Jake & Children's Music
For over 8 years Jake has worked as a musician at Nursery Schools and Infant Music Classes. This he started by working with Bea of the legendary Beas Baby Music in West London. He sings and has fun twice a week at Blundell's Day Nursery in Battersea where he is known as Mr Jake and sings with children between 2/5 years old. He is also a favourite now at Wee One's nursery in Earlsfield
Much of Jake's childrens material is now self penned and together with his playing of the accordion, banjo and ukulele he uses puppets and props to provide lively and engaging music sessions of between 30-60 mins in length. If your interested in using Jake either with workshops or as a music leader in your nursery contact him by email or phone.
Jake's knowledge and sympathy with music for the very young has led to him being comissioned by Impossible TV to compose all 60 episodes of music for the channel 5 animation called 'Birdbath'. You can now watch all these episodes via the Channel5 Milkshake website.
Click Here for Birdbath Episodes
Jake songs seem to appeal to kids, as Jake's fellow pierrot pal Gacko demonstrated recording his sons rendition of one of Jake's songs: Presenting, Alfie Bridgens performing fantastically The Sea Kissing the Shingle at home in his Pierrot Costume aged . Well done Alfie !
There is considerable demand as well for Jake's workshop skills with children in both large scale and small scale events. He has had comissions in the last year from The Manchester International Festival, Somerset House, The Royal Festival Hall, Arts Depot and The Georgian Theatre Richmond.
- Caspar with his Dad at his first banjo lesson -
There is much interest with Jake's fantastic new childrens band 'Tea Time Treats' Featuring six fabulous musicians playing a range of fun instruments. Expect to see Trumpet, Saxophone, Accordion, Piano, Ukuleles , Double bass , Drums and Banjo. Lots of songs about Panyattas, Jellyfish & Jumping Kangaroos . Their first gig will be at The Arts Depot in Finchley on the 4th May 2009 ( see gig lists on this site for more details )
- The Tea Time Treats -
A Short History of Music for Children in the Twentieth Century
By Jake Rodrigues Mar 2008
Whilst giving a demonstration of multicoloured musical pipes in my ‘Windy Workshops’ show I announced,
‘This next piece of music was written by a musical genius called Mozart. Put your hand up if your four years old. Well, while your up stairs playing your gameboy this lad Mozart was knocking up the best known tune ever known and he was three and half and younger than you !’
This gag plays on two myths. That of childhood genius and the second that Mozart wrote this tune when he had just started using a potty or whatever they used then. The truth is that whilst Wolfgang Amadeus was a prodigy he didn’t write Twinkle Twinkle until he seventeen and then it was a set of twelve variations called Kochel-Verzeichnis. The melody was in fact a well-known German ‘folk melody’ and the whole point of the piece was to demonstrate virtuosity and compositional prowess with such a simple tune. Wolfgang’s little tune demonstrates the paradoxical and potency of a children’s tune. It seems elevated and denigrated at the same time by its treatment by and by association with Mozart. I guess the Mozart story of at three and half writing a simple tune to amuse and satiate his dribbling peers is as good a place to start as any. The history of Children’s music is steeped it stories, either accompanying the tales of pies full of blackbirds, and falling down hills or in epic pieces of classical music that conjure far away places or the changing of the guards.
Children’s music has always been prevalent in our western culture and it only takes a cursory glance to realise in all cultures it has always been so. Music with song has been used to amuse, bond, count, teach language, as well as tell stories and histories. In it’s most obvious form we have the nursery rhyme, but there is also a long history of events such as the dancing round the maypole, singing Christmas carols and other ritualistic songs and melodies.
The styles of music I have just been listing are what many would call ‘folk music’ and other than the Christmas Carols would have been passed down orally from generation to generation. The fact that we are still singing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ and the old plague song ‘Ring a Ring a Roses’ is a testament to the longetivity and continuity of this music. Any exploration of Children’s Music has to accept this huge tradition as effectively the base colour and palette from which this genre has developed.
Until the baby boomers of the 1950’s in Europe and America children’s music with a few notable exceptions was a haphazard affair . To look at this in terms of classical music we need to start in the nineteenth century and earlier still. As Mr Mozart’s earlier example demonstrates musical novelty is perhaps the keyword with the classical repertoire that has developed for children. There are two categories of music as well to consider here. Music written for children/novices to play ( cue the sonatina’s of Clementi ) and music written for children to listen to and be inspired by. This latter repertoire is a slim volume of work written by composers for their children very often . A good example is Debussy whose Etudes and children’s corner were written with his child Claude-Emma in mind . The best known of these pieces is ‘The Golliwogs Cakewalk’. Perhaps the cynic in me might say that even this piece is a novelty pastiche of Ragtime rather than a piece written really for children. The dilemma that soon becomes apparent is whether a composer is dumbing down by writing for children. In Peter Van der Merwe’s book Origins of the Popular Style the point is made about the assimilation of Classical form and how by the middle of the nineteenth century Classical Composers in their urge for originality and innovation were moving yet further away from their audiences.
