger’s Children’s Concert at Town Hall & School Children Singing Particle Man – I offer two major examples of this to rest my case. My fascination with this subject originally began with The Langley Schools Music Project, a collection of recordings made by schoolchildren in 1976-77 in British Columbia, Canada. The project, which began with one grad school teacher encouraging his students to think of their favorite songs of the time, teaching them basic percussion (mostly with cymbals & some timpani, to mixed results), & gathering the 60 or so students in a gymnasium to record, has taken on a life of its own. Originally only pressed to record for the students & their parents, the recordings were found in a used record store in 2000, & were eventually released on Bar None Records.
While the story is nice, however, the music truly speaks for itself. Every sound has an echo, most of the percussion is half a beat off, & the song selection is less than stellar (think of what songs were popular in 1977, then throw in a lot of Beach Boys), & yet every new listen is more & more haunting. The children’s innocence appears & fades away depending on the song matter, & the vast arena in which the recording occured offers a depth before unfathomable. David Bowie has said that their version of “Space Oddity” is a huge improvement on his original, & you only need to get halfway through the bottle-neck guitared version of the Langley School to see why.
“Space Oddity”:
And my personal favorite, “Mandy” (yes it’s the Mandy you think it is):
More recently, the school-as-functional-musical-tool theme has been revitalized, this time in the form of musical theater borrowing heavily from indie-folk iconography. Just last week, NPR ran a story about Lexington High School in Massachusetts piecing together With the Needle that Sings in Her Heart, a musical based on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The implications of this are both absurd & chillingly exciting, especially for those of us who partially grew up on In the Aeroplane & realize that we are old enough now that this is what can be taught to the next generation. To hear these students sing “King of Carrot Flowers” & “Two-Headed Boy” is to hear myself at 15 years old singing the same songs in my room at the top of my lungs: it is heartbreak, collectivity, & the poetic absurd turned normal all at once. With stunning immediacy, we realize: this is the next generation, & they are us, redone.
Hear the Lexington High students sing “The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1.”
Hear them sing “Two-Headed Boy.”
