"Summertime," this great song from the iconic work "Porgy and Bess" by George Gershwin is a personal favorite. I can't imagine my own musical development without the memory of my mom taking me to see it on Broadway. I was about fourteen and doing anything with just her was a treat! Afterward, we ate at Sardi's with her literary friend Doris, and I felt like a princess.Years later, I and my three teenage siblings managed to pull off the purchase of anniversary tickets for my parents; how we collaborated successfully on that is a wonder, but it only added to my love of this jazz opera.

The show stopper, "Summertime" played on trumpet by rising sixth grader Jasmine, was part of the pure pleasure John and I shared with three young girls in arranging camp last week. She played like a much older and wiser musical soul than her precious youth suuggests. Our time together as teacher's and students unfolded along a purposeful path, but with twists and turns unplanned. Kind of like in a good symphony or in jazz. And kind of like in life.
  
We had asked the girls to bring in some music of their own to listen to during our break time. Johanna's  lilting soprano fun she had while singing along with her ipod didn't go unnoticed. It became our performance opener by week's end. She delighted in sharing this Scottish songwriter's work with us Americans! The European perspective the Schoenberg family brings our school never fails to delight. While the parents were lucky to be at the World Cup the prior week, the sitter's reading of the name "Gurske" confused with the German: gurke (cucumber), had the young woman stumped as to where these children were to go involving a cucumber! 

The girls learned the blues and it was exhilarating for them. First time improvising on her new scale, Jasmine played a fluttering riff and afterward giggled, "it was an accident." Again as in life, a lot of good can come from accidents.

In music, balance  has to do with not letting the little things drown out the melody, the song, the message. It has to do with balancing the pieces of the form, to divide the notes among all the players, not mathematically, but with interest and diversity. Balance includes expression and exploration, called the development section in a symphony or the solo section in jazz, and then the necessary return to the familiar. Balance in music is art. Balance in life, in my opinion, is a constant goal we never fully complete. Because while life may resemble art at times, life is life and art is art and well, "Fish is Fish," an all time favorite, by great children's tale teller Leo Lionni. 

With this, I need to tell you about our youngest member, Veronica. Rising 4th grader, the older girls dubbed her "Little Mozart" from day one. She has technique at the piano and ears bigger, as we say, than most private students ever achieve. But that is not the deeper inspiration for me; it would be her positivity, strength, and and joy that give me that.

Veronica had to miss a lot of camp because she was fighting a fever all week. But during her first morning there, I couldn't quite believe my ears when she said, "in the summertime you can get like four times better playing music because you aren't so busy. That's when you SHOULD play music!" She was quoting me, yet we had just met.  When the word "chord" was said in the first half hour of learning, she leaped off the piano bench to exclaim to John, "You know about chords?" His response was, "I'm kind of a chord freak." He had found a kindred spirit. Talk about connections.

Veronica is type one diabetic and throughout the week we all learned a little about the physical aspect of this disease.  We learned a lot about the incredible mental and emotional strength the human spirit can possess. Johanna even shared with me privately how impressed she was that Veronica is such a happy person, despite having to deal with the finger pricks and planned eating and pump she wears to help her pancreas. (Personally, I never new how much my healthy pancreas would help me not to over eat if I would just listen to it.)

Bandaids on her fingertips, swaying and grinning with delight, seeing this child learn to improvise was like witnessing Picasso first see color. The new tools of improvisation give her a canvas on which to now hang her musical expression. It is a brand new musical pathway, and with her practice ethic, there will be no stopping her.

The tools of improvisation, scales, chords and rhythmic play were sorely lacking in our own early music education, so to start this Friday night program is especially fullfilling. We are ready to teach them how to find new ideas, new ways to listen and to think about music. Much will be learned by us too, no doubt.

We look anxiosly toward September, but will spend next week reunioning with family on the Chestatee River in the north Georgia mounains. Too hot even here for Gershwin's jumpin fish, we will jam with our extended family on some tunes and make some attempts at balance and at art.
 
John will surely still fish, even if the huge trout that are my dad's pets are in hiding under the rocks  my children grew up leaping on. He never minds coming up empty. I think it has a little to do with how good it feels to think like a fish instead of a jazz musician every now andth again.