‘ Certain melodic features common in Chopin and Liszt during the years 1830-1850 faded out of ‘serious’ music after the mid century , though they continued to flourish in popular music. A little later the same thing happened to the Romantic’s lush chromaticism. As soon as it became the property of every parlour balladeer the ‘serious’ composer abandoned it…it hardly mattered…provided it was clearly unpopular’
If Victorian Composers were having issues concerning their adult audience, their relationship with their potential juvenile audience for the most part would have been non-existent. A snapshot of nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in terms of children saw them having little if no contact with men of the middle and upper classes, and making the presumption that to be a composer you needed to be educated, that pretty much cuts Classical Composers from children period. This theory obviously is just conjecture and would need to be proved in detail, but the notable exceptions serve to prove my point that Classical (male ) composers have tended to have little or no contact with their own children let alone other’s. The best-known exception is Prokokiev who wrote orchestral music for his son and then repeated this with many compositions especially on returning to his native Russia.
It would be fair to say that his 1936 piece of work ‘Peter and the Wolf’ is considered the premiere piece of children’s classical music. Visiting the Barbican library recently there were no less than five versions of the work with different narrators my favourite being Dame Edna Everage. Edna makes her/his entrance with the immortal line ‘Hello Possums, this is a story about a great big wolf” . This must be a great work to survive an onslaught such as that.
In the top ten of classical children’s hits Peter and the Wolf are at the top of the pops followed by the Carnival of the Animals, The Nut Cracker Suite and Swan Lake. The rest of the charts are fought out by Rimsky Korsakov and his thousand and one nights
Benjamin Britten's young persons guide to the orchestra and Bela Bartok’s concerto for Orchestra, Oh and don’t forget old Holst’s planets. The common theme’s are either accessibility ( the Britten & Bartok pieces just mentioned ) or in pieces of music that are often musically onomatopoeic of what they represent ( skeletons on xylophones etc. ). Another generalisation I know but a look at the programmes of the last few years Children’s Proms, bar the exception of the orchestrations of the Harry Potter theme tune seem to bear this out .
The coming of sound recordings with the advent of gramophone records, radio and film in the early twentieth century, saw the massive growth of all sorts of music . Classical Music was the star focus of Walt Disney’s third movie Fantasia, which animated popular and quirky classical pieces. The films reception at the time was muted and despite being seen as now a children’s classic it still has the power to upset classical purists who complain how the music has been chopped and changed to fit the animation. For me Fantasia is still very challenging as a piece of art. Some of the work I can easily see is great fun and digestible for children. However, there is a real darkness and menace in several sequences that scare even a dad like me. Perhaps it is impossible to view now without the perspective of the second world war and the uncertainty of the thirties. Scary in a way other popular children’s films don’t get near or choose not to.
Walt Disney’s two films that preceded Fantasia ( Snow White & Dumbo ) were far more typical of where music for children was heading by the late thirties. As well as picture book animation, and a strong narrative these animations had modern, witty and highly innovative songs and soundtracks. The effect of the three to four minute recording time available on a 78 record had a profound effect on twentieth century music and this is evident with all Disney’s major animations. Composers teamed with lyricists and by the mid thirties a huge industry specialised in popular music. Family friendly music became big business and a hit song from a film would be released on 78 , sheet music and would be played back to back on the radio and in live bands . The recording industry in America soon blossomed and the model was copied throughout the world. At the same time as films, variety stage shows and light comedic operetta’s developed into a new high bred pioneered by the 1927 stage sensation ‘Showboat’. We take the established conventions of the musical for granted now but in the nineteen twenties they were revolutionary. Films and Musicals effectively began to bounce off one another and there was a golden between the thirties and the start of the 1960’s where musicals were made into films and visa-versa. They also significantly targeted families producing an entire cannon of family entertainment that we are still watching with kids to this day. I consider this period as being the richest vein in terms of children’s music. Together with this musical animation continued to be prolific and composers and writers found ever-new ways to engage both adults and children at the same time. The music shifted with the times such as the Jungle Book’s jazz rhythms or Peggy Lee’s smokey vocals in the Aristocats. Performers such as Danny Kaye , Burl Ives and later Julie Andrews became children’s music specialists. The film Mary Poppin’s was a typical innovative entertaining film mixing entertaining animation with live performers and an incredibly memorable music score aimed directly at kids. Likewise the seminal piece Tubby the Tuba meshes characterisation with orchestration in a way that was both a homage to and an ironic take on Prokokiev’s and Poulenc’s orchestra / narration pieces.
The radio further propelled performers such as Danny Kaye and Julie Andrews and all sorts of other children’s music. In Britain composers such as Eric Coates wrote short novelty pieces of music with children in mind with pieces such as The Three Bears and The Jester at the Wedding Suite and on the subject of Bears the nineteen thirties classic The Teddy Bears Picnic was a weekly choice on Listen with Mother a massively popular radio show on BBC’s Home Service.
Before blowing Listen with Mother out the water with the advent of pop, teenage music and TV in the 1960’s let’s go back to folk music and it’s revival in the twentieth century.
