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Thank you, Readertotz, for highlighting this gorgeous video of one of my favorite singers, Andrea Boccelli, singing Sesame Street’s Elmo to sleep with a variation on one of his most well-known songs - very sweet and funny at the same time!

It also made me think of all those picture books where the baby just won’t go to sleep - like Hush! A Thai Lullaby by Minfong Ho, illustrated by Holly Meade (Orchard Books, 2000).

“Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us,” says Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at the Boston Conservatory, in a beautiful speech from 2004 that has now made its way through the internet. And the same could be said—has been said—of good literature. So now imagine the effects of literature and music combined!

To help children begin to explore this powerful pairing, I suggest you take a look (if you haven’t yet done so) at the features currently highlighted on our website. I also recommend reading Paulnack’s speech on the value of music in its entirety. Here’s another excerpt, as way of enticement:

“I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.”

With September now upon us, we are continuing our focus on Music in Children’s Literature with a new Book of the Month, over on the main PaperTigers website: A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord and illustrated by Shino Arihara (Lee & Low, 2006):

…the painful but inspiring true story of how music literally saved the life of Arn Chorn-Pond, founder of Cambodian Living Arts, a World Education project.

An orphan of the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975, nine-year-old Arn was sent to a children’s work camp, where he was underfed and overworked, under the constantly watchful eye of armed and threatening soldiers. When volunteers were called for to play propaganda songs, Arn, who came from a family of musicians, raised his hand. He and five other children were chosen to learn the khim, a traditional Cambodian string instrument. Arn excelled… but once he had learned to play, his teacher and all but one of his fellow students were executed…

Read the complete review

Michelle has also contributed an insightful Personal View, Music as Inspiration and Survival: a Cambodian Journey - definitely worth reading!

Also new on the website, we are delighted to present an interview with husband-and-wife team Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, authors of the powerful and moving illustrated middle-reader, Little Leap Forward (Barefoot Books, 2008). In June I blogged about its powerful stage adaptation and in the interview Yue and Clare talk about it, as well as other aspects of the book.

Little Leap Forward is based on Yue’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution in China. His father, a professional erhu (two-string violin) player, died when Yue was very young; when Yue was seven, he began receiving flute lessons from one of his father’s friends, a musician who lived in the same small courtyard; then, at the age of seventeen, he joined an army music ensemble as a flutes soloist for the People’s Republic of China. With the help of one of his sisters, Yue left China in 1982 to take up a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He now plays all over the world - and by following some of the links in the interview side-bar, you can listen to some examples of his beautiful music…

The threads of a little boy’s life are drawn together and lead to a happy ending, thanks to the wisdom of his grandfather, in this beautifully written and illustrated picture-book: Babu’s Song by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen and illustrated by Aaron Boyd (Lee & Low, 2003). Set in contemporary Tanzania, Bernardi lives with his grandfather, Babu. They make a living from the toys which Babu makes and Bernardi sells at the market. Bernardi shares a love of soccer with the other boys his age and he wishes he could afford to go to school like they do…. and he longs for the new football he sees in a shop window.

One day Babu gives Bernardi a musical box he has made from an old tin: it plays a song that Babu used to sing to him, which makes it extra special as Babu lost his voice after an illness several years earlier:

Bernardi hugged Babu, and together they listened to the music. That night for the first time in many nights, Bernardi fell asleep listening to Babu’s song.

The following Saturday, Bernardi sells the music box to an insistent tourist and decides he will buy himself the football. However, he finds that he cannot buy it and, filled with guilt, he hands the money over to Babu. Babu leaves Bernardi for a while, then returns with three surprises: a school uniform, because he has paid the fees for Bernardi to go to school; a soccer ball he has made; and an old lard tin to make another music box.

Babu’s Song became an immediate hit in our household and, since it arrived a few months ago, we have read it many times. I’ve included it in my Personal View for our current music theme; and it is definitely one of the books Steve Adams of the Willesden Bookshop would have been referring to when he spoke to me about children’s books about Africa and India starting to reflect a modern urban setting. The illustrations here really help to get that across.

All in all, there’s plenty of food for thought and this is exactly the kind of story we need to get children thinking at an early age, even if subconsciously to start with, about the distribution of world wealth. For parents reading this book with their children, it is a wake-up call: a tourist paying, albeit generously, for a hand-made souvenir makes it possible for a child to attend school…

Little Brother read this as his African book in our Book Challenge so I’ll leave him with the last words:

There are some sad bits and some happy bits, which makes it a heart-moving story.

The new issue of PaperTigers, focusing on “Music in Children’s Literature,” is now live!

Music is central to the human experience and has been bound up with poetry and storytelling since time immemorial. We have brought together an international array of writers and artists whose lives and work have been touched by music; and whose work, in turn, reaches out across geographical boundaries to touch their audience.

As the final words of the opera Naomi’s Road say, “We’ll always carry with us these three things. Gift of music. Gift of words. Gift of love.”

We hope that you’ll find inspiration for all three of these gifts among our website’s new features, which include interviews with Joy Kogawa and Matt Ottley; gallery features of Lulu Delacre and Satoshi Kitamura’s work; essays by Jorge Luján and Michelle Lord, and more. Through September, we’ll continue to explore, here on the blog, the ways in which music features in children’s and young adult literature, so read the new features and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this or any of our upcoming music-related posts!