Remembering Mrs. Pentstemmon

Remembering Mrs. Pentstemmon

Keywords: essay, humor, music education

She looked and dressed like one of the suburban ladies in the Helen Hokinson cartoons. She was portly. She had an imposing physical presence. She might have been forty years old. She was the music teacher at the Kingscote Elementary School in Blisskill, Connecticut. And I can't think of a single thing she did that was wrong, except to give me a dislike of singing that lasted more than thirty years.

She taught us the names of Mr. Eugene Ormandy and Mr. Arturo Toscanini. She had a cabinet full of castanets and tambourines and woodblocks. At Halloween she played "Danse Macabre" on the phonograph and invited us to express ourselves creatively by accompanying the music with wooden xylophones. She had at least ten autoharps; I liked the autoharps.

She staged elaborate musical productions. One Arbor Day, in an elaborate outdoor extravaganza, we all sang what she said was Mr. Felix Mendelssohns' "Spring Song:"

"Welcome, sweet Springtime, we greet thee with so-oong
Murmurs of gladness fall on thy ear
Voices long hushed may their full notes prolo-ong
Echoing far and near."

Years later I discovered that the music was not what she had said it was. It was really Antonin Rubenstein's