Anyone Else Still Have Their Recorder from Elementary School?
March is National Play the Recorder Month. That was the first 'instrument' I learned how to play - and I use the term 'instrument' loosely.
I remember the first half of fourth grade was spent blowing on kazoos. I can still picture the teacher reaching into a big cloth bag and handing them out one by one to the class. Usually, she would start at one end of the row and have us hand them down to the other end, meaning about 10 other kids handled your kazoo before you ever got a hold of it.
Then came time to make music! Time to put it to your lips and blow – making the goofy sound that only kazoos do. After about 15 minutes of ‘music making’ (aka noise), that’s when the teacher would have us hand them back in – spit and all!
At the time, I never gave it any thought. But now that I’m all grown up and wiser, all I can think of is, “YUCK!!! How gross!!!”
The second half of the year we got to learn how to play an actual instrument - the recorder (some schools called them flutophones, in our school they were recorders). And they came in only one color - black. However, I understand today you can also get them in white. I can even remember the cloth pouch that my mom made for me so I could carry it back and forth from school. It was gold and black in color and cinched with a tie at the top. I'm pretty sure I still have it somewhere in the attic at the farm.
And if memory serves me, I think the first song we learned how to play was "Hot Cross Buns." Nowadays, they tackle things a lot more complicated. Here's a comment made on my Facebook page from a friend who teaches elementary music in Sioux Falls.
Kathy Pilker Boadwine Just finished playing recorders with my 4th graders last week. We ended with Beethoven Ode to Joy, Bach Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, and Dvorzak New World Symphony. Harvey Dunn Elementary kids rocked the recorder!
All I can say is, "WOW!"
If someone asked me to play a song on a recorder today, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I do know one thing though - that little recorder opened a big bright world of music to me at a very young age - something I still enjoy today!
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