PASS IT ON!_®

Editorial

by Scott Bierko

From Pass It On! Issue #40 (Winter 2002)

Ten years ago, I attended a seminar in New York City on the state of children's music. At the time, I was new to our field and I still harbored a dream that I would become the next Raffi. Sound familiar? The audience that day was full of tuneful suitors to his throne, but we were soon to hear a different proclamation from the assembled record company "royals". According to this panel, the current and future markets for children's music could be summed up in two words: licensed characters. The music and television industries had discovered that real people--even Raffi--were no longer as profitable as cartoons and puppets. Their message was simple: learn to write for the puppets or perish.

But a lone voice stood out from the others on the panel. A woman--I'm sorry I didn't catch her name--spoke of her completely different vision of the world of children's music. It was so refreshing and different that you could actually feel the audience of artists sitting forward on their seats as she spoke. What she said basically was this (I'm paraphrasing, of course, after 10 years):

I see the world of kids' music like the ocean. On the surface, there's the commercial market with lots of volatile changes: high waves of interest in children's product crashing into storm walls of not enough sales, while the artist is clinging furiously to the little dinghy provided by the record companies. Me, on the other hand, I have a small, independent company and we live deep under the sea, far away from the tumultuous surface. Down here, we do our thing, making records, having a life, and basically not paying any attention to the changes that occur on the surface. We don't ride the high waves, it's true, but we don't crash on the rocks, either. In fact, it doesn't matter what goes on up there because we keep doing our thing regardless. We have fun and we make good music.

Wow! While the other panelists were assuring us that our noble ambitions were futile, this woman gave us an alternative. After the seminar, many writers I spoke with shared my gratitude for the hope that she offered to children's musicians. She had thrown out a lifeline, and many of us grabbed it. I'm still holding on!

I believe that the Children's Music Network can also be a lifeline for artists, teachers, and parents in a stormy world. At more than one of our national gatherings, I have heard a first-timer exclaim, "I've been searching for you folks my whole life!" Statements like that make me redouble my efforts to sustain and grow CMN. They also justify my desire to attract into our organization more people who want the combination of friendship, networking, knowledge, and support that our CMN family has to offer. Most importantly, though, it's the music--the medium many of us choose for reaching out to children. To paraphrase a best seller, whenever there are two or more CMN members together, music is with them.

Since the late 1980s, we've been sharing our music in the pages of Pass It On! Now, we are embarking on a new chapter in our organization's history as we begin to collect our music in its recorded form for internal distribution on compact disc and, sometime soon, on our website, www.cmnonline.org. CMN is taking a big step forward with this issue, and we are open to learning from your experience whether or not this is a worthwhile endeavor for us to continue. We are interested to know not so much if you like the songs herein, but are they useful? Is the concept of a written and recorded Pass It On! a venture that we wish to continue? Are the difficult feelings of having certain songs chosen while others are not worth what we achieve here?

In the ten years since I sat in that New York seminar, I have come to believe that we possess a place of honor in today's world. Think about it: we're placed in front of tomorrow's generation and entrusted with a portion of their artistic and character development. They may never know it was us and we may never hear their thanks, but aren't we a lifeline for them?

Please consider these songs as ways of getting children (and other adults) to think, love, laugh, and sing. Make them your own and then give them away. Pass them on with the compliments of the twenty-six composers, twelve members of our selection committee, four notation engravers, and a board of directors who were willing to take a risk and grow our organization. To them, I tip my hat and say, Many thanks for your pioneer spirit and your energy. We made a great team. I sincerely believe that your work will benefit hundreds if not thousands of children