Music for Children

Nine questions a small child actually asks — where the water goes when it spirals down the drain, whether her dog knows he’s a dog, whether a fish is thirsty, where a sneeze comes from, and who decided a dog would be called a dog in the first place. Not one of them is answered. There’s no lesson, no tidy last verse, no grown-up arriving to explain. Every song ends the same way, shouted by a room full of children: nobody knows. Because it’s true — and because when a six-year-old works out that the grown-ups don’t know either, it’s the best news she’s ever heard. Sung by a girl of about six with her friends joining in on every chorus, over acoustic guitar, upright bass, piano, and nothing but hands and feet for a beat. Made to be sung badly, loudly, in the back of a car, for years.

A rainbow opens, and a white unicorn leads three children along a Hawaiian shore in search of twelve treasures — a story that ends where it began: inside the heart. Fourteen bilingual songs for children and grown-ups alike, written to give Kumi Hatanaka’s picture book a singing voice, where the islands of Hawai’i meet the heart of Japan.

Everyone knows that playing classical music to a baby makes the baby smarter. It turns out that isn’t true. But while I was finding that out, I learned what music really does for someone very small: they remember it, and a familiar song sung badly by someone in the room does more than a beautiful recording ever will. So I wrote six cradle songs — in English, Italian, Japanese, French, Spanish and German — built to be learned and sung by you, and a seventh track that is nothing but the small melody they all share. This record is the teaching copy. Your voice is where it’s meant to end up.

One night, one child, one woman singing in five languages. A nylon-string guitar, Welsh harp, muted violin, koto, and Hawaiian slack-key guitar take turns beside her voice as the tempo slows and the night deepens. Four instrumental interludes carry the handoffs, and a music box waits until the child is asleep before recalling the opening Italian melody. Nine quiet pieces shaped by the practical tenderness of a cradle song.