AJ is currently obsessed with all things Magic School Bus, which, if you are not familiar with it, is a series of cartoonish books and actual cartoon videos dealing with assorted science concepts. And they really are pretty entertaining, even for grownups. AJ reads Magic School Bus books, watches Magic School Bus videos, and plays Magic School Bus with his toy bus and a motley collection of figurines, Matchbox cars, or whatever can be a stand-in for the children. This morning he was running around singing a version of the Magic School Bus theme song. He doesn't really know the words, so he was singing the tune to the words "on the Magic School Bus." But he ended the song with "Whop bop a lula a whop bam boom." I found this funny because the latter is a line from that classic tune "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, who, as it happens, also sings the theme song from The Magic School Bus. I don't know that I've ever mentioned to AJ that it is the same person and his voice is sufficiently different (due to age, processing, or what have you) on the TV show than on our 1955 recording of Tutti Frutti. The Magic School Bus song also does not feature any of Little Richard's trademark squeals where it sounds like he's achieved the high notes by being goosed. But it would appear that AJ has tapped into the essential Little Richard, that somehow he has connected these two songs, most likely the only two Little Richard songs he has ever heard.

I've been thinking about this idea of communicating the essence of musical styles to my students, to what degree it is about study, to what degree it is simply intuitive. Clearly AJ's connection is all intuition. When I sit down in my car and turn on a classical station on the radio, I can probably tell you the composer if not the piece after hearing a few notes 95% of the time. That's certainly about schooling, at least in part. I have, after all, been studying this kind of music since I was very young. But the process of identification does not feel at all scholarly. Rather I feel like I understand in a less analytical sense that a pieces sounds like Shostakovich or Debussy or Haydn. I'm trying to figure out how to teach this skill to my students and I'm wondering to what degree it can actually be taught. The needle-drop test (as its anachronistic name suggests) is a longstanding tradition in the music classroom, where the professor plays a fragment from the middle of a work of music and the students are supposed to identify the piece. It is the subject of universal anxiety under students in the non-major courses. Certainly, students can be taught to analyze individual elements to figure it out. Instrumentation, for example, is quite different from era to era and country to country and can narrow down the time period. And language can often (but not always) narrow down the nationality of the composer. There are also huge numbers of mnemonic devices for remembering individual works. Some have even been published as with From Bach to Verse by Josefa Heifetz (daughter of Jascha and a pianist in her own right) who, for example, has forever cemented the opening of Mozart's 40th symphony as "Give a hand to the band playing Mozart! He wrote music both charming and pretty." But the best ones aren't generally suitable for the sedate pages of a classical music book, as with one that made the rounds of my program which has forever ruined for me the last movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony:

I want to masturbate!
Please leave me alone!

But mostly, you just know and it's hard to communicate exactly why. How, for example, do I explain that I can tell it's Bach because when the music starts to play that you know with almost mathematical certainty how it will go and that it never disappoints (well, except maybe for the Easter Oratorio). How do I explain that Mozart sounds like something perfectly symmetrical but not quite? Or that Haydn sounds like Mozart wearing big shoes? How do I explain that Debussy sounds like it's floating away but Ravel sounds like it has several guy-lines holding it to the ground? Even to put these sensations into words is to remove the subtlety of what I actually hear, but it at least gives you the idea of the lack of any kind of scholarly trajectory of thought.

Music seems to be particularly good at making these kinds of connections in reverse as well. How many of us (or at least the Americans among us) know the Preamble to the U.S. constitution solely because Schoolhouse Rock? Can you say it without singing the song in your head? We checked an anthology of Schoolhouse Rock episodes out of the library to show AJ "Interplanet Janet," which we've been attempting to sing at home. I was stunned that I knew most or all of the words to about 30 of them, none of which I've seen in decades. And I still remember which early American inventors invented what from a solo I had in the musical about American History that my sixth grade class put on in the school cafeteria. Why is it that music seems to have a staying power in the memory that is greater than words? Is it a function of the association of one with the other? Or is it something about music itself? If the latter, then my students should be having an easier time with the drop-the-needle tests.

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