MUSIC IN THE NURSERY

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 181, 26 April 1924, Page 13

MUSIC IN THE NURSERY

What really convinced me that the Queen’s Doll’s House was slap bang up to date, if not, indeed, a little in advance of the times, was the fact that it had a gramophone in the nursery. For two years I had been hugging to myself the proud secret, but letting it out occasionally to relations, that to me belonged tho discovery that the one toy which a child cannot afford to be without is a gramophone (states “AI.A.” in the “Manchester Guardian”). Friends were horror-struck when they learned that I left an expensive instrument and delicate, highly-prized records to the mercy of my notoriously rampageous children. And now my vain bubble has been burst by the public acknowledgment that in tho playgrounds of princes and princesses gramophones are accepted articles of furniture. Still, I cling to the thought that I was a pioneer in this nursery reform, and as a mere male parent whose influence is not supposed by the family to extend beyond a mysterious place known as “th’ office” I am determined to retain all the credit I can. .Truth, of course, compels mo to admit that the idea did not originate with me, but with Jack, aged four, and Babs. aged three, who took their own way or bringing the matter ,to my notice. I surrendered to their importunities after one bitterly cold morning, when the sound of music woke me up. On going shiveringly downstairs to investigate I found Jack in his pyjamas and Babs in her nightgown dancing round the sitting-room to the strains of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Now the gramophone is in tho nursery and is regarded as their very own. All the records are there, too, and in good condition, for the children are extras ordinarily careful and use only fibre needles. I lost three records in one smash —and that is all. That was before I found out the folly of stacking the records on a piece of furniture too high to be reached without raising the arms above the head. They are on the floor now. The lowest form of usefulness of the gramophone is to entertain the children for hours on end, allow the housework to go forward without interruption, and ensures the housewife a period of rest. Children prefer tho gramophone as a story-teller. It never tires of repeating the same old yarns; it never has headaches, and it can always be “bothered.” The parents may revolt occasionally against the slavery imposed by the children, but the gramophone never does. All one need worry about is the choice of nursery records, care being taken that tho accent of the" singers and talkers meets with one’s approval, as the children soon btegin to speak very much like the people “inside” the machine. They are more imitative than we generally imagine. In its higher form of usefulness the nursery gramophone enables the chil-

dren to absorb unconsciously a whole library of tho world’s best music. Most of us know how, in our childhood, we were shut off from any real intimacy

THE GRAMOPHONE AS A TOY

with the works of the great composers, and from hearing opera or the great siaigers and instrumentalists of the day. Since growing up we have been acquiring laboriously, expensively, and often, I fear, somewhat painfully, the taste and the knowledge which ought to have been ours by the time we had reached tho kindergarten stage of other things. Already, I fear, my own children have a keener perception and a better taste than mine. They cannot understand my solemn and highly correct concert-room attitude when the records are playing. While I want to sit like a statue on a small stool they will prance round me in a mock serious dance to the “vicious polyphony” of the “Mastersingers” overture, and the next minute they will squat down to laugh at the thin humour of the orchestra in “Dickory, Dickory, Dock.” One cannot leave them entirely to themselves, and one had better, before he begins the experiment, be prepared with"his answers to questions. He will be required to identify the various instruments in the orchestra and to explain their functions, and he need not put operatic records in the nursery unless he is able to tel] the stories of the operas. I find that the name of a piece, the composer, and the performer, on a new record has rarely to be given a second time. Ever afterwards the cluldren will recognise the piece as soon as the sound-box gives out the first note. The adult visitor to our nursery Is apt to feel that our children’s familiarity with the. names of composers and performers ia uncanny. But is it? Words which to us have a foreign sound, and in the pronunciation of which we have to be careful, are not foreign to them. They are hearing new words every day and adding them to their vocabulary, and Chaliap'ine or Tschaikovaky will sound no more strange to them than Bevin or a popular toffee maker. If I were asked to advise anyone who contemplated installing a gramophone in the nursery, I should tell him to get the best instrument he could afford. By the “best” Ido not mean the most ornamental, but the instrument with a strong, reliable engine and. a good sound-oox. A child’s ear is sensitive, and should not be outraged by a cheap machine. The records should be mixed. The gramophone companies publish albums of excellent nursery records, and of military band, oichestral, rocal, piano, and violin records there is a multitude. 1 should mix them, lumping tho really good with the apparently bad, and leave the children to choose which they will play. The comic records are always handy when father is at ‘’th’ office,” or when he is too grumpj’ to relax into the state of idiocy in which he begins to be really popular with tho children. And when the rightful owners have been bathed and put to bed one can raid the nursery and enthrone the gramophone again, for a night, in the sitting room.