Fraternity-Testvériség, 1961 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1961-12-01 / 12. szám
2 FRATERNITY a tune is just one note after another. I’ll strike just the two first notes on the piano — It came . . Full of good will the little boys sang with her. She stopped. Breathed hard. “Not quite”, she said, with a false smile. “Pre-t-ty good. I think we’d better take it one note at a time. Bill, you try it.” After a pause . . . “Peter — it’s your turn.” That evening, after the children had gone to bed, she told her husband, “You never heard anything like that in your whole life, Harry. Never. You can’t imagine what is was like!” “Oh, yes I can too”, he said over his temporarily lowered newspaper. “I’ve heard plenty of tone-deaf kids hollering. I know what they sound like. There are people, you know, who really can’t carry a tune.” Seeing, perhaps, in her face, the mulish mother-stubbornness, he added, with a little exasperation, “What’s the use of trying to do what you can’t do?” That was reasonable, she thought. But the next morning, when she was downtown doing her marketing, she turned in at the public library and picked up two books on teaching music to children. During the weeks between then and the Christmas entertainment, the mother didn’t see how she could ever keep it up. She discovered to her dismay that the little boys had no idea whether a note was higher or lower than the one before it. She adapted and invented “musical games” to train their ear for this. Standing in a row, their backs to the piano, listening whether the second note was “up hill or down hill” from the first note, the boys thought it as good a game as any other. They laughed raucously over each other’s mistakes, ran a contest to see who came out best. There were times when the mother faltered. Many times. When she saw the ironing heaped high, or when her daughter, Janey, was in bed with a cold, she would say to herself, “Now today I’ll just tell the boys that I cannot go on with this. We’re not getting anywhere, anyhow.” Then she would remember that Christmas celebrated the birth of the Savior — and that one of Christ’s most beloved traits was patience. So when the boys came storming in, certain that she would not close that door she had half-opened for them, she laid everything aside and went to the piano. As a matter of fact, they were getting somewhere. Even with their backs to the piano, the boys could now tell, infallibly, whether a second note was above or below the first one. Along about the second week of December, they could all sound — if they remembered to sing softly and to listen to themselves — a note, any note, within their range, she struck on the piano. After that it went fast; the practicing of the song, repeating it for the at first skeptical and then thoroughly astonished teacher, and then their triumphant report at home, “Teacher says we can sing it good enough. She says we can sing it with the others. We practiced going up on the platform this afternoon.”
