A Musical "Life Zest"
A Musical "Life Zest"
... and Two Women Who Have It
Last week, I encountered a classic good-news story out of the Twin Cities about the retirement of a remarkable choral music teacher. Ruth Oliphant conducted three choirs at the church we attended in the Twin Cities: the cherub choir, the boys choir, and the girls choir, involving children from ages four though eleven.
What made this particular story worthy of five minutes of local TV coverage is that Mrs. Oliphant has been conducting choirs, teaching children, and modeling Christian discipleship for 67 years. While choir members certainly learned music, singers were also being guided artfully in their faith formation. Young musicians were introduced to captivating songs by a loving teacher with an exceptional gift for connecting with seventy, eighty, ninety children year after year, throughout the church season. And all this happens at a time when youngsters are highly absorbent of essential life lessons.
Our three children, now in their thirties, were all beneficiaries of Mrs. Oliphant’s nurturing. I suspect lessons they learned will continue to play out for the next six decades, not knowing, of course, but an estimate based on personal experience. I can testify about the transformative, life-lasting power of music. My point here is the importance of PARTICIPATION in music: to sing, to dance, to play an instrument. The opportunity to be IN a choir, a dance troop, a band or orchestra is vitally important and must be made available to children of all ages, all talent levels, all socio-economic levels.
I emphasize the concept of “in”… like passing over a threshold and entering a musical mansion accommodating the likes of Bach and Mozart, Martha Graham and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Paul McCartney and Aretha Franklin. (I could go on, but you get the idea.) Yes, knocking out a tune on the spinet, even humming along with the radio is making music! The door swings open; we’re inside the mansion.
Mrs. Oliphant’s retirement tribute prompted thoughts of dedicated music teachers who have illuminated my path. My first music teacher, Sadie Owen, will always rank among the most unforgettable people in my life. Mrs. Owen made a weekly pilgrimage from her spacious home in Osage to our modest country school to teach grade school students that music-making, specifically singing, was a necessary, even essential endeavor.
Her fingers flitted over piano keys as pupils sang “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” a song from 1918, the same year her son William was born. (This son became a doctor, practicing medicine in St. Ansgar for almost four decades.) We performed plays, pageants, and programs on the school’s small basement stage as if it were Carnegie Hall. We warbled our way through “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” blowing interludes into inexpensive recorders for an attentive “Mothers Club” audience. At our final performance before the school closed permanently in 1963, the stage was magically transformed into a Parisian sidewalk café amid verses of “The Last Time I Saw Paris” and the grand finale, “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round”, then a contemporary song composed two years earlier.
Ruth Oliphant and Sadie Owen are iconic characters, dedicating a major portion of their lives to instilling in youngsters a love of music. Their very nature conveyed a sense that teaching is a noble calling -- for Mrs. Oliphant, a holy calling -- and a steadfast obligation that indeed, no child would be left behind, certainly not on their watch.
As I think of these teachers, their boundless zest for life seems to flow from a musical wellspring, pouring first into then out of every facet of their being. It’s a rare trait. For years, I’ve remembered Mrs. Owen as one-of-a-kind. To now note that dear Mrs. Oliphant shares many similar attributes suggests a more widespread musical “life zest” than I first envisioned. This thought gives me hope.
In closing, the last lines of a song first learned sixty years ago, cited with overflowing gratitude for these two women: “High in some silent sky / Love sings a silver song / Making the earth whirl softly / Love makes the world go 'round.”
I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. My colleagues: