Let us pause, dear friends, in this first week of the new school year, and reflect on how everyone in Canada knows how to play the recorder.
It’s quite remarkable, when we think about it. Of all the aspects of the common web of experience that makes us Canadian, perhaps this is the thing that connects us most tightly.
Around age 10 — Grade 4 — is usually the time of life when, for several generations now, all of us — ALL of us — have been and will be introduced to the secrets of this humble but venerable member of the woodwind family, an internal duct flute with a whistle mouthpiece, with a thumb hole and three finger holes for the upper hand and four finger holes for the lower hand, with the clear sweet wooden sound associated with birds, shepherds, and the musical shenanigans of Renaissance and Baroque courts.
For this immense cultural touchstone, as for so many other things, we have to thank the 1960s, that glorious decade when cheap, plastic recorders began to be manufactured en masse. Simple to learn, simple to teach, and simply the cheapest instrument that’s out there, bar the kazoo.
[I would have preferred that the educational powers that be had put a Fender Stratocaster into the hands of every Grade 4 student in the land, especially mine. But I suppose that one must discover the holy grails of musical instruments on their own, after a quest filled with peril. That’s rock and roll, innit? But I digress.]
The recorder song of my time and place was “Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns, Who Will Buy My Hot Cross Buns?” In the key of C, it’s notated like this: edc, edc, cc dd edc.
I caught on quickly, because at that time I had just started piano lessons, and my first piano piece — “Birthday Party” — was similar: cde, cde, dcdec, c.
My colleague at the Townsman tells me her class in Grade 4 did “Three Blind Mice,” which, though it starts out the same as “Hot Cross Buns” (edc, etc), soon starts jumping all over the scale, and even goes up to the C an octave higher. Crazy! What mad recorder players they must have been in my colleague’s elementary school.
Not too many years ago, I attended my daughter’s Grade 4 class’s recorder concert at TM Roberts Elementary School in Cranbrook. It was super cool. The students all wore dark glasses, and played a selection of jazzy pieces to accompaniment.
I was impressed, and tried to remember if my Grade 4 class had played a recorder concert ensemble at an assembly. I don’t think we did. Maybe we were all musically hopeless, or maybe it is because “Hot Cross Buns” is just not compelling enough a song to engage even the most doting parent, or the most sympathetic music lover.
Even so, I don’t think we as a nation have capitalized on this wonderful heritage we share, this common musical language we all speak. Much as Ireland is known for its fiddling traditions, or Middle Eastern countries for the Oud, the potential for each and every Canadian to be adept upon the recorder is one of the things that makes Canada great.
I can imagine, sitting in a café in some far-flung foreign land, lonesome and homesick, when from across the crowded room another Canadian traveller, lonesome as well, pulls a road-weary recorder out of his backpack and gently, tenderly, begins to play the theme from “Hockey Night in Canada.” Oh how my tears would flow. Gosh, I’m getting choked up just thinking about it.
But seriously, folks … simple as the recorder may be, and as unlikely as it is that any of us will master the recorder and go on to careers as recorder prodigies, this most rudimentary of music educations is the first exposure most of us get to that everyday sorcery that is music performance.
There are some who make the argument, and I would too, that musical literacy is as important as literacy itself, or numeracy. Music is something that is so integral to our lives, that surrounds us at all times and is so tied to our moods and behaviours, that you’d think learning how music works, how to read it, understand it and create it would be of utmost importance in Western education, along with the sciences, languages and trades. And though music education does have a prominent place in our schools, quite often it is the first thing on the budgetary chopping block. There are plenty of schools with no music programs at all — except for that humble introduction to the recorder.
Teachers, keep it up! Keep running those recorder classes. Students, take your recorders in hand, and bring forth sweet music, even if it is “Hot Cross Buns.” The recorder can lead you into wonderful musical worlds if you let it.
Let me take this opportunity to wish all teachers — of all programs — students and staff in the Cranbrook and Kimberley area a great school year, filled with learning, achievement and music.