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- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K How much money should your teenager get for clothes? Share your thoughts in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y We're here, we're ... uh ... straight? Rain on the parade Monica's betrayal Back-to-school blues Red Square BROWSE THE WILD THINGS ARCHIVE - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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words FIVE CHILDREN'S BOOKS MAKE MAGIC WITH MUSIC. - - - - - - - - - -
Picture books belong to the age of music, the era when children learn to mark their most important triumphs with song: "Happy Birthday to you"; "Nyah, nyah, I know something you don't know." Sadly, though, books can't sing -- unless you consider one of those maddening novelties with a whining chip wedged in its spine a book. Rather, they depend on the human voice for their music. Even when you read them to yourself, children's books refuse to be silenced. Again and again, their authors find ways of capturing the drama, self expression and power of song in their flat, still pages. One way to borrow a musical voice is to illustrate a song, as Kathy Jakobsen does in "This Land Is Your Land." A small, upright Woody Guthrie strides through Jakobsen's folk-arty paintings while his song plays itself out in the reader's inner ear and perhaps even aloud if there's a parent around who can carry a tune. Like the music, the illustrations in Jakobsen's book draw strength from their seemingly naive passion, keeping just this side of sentimentality. As Guthrie does in his lyrics, Jakobsen alternates sweeping natural images -- that endless skyway, those diamond deserts -- with busy scenes populated by people like you and me. Her pages illustrating the chorus are particularly clever and intricate: She fits together carefully posed snapshots into spreads laid out like antique postcards. She lines the margins with vertical or horizontal images of quintessential America -- the Washington Monument, a great sequoia, Yosemite Falls, a space shuttle launch, the Brooklyn Bridge, a train, a dog sled. Song and book include the freedom to protest and a social conscience in their celebration of America. Woody sits by a New York City subway entrance playing a guitar marked "This machine kills fascists." Soup kitchens put in an appearance, as do picket lines. But Jakobsen readily turns back to blossoming fruit trees and sing-along picnics before it gets too political. Like Jakobsen, Miguelanxo Prado draws power from a musical work popular among children, transforming Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" into a graphic novel. Building up his pictures from layers of saturated color, he creates a shadowy, frightening, yet slightly goofy atmosphere that's in keeping with Prokofiev's world. Peter's animal friends -- the sneaky cat, the slow, plump duck, the quick-moving bird -- are illustrated the same way their theme music sounds. The bird even leaves behind a visible trail to show how it darts through the air, much the way Prokofiev's music trills and leaps when the bird enters the story. Peter's grandfather, warning the boy to stay home where the wolf can't get him, seems almost as threatening as the vast forest. And the scenes where the wolf plunders, gulps and gloats remind me that I always ran out of the room halfway through the Leonard Bernstein version of the piece when this section played. As is fitting for our environmentally guilt-ridden age, Prado adds a note of regret once the wolf is safely dead, but Peter quickly gets over it and learns to delight in his kill like any successful predator. Another musical number ripe for an update is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Artist Ted Dewan has reinterpreted Goethe's Romantic ballad, adopting the pacing of Paul Dukas' famous scherzo -- a sprightly humorous instrumental musical -- and ignoring Disney altogether. In Dewan's hands, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is clearly a tale for our time. A musician and former physics teacher, Dewan uses the story to raise an eyebrow at technology. His sorcerer sports shoulder-length gray hair and a baseball cap, and it's not hard to imagine the next generation's answer to the personal computer coming out of his cluttered workshop. Dewan gives his sorcerer-geek the requisite sense of mysterious antiquity by filling the workshop with machine-age tools and parts. The magician-techie's lamps have goose necks, his electrical cords are wrapped in cloth, and he keeps his nuts and bolts in an oak drawer file. To reduce the clutter, he builds himself a robot assistant whom he asks to vacuum and straighten up. The disk he slips into his apprentice's head is a 45 RPM -- you can almost hear him flick the dust off the needle before lowering it gently and letting it play. Naturally, the assistant sees the blueprints that created him and decides to build helpers of his own. One robot becomes two, two become four and four become eight, while illustrations of a whole note, two half notes, four quarters, eight eighths and so on dance across the page. Like the audible scherzo, the book builds to a boom. Dewan's housekeeping hint in an age of mechanical reproduction seems to be: Do your own dirty work. In "Music Over Manhattan," author Mark Karlins and illustrator Jack E. Davis use a different tactic to bring music into their story. Instead of cribbing from musicians, they use them as characters. Bernie, a Brooklyn youngster plagued by a cousin so talented at penmanship that the family can't stop kvelling, takes up the trumpet in hope of consolation. Uncle Louie, his teacher, is such a talented musician that he can make the pigeons strut and coo when he plays. Even the laundry dances in time. In fact, Uncle Louie plays so well that the music lifts him into the air. Inspired, Bernie practices diligently. The story ends with a fanfare of fantasy: When Uncle Louie invites Bernie to play at a family wedding, his talent floats the whole party over Manhattan to their homes. Jealous Cousin Herbie of penmanship fame lands in a trash can (nyah, nyah). For the young narrator of "My Friend the Piano" by Catherine Cowan, an artist's life is not nearly so straightforward or triumphant. "It all started the first time I hauled myself onto the piano bench, touched the keys, and began to compose. As I grew and my feet reached the pedals, my music swelled with passion. At times the piano wept. At other times it shrieked with laughter. "One day Mother announced it was time I took lessons and learned how to play. 'But I already know how to play,' I said. "'That is not playing,' said Mother. 'It's noise.'" The piano, it turns out, doesn't take kindly to lessons. When the heroine tries to practice her scales, the instrument immediately goes out of tune. Kevin Hawkes' illustrations show its lid growing spiky and its keyboard curling in distaste. It's only really happy when the girl plays her own "symphonies." The narrator's parents soon lose patience and decide to get rid of the piano. The heroine pleads in vain and when the piano is on its way out the door, she decides to rescue her friend. She hops on the lid and off they speed together down the driveway, out through the neighborhood and over the highway. At last, in a heroic dash for freedom, the piano flings itself over a cliff into the sea while the heroine stays behind, clinging to a tree branch. In the last picture we see the piano leaping with dolphins in the moonlight. At the end, the piano is free and our heroine is glad to have it out of the reach of interfering teachers and unappreciative parents: "If you go to Symphony Rock, you will see where my friend the piano escaped to the sea with my music safe inside," says the narrator. "Now I compose concertos for pots and pans." Music needs a different kind of freedom -- the freedom to jangle and annoy, to get stuck in a listener's ear, to repeat itself over and over, to call up a lost thought from long ago, to be seen as well as heard. And picture books provide it with the perfect soundproof auditorium.
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"This Land Is Your Land"
"Peter and the Wolf"
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
"Music Over Manhattan"
"My Friend the Piano"
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