'Till September,
Mrs. Cucumber

Hear the girls play the blues on our Friday jam and pizza page under programs tab!

 "When Johnny comes Marching Home Again, Hurrah, Hurrah!"  A song of celebration. In our family my nephew Matthew Barton was welcomed home from Baghdad last week. As his mom put it, "for good!" He is a well-loved young man.

When Matt first enlisted, he served in Korea and of all the items he could have chosen to add to his "must travel light" reality, he picked a banjo. Gotta love it.

 We have southern Roots in our family, despite my California childhood. When challenged to reconcile these two cultures as a child it, was like E.T. phoning home. I am connected with these roots now in Georgia, through food and songs and fishing and baseball stories and the incredible big love of my grandmother, who never graduated from high school, but was a Rhodes Scholar on people. It took time for me to know my roots and  at first, it did seem rural Georgia was another planet. The  week we spent on a cross country train to get there was the proof! My parents were adventurers, but that trip exceeded all expectations.

But lest I divert to train songs, I refocus. I woke up today wondering about  Matt's marching. Although he didn't march home, it is a used as a metaphor for a long journey, which of course he had. In the service it seems reflective of the laboring and more importantly I guess, community building.  I have the silliest picture in my head of our family reunion in August with all of us doing the marching and Matt getting to just strum his banjo.

In aging we learn that generations of family live and change through stories. Sometimes it becomes like the broken telephone game we played at the Kindermusik Convention, and the stories get tweaked. Certain grandfathers delight in this aspect!

The butter bean g'daddy has already translated my blog bio which states I was raised on a little field, changed it to "born on a little league field" and put it into  a Davey Crockett song. I would love to see how his brain made those connections. I believe it may have hinged on "born on the fourth of July." It takes one to know one.

And so today I  have a story for you  Matt. I hope you haven't heard it,  but if you have, it's bound to be a little bit different!

It was 1964 and your dad, his three siblings, and your grandparents  were on the train from hell. I didn't mind so much, but grandma got kicked for a week of co-sleeping with Uncle David and his new hard brown shoes which he did not remove the whole journey. He was ready to show them to his grandmother, but didn't have a very good sense of time at age two. And we did what we could to stand apart as kids.

Long story, but we ended up staying in Georgia most of the summer with a special emergency train stop so  g'dadday could have his life saved at the La Grange hospital. Strep, kidney failure, high fever to the sounds and movement of a 1960's choo choo train. I can conjure up the movie thriller it all felt like. At least his coma waited until they admitted him.

Myself,  I became a 4 year old with a reputation that summer. I was scared, fearful, hostile. My mom was gone both emotionally and physically, but I forgave her.  I was very astute to the fact that my father's health at age 32 was threatening to widow her with four kids. Yet for all these new relatives taking over my life, I felt no relation or compassion. They were honing in on my family crisis. Their accents, their loudness, their drippy sweet concerns over me, the buttermilk, the strange smells, this very different kind of heat; I couldn't process any of it and missed the breeziness of California.  I did not want their help in dealing with my trauma and was sure that the only way I would ever return to the planet earth was if they would all just leave me alone.  I spent my days stuck in fight or flight mode. I was a mess and there is no music in my memory of this time.

Fast forward. Say the late 60's. I was now a mature 9 year old.  Same hospital, same siblings, but with an alert healthy father, and he had a plan. Watch out. His plans, as you know Matty, whether boat building or digging up the septic generally captivate all those around. One of his big ideas used to be to have Uncle David and I put on our marching band uniforms and play.  At home.

This time Big Daddy was the patient, his father, and we were going to bring him a gift. Never has there been a truer lover of music than your great grandfather.  It was a pure, uncomplicated, personal love. He had let music in to his inner sanctum  and as a white southern male in the depression days what you let get deep into your soul was a big deal.

Lined up in order of height, many rehearsals under our belt, time to perform, at his bed side. I felt like I was with the VonTrapp family singers on tour. I was so proud of us! When we began to sing, our patient came to full attention and even began to conduct. Apparently this was one of those audience participation shows! That threw me a little, but was great training for future flexibility in the classroom. The words helped me to settle. "I wish I was in the land of cotton" My dad had taught us something that was all about that insane four year old train ride! It all made sense now! My two worlds could come together like sea to shining sea.

