Voices: Part One
Yesterday afternoon I went up to my kids’ elementary school for an assembly. One by one, each grade took the stage and sang a couple of numbers, starting with the first graders and ending with the about-to-graduate fifth graders.
What is it about children singing? They could be singing, oh, I don’t know, “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and I’d probably cry. And when it’s “The Happy Wanderer,” sung by second graders (including my daughter), who chose that song themselves, well, I’m a goner. Mush ain’t in it.
If the pure innocent sound of seven-year-old voices rising up in song isn’t enough for you, add this to the picture: they sang well. The music teacher at our school is amazing, a jewel in the crown of the Ann Arbor Public Schools. By the time these kids graduate they know the difference between their head voice and their chest voice, they can read music, they can sing in four-part harmony. Yeah, the fifth graders sang a round in four parts, a capella, in a minor key, with large intervals and some dissonance. Sang it beautifully.
But I’m not done, oh no. The assembly finished off with a slide show compiled of the baby pictures and current pictures of the graduating fifth graders (among them, my son). And while the slide show played, the fifth graders sang a medley of tear jerkers that included “School Days” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” The only thing that saved me at all during this was the peals of laughter from the kids as each drooling toothless infant was revealed to be Eddie or Lizzie or, ha ha, the school principal.
All this by way of explanation for why, when my fifth-grader Joey arrived home with two of his buddies in tow and a request that they stay for dinner, all I could say was yes.
