I was saddened to see the news this week of the passing of Roberta Brown. Ms. Brown, a resident of our community since 1956, was the music teacher at Starkey Elementary School when I was a student there.
While the world of elementary education has changed significantly since those days, the idea that young students should be exposed to music, art, and physical education has remained constant. Ms. Brown was our guide to music, and she was a good guide.
I didn’t realize until reading her obituary Thursday that she was a fellow Longhorn with a degree in harp. Harp: I never would have imagined it. I suppose we waves of schoolchildren were her primary instrument all of those years – we were a slightly off-tuned harp.
Here are some of the things I remember from Ms. Brown’s classes:
I remember her wheeling in a phonograph on a cart and playing different types of music for us. No one liked the opera she played for us, but we did enjoy the narrated “Peter and the Wolf” each year. She also brought recordings of music from around the world.
She was also responsible, in those Norman Rockwell days, for producing school pageants. I have very distinct memories of two of those performances.
In one we sang several selections in Japanese. Well, it was a version of Japanese tinged with both a Texas drawl and a complete incomprehension of Japanese. We practiced for months, making these odd sounds, warbling in a tongue no one could understand. It only occurs to me now that Ms. Brown probably didn’t understand Japanese, either.
On the big night we sang our little Japanese hearts out, and our parents applauded in English. I’m guessing the point of the exercise was to focus on the sounds we were making instead of the words we were saying. Regardless, it’s a lesson I still remember some forty years later.
The other memory is more personal: In class one day she asked who among us students could play the piano. I raised my hand, though in truth I had only just started lessons. I could play the piano about as well as I could play the bassoon.
I found myself assigned a piece to play for the Starkey Christmas Pageant, “Silent Night.”
I looked at the music she handed me. It was like nothing I’d ever played before: it required both hands. At the same time. And each hand was expected to play several notes. At the same time. But even worse, each hand was to play something different from the other hand. Again, at the same time. It was like trying to tie two different knots separately with each hand.
I was terrified. My teacher, too, was not pleased. But Ms. Brown, like another Ms. Brown, was unsinkable. She insisted that I play that piece in that night in front of a huge crowd. “Of course you can play it,” she told me.
And so my piano teacher began some intense training.
Leonard Bernstein once quipped that to accomplish the impossible all that is required is a plan and not enough time to accomplish the plan. Somehow, by the night of the musical, I could play “Silent Night.” I’m sure I stuttered along on the old upright piano, but I did make it through the piece while the audience sang along in the in the school cafeteria.
And yes, Gentle Reader, I can play “Silent Night” to this day. The lesson burned into my head those weeks is still there, the notes are still upon the tips of my fingers, ready to march out, in sequence, upon command.
Roberta Brown was a good teacher, and she gave life to a difficult subject. Music is, after all, a fleeting art. It lives on the edge of a knife, as the sound we hear passes quickly into memory. It is art in a series of moments. Ms. Brown helped us explore those moments and in doing so taught lessons that do not fade.
Until next week, all the best.
Joe Herring Jr. is a Kerrville native and a Starkey Scorpion.
