The masterclass took place in Harvard’s Paine Hall, whose interior walls are on three sides inscribed with the names of 26 composers, chosen when the hall was being finished in 1913-14. It’s all dead great European men from the 19th century and earlier. Some of the names have worn better than others. At one point, while guiding a young soprano through “Porgi, Amor,” Horne happened to glance up at the frieze of names and exclaimed “Couperin?! How did HE get up there?” And worse was to come when Horne noticed that her career stalwart Rossini was absent from the roster.

It made me wonder who the names on a children’s-book frieze would be, if we used a basic criteria of “dead but important and still singing to readers.” Let me take a stab at 26:  Alcott, Andersen, Barrie, Baum, Bemelmans, Burnett, Carroll, Collodi, Grahame, Grimm, Keats, Kipling, L’Engle, Lewis, Lindgren, McCloskey, Milne, Perrault, Potter, Seuss, Spyri, Stevenson, Wilder, Twain, Travers, White. Hmm, all white and mostly male. Is that me, the canon, or both?

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For more on boys and girls, take a look at Hilary Rappaport’s “On the Rights of Reading and Girls and Boys,” which will be published in the May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine but which we’ve put online now for all you engaged in the most recent guys’-reading debate.

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Back from a weekend in New York–Lost in the Stars at Encores! (terribly worthy and high-minded), Billy Elliot (LOTS of fun) and a double-dip at MOMA with Andy Warhol’s movies and the Abstract Expressionists (my favorite pictured, Jackson Pollock’s Easter and the Totem).

I wonder when we learn to be willingly (if grudgingly) edified. Watching Lost in the Stars, I thought, “well, this is dull and preachy and the singing isn’t all that exciting, but I’m glad to have finally seen an Encores! production and to add to my knowledge of Kurt Weill’s music, which in the main I like.” I guess it’s a form of delayed gratification, never my favorite concept, but perhaps I’m growing up.

As far as “Modern Art” goes, I just stick with Gertrude Stein’s considered response: “I like to look at it.”

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One thing Chua is right about is piano practice. I’ve just read Jane Breskin Zalben’s new middle-school novel Four Seasons (Knopf), about Ally, a gifted kid who studies piano at The Julliard School (only amateurs, she tells us, refer to it as just plain Julliard). I can’t remember a book so honest about the demands made upon young serious musicians–by their teachers, their parents, themselves.  Ally’s parents have an interestingly complex job of raising her: her father is an active professional musician and her mom, well, her mom has a story of her own. On the one hand, they want Ally to be happy and have a “normal” life, etc., but on the other, they know how hard she is going to have to work if she wants to make the piano her life. Whether she does want to do that provides the novel with its theme, and it’s a truly engrossing exposition. Highly recommended to all those forced through “Lightly Row” and “The Spinning Song.”

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“The young miller is naive, vulnerable and over-enthusiastic, with a poetic imagination, but not psychotic! As to the cycle’s ending, his death in the brook makes me think of the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman imagines death as a dispersal into the universe, an absorption into the cosmos, and that’s very much the sense we have here.”

–Tenor Mark Padmore talking about Schubert’s Die schone Mullerin in the November issue of Gramophone.

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And, fellow survivors–what can you still play? I still have “Lightly Row,” “Spinning Wheel” and “The Juggler” in my fingers.

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