Opinion

Anita Robinson: I absorbed music from an early age and it did nothing to improve my maths

Singing may make you feel good but it does nothing for your mathematical skills
Singing may make you feel good but it does nothing for your mathematical skills Singing may make you feel good but it does nothing for your mathematical skills

According to a well-known quality newspaper, a recent study has found that training children in music “doesn’t make them more clever in other areas such as maths or literacy”.

According to a popular tabloid, in another experiment, researchers recruited 300 people to eat chocolate in silence, or listening to fast or slow music. Apparently, slow airs make us chew in rhythm with the music so we feel full sooner and stop eating. “This,” they say, “may help to combat obesity.” The point of these two statements of the obvious may be made clear presently.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a musical household. Without realising it, I absorbed music from an early age. My father, a fine bass, sang in our parish choir, played the harmonium in the country church near his school and trained his primary pupils (me included) in tonic solfa so we could read music. My earliest memories are of my brothers, already at university, home and lying late in bed on Saturday mornings singing in close harmony the popular songs of the Fifties.

By a process of osmosis I learned the lyrics and remember them still. Social evenings with friends and extended family invariably ended round the piano, with everyone expected to ‘do a turn’. After a dainty supper (with pastry forks) came the entertainment. There was a distinct pecking order. First up was Daddy, rendering ‘Simon the Cellarer’, appropriate showcase for his amazingly low notes. Next was my mother. With one hand placed on his shoulder she’d launch into ‘Genevieve’. I found the tableau touchingly tender, until I realised she was applying pressure at intervals to prevent his playing too fast. Sister Dear followed, accompanying herself with ‘The Lass with the Delicate Air’ in sweet soprano, then the brothers in chorus with the youngest at the piano, a variety of relations – then me. My party piece was the Skye boat song delivered in uncertain treble. As unasked-for encore I recited a poem – “There’s a teeny tiny cupboard with a teeny tiny key…”

I was a precocious and faintly nauseating child. Aged seven I was put to piano lessons. Lacking either enthusiasm or talent I ploughtered through miserably for years and can attest to the fact that it had no beneficial effect on my inability to master long division. Meanwhile, the radiogram in the corner frequently overheated with Sister Dear’s passion for opera and popular continental songs she’d heard on foreign holidays. She’d buy the sheet music and play and sing them with great verve and perfect pronunciation. She was a hard act to follow. My early teenage taste veered more towards obsessive listening to Radio Luxembourg despite orders to “turn that bloody racket off!”

Student days coincided with the youthquake phenomenon of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the discovery of jazz via my more sophisticated friends. Consider my dismay on finding part of my Early Years teacher training course was ‘the requirement to play an instrument to adult level’. Having long ago abandoned the piano, I cut my fingernails to the quick, locked myself in a practice room for three days with Chopin’s least challenging nocturne and passed the exam.

Ironically, each of the three schools I subsequently taught in had a designated music teacher and I’ve never laid a hand on a piano since, except to dust it. The old one from home stands silent in my hall. Beside it, a cabinet crammed with sheet music. I couldn’t find the opening notes of ‘Für Elise’ on it now.

The older I get, the more nostalgic I become. I can be stopped in my tracks by a melody half-heard, that conjures instantly a time, a place, a person, an event. Memories ‘flash upon the inward eye’, much like Wordsworth’s daffodils.

My constant companion while I compose these columns is Classic FM murmuring softly in the background. I have encyclopaedic recognition of almost every piece of music, but couldn’t name the composer or the title of half of them.

However, I’ve just consumed an entire bar of Cadbury’s new Darkmilk salted caramel chocolate in record time to the strains of the William Tell overture….