To me, southern California had always felt very insular. I craved more of the unknown. This here was a foreign song, this dixie song! "With a banjo on my knee" With learning this little song, I time raveled.  I became a part of our family heritage. It was like an outof body experience singing this song for my grandaddy, but meant so much because it was completely in my body; my ears, my voice, I still see the small room. The emotional connection being made for me was like years of psychotherapy; my father teaching this song to us and  through this loving his father.  I was so in my heart. We all were. And our hearts were out there beating as one, singing about a place called "Dixie" that we all shared in a past life, in the moment still, and even forever.

What I didn't fully understand then, but do now, is that for Harry Barton there could have been no greater gift than his grandchildren singing for him. Not sure it can get more beautiful than that.

Your travels are more than I can imagine Matty, but I am so happy that you procured a banjo, even if it was just temporary.

"Hot in Cleveland" says the new sitcom? Well okay, I guess since they mean the other kind of hot. In Greensboro, NC last week at the Kindermusik Educators conference, our Filipino friends said it was hotter here than there. Blech. It is too much, too soon for us here Charlotte.

So it is a chillier memory I would like to share. At age sixteen my dad scored third base box seats at the NY Yankees/Cincinnati Reds series. It was October of course, and the cold at the New Yankee Stadium was electric. My sensory memories of this experience are more vivid than reality. We shivered in connection with a sea of faces, colors, and sounds that I instantly knew would never leave me.  Pete Rose seemed to me like a giant and fierce marionette, dropping and diving at third base.

On the subway from the Bronx to Manhattan after the game, people hoarded the sod from the field they had ravaged. The tree hugger in me dismayed, but not enough to interfere with the task of survival mode amidst the big apple subway volume and  movement. Talk about vestibular input my Kindermusik friends! I have such fond memories of my self esteem in Latin class the next day  as our teacher reported my adventure to the other pretend scholars.

 But I am here to talk about songs, you see it was music I used as my getaway from my baseball driven family.  I'm sure it was the music education in which my parents invested that enabled my concentration as a scorekeeper. My concentration which I have now lost, thinking of the dugout smells and the puberty stricken boys wanting to know their stats from me constantly.
 
Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Yankee Doodle Dandy;  two great American songs that kids still know, thank God. Thinking of either takes me back to that place of marvel in childhood: the rhythms, the lyrics, the cultural context; all dancing around in my head. But It will be forever in this heat until 180 something baseball games are completed, and the 4th is just around the corner, a great day for music appreciation!.

Still clueless about the relevance of feathers and macaroni in this song (help me if you can here) makes it even more endearing even more enduring I think.  As a kid, I pictured the curly haired girls with ruffled white knickers peeking out of their woolen skirts. Woolen because they had to be in Boston, right? I admit I  get kind of weirdly bashful when leading this song in class right at the part when the little minute man guy gets handy with the girls. And just because he stuck a feather in his hat? Ladies, please. Get a life!  But then again he was on a pony....Now that I know more about human development,  I'm  thinking maybe the doodle dude was a bit ADHD and that's what the girls loved!  As a child, I loved pondering this song (as I still do aparently),  precisely because my mind was taking me nowhere. Seemingly.

Now humor me and sing a little bit. YANKEE doodle / WENT to town = LOUD quiet / LOUD quiet - let your minds ear listen a minute and feel it in your body.  The 2/4 meter of this song is like walking...an easy, familiar, reliable pattern; In our legs, in our arms.  For some, it may never be much more than just rocking. But it balances our brain.

I will need to think of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" to clear any "Yankee Doodle" earworms today. That's what my German friend calls it when the song gets stuck in you. The 3/4 meter will be a relief. No place to get to with that. Just waltzing around. Ahhhh.

And is there a more patriotic song than  "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"? My older brother actually thought it was the national anthem. Or was it that he called "The Star Spangled Banner"  the baseball game song? It's no matter.

Have a refreshing 4th of July and until later, "mind the music" -  preferably indoors.