The Songs We Don’t Sing

Image Gallery image by Brandon Reese / www.brandonreese.com

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

To read more about rediscovering your singing voice, visit Utne.com/Sing.

I have been watching, in amazement, the cartoon Wonder Pets on the Nickelodeon children’s television channel.

Demonstrating the benefits of teamwork, Linny the guinea pig, Tuck the turtle, and Ming-Ming the duckling (Ming-Ming is everyone’s favorite, and mine, too) save an animal in trouble—sometimes a dolphin, sometimes a monkey, sometimes a bee—in every episode, and feats of great collaboration are always required.

But it’s not just the photo-puppetry animation, the message of teamwork, or the humor of the cartoon that’s engaging; it’s also the fact that the characters are always singing. It’s practically an opera for toddlers, but with a lot more recitative and not too many grand arias.

As the three creatures sing, answer distress calls by phone, and travel far away and sometimes through time, they are accompanied by a score written by current composers and played by an orchestra. The score climaxes every now and then in the Wonder Pets refrain: “What’s gonna work? Teamwork! What’s gonna work? Teamwork!” It’s an awesome achievement to set an entire cartoon series to music and to employ the voices of three young children. Deservedly, Wonder Pets won an Emmy award for music direction and composition in 2008.

Even in our wildest dreams as parents, however, we can’t imagine that Wonder Pets is going to grow an appreciation of singing, never mind opera, in our children. It’s just another passive experience that they sit through. Parents realize this, but we don’t need to worry about it in the toddler years because there is no lack of singing and play in children’s lives at that stage.

Singing is one of the first things that parents do with babies when they are born, and parents are constantly singing to toddlers: wordless ditties, choruses and refrains, made-up rhyming songs, anything to comfort them or engage with them. Parents sing, sing, sing in the early years of children’s lives—and then it stops.

What happens? Once children are at school age, after a toddlerhood of joy in singing, parents begin to consider their musical ability, they look into the future, ambition sets in, music lessons enter stage left, and suddenly, without anyone noticing it, singing has been dealt a critical blow. It is instrumental lessons that children are sent to. Piano, clarinet, fiddle, whatever. Parents suddenly emphasize playing an instrument, as if singing wasn’t substantial enough. Instruments are purchased, music stands are put up, practice is required, and slowly that natural instinct to sing out at the drop of a hat is left behind.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print