Both in America and Britain folk music was being collected and intellectualised in the early twentieth century. In Georgina Boyes book ‘The Imagined Village’ she tells how folk music was essentially recreated and contrived in the twentieth century an example being the statistic of there being 9 folk clubs in 1959 blossoming to 1700 in 1979 . Both sides of the Atlantic saw this music being reclaimed by the middle classes often with a socialist political agenda. In Britain Ewan McColl spearheaded this revolution. In America, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Ella Jenkins were at the vanguard of the new folk movement . Guthrie and Seeger’s ‘everyman’ appeal was based not only on their workers anthems but also on their inclusiveness regarding their music. Children’s songs were essential to their act and their integrity. Seeger made two classic children’s LP’s that defined a new style or re-invention of American children’s music. His most famous anti war song was even child friendly I remember singing ‘ Where have all the flowers gone’ at school without any knowledge of it’s underlying message ( successful propaganda if ever there was) . Guthrie wrote children’s songs that contemporary artists such as Natalie Merchant from the 10,000 Manics and Billy Bragg now cover. Seeger’s folk repertoire is based on American country and Blues music . His stripped style ( just him and a banjo ) encouraged the whole folk revolution to sing to their children all the old story songs like ‘Froggy went a Courtin’ and ‘John Henry’ . Here were educated singers singing music from the Appalachians to families in Greenwich Village, New York in the 1940’s and 50’s. There is now an established ‘folk repertoire’ of children’s music and leading children’s musicians like Dan Zane and Bluegrass musicians like Cathy Fink use these songs pretty much exclusively. In Britain the folk revival took longer to shape up but by the 1970’s all the leading folk musicians such as Maddy Prior and Martin Carthy were making forays into children’s music. The children’s song gives the English folk revival real continuity as childhood is the time when we sing most with our families and where the amateur can shine in the actual doing and making of the music rather than polished concert performances. It also puts the control of the music back in the parent’s hands literally.
This movement has gained momentum and is continuing to thrive perhaps as an antidote to the increased commercialism and targeting of children and teenagers in terms of music and entertainment. The term teenager did not exist in the Listen with Mother world of the 1950’s but the advent of Rock and Pop together with television changed the whole industry of music for children. Pop music which exploded in the 1960’s targeted teenagers and young adults , but also excited children literally by its energy and beat. It was and is music to dance to so young children will naturally like it despite I am sure many a prude parent trying to ban it. Some Pop bands most notably ‘ The Beatles’ aimed some of their output directly at Children. The Yellow submarine and The Magical Mystery Tour were vibrant, psychedelic. and funky fantasy world’s. The mid sixties saw music for children as being very fashionable and the monopoly that Disney had held with children’s popular music for thirty years was taken from them this group of unconventional Liverpudlians. Perhaps the best piece of children’s music from this era was made by the songwriter in The Beatles arch rivals ‘The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson As a response to Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band , he wrote an epic flowing selection of songs and musical soundscapes called ‘ Smile’ . The album was never completed because Wilson had a complete mental breakdown before it was finished. It was released some thirty years later and is a musical expression of the joy of American childhood, songs like ‘Vega-Tables’ and ‘Barnyard’ are a sonic hoot of pops and whistles a kaleidoscope of music for a whole range of ages, including kids.
Popular music for children soon became subsumed in television, and bands such as The Monkee’s were contrived as a children’s show about a band. Things would get turned on their head further as the Jackson family and the Osmonds became child bands playing sophisticated sounding music referencing childhood subjects with an adult sound. These two bands became cartoon strips, action toys and t-shirts. Commercial tie-ins with children’s entertainment became a necessary factor to make the shows commercially profitable. It became important to have a strong identity and a hit theme songs , like Mike Batt’s string of ‘Womble’ hits became the songs children want to sing. The most ironic children’s pop song came with the nineteen eighties Pink Floyd song ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ an anthem for disgruntled teenagers, it’s still sung I imagine to this day in grimy comprehensives everywhere.
Away from television and children’s music is thriving despite the national curriculum in schools. There is now a national franchise of ‘Caterpillar’ classes where you can either participate with young child or you can buy their sing-a-long cd’s franchise packs and start your own business. Alternatively there are many musicians such as myself who run classes for the very young in nurseries and halls, singing a mixture of nursery rhymes made up songs and percussion games. All the baby books emphasise how essential music is now to the early developmental stages of childhood. As kids get older , the recorder is being subsumed by the Ukulele as the primary school instrument of choice. This trend started in Australia and Canada with the Nova Scotian musician J. Chalmars Doane and is getting very popular now in the United Kingdom. The Uke is cheap, looks like a guitar (so it has rock kudos) , and you can also sing and accompany yourself at the same time. Computer technology is enabling children to record their own music and now every teenager has a go at being a budding producer, in fact the comparative cheapness now of good quality musical instruments is making music more accessible than ever before. It should be a boom time for children’s music , perhaps the next revolution will be music made by children for children. Who knows we’ll have to wait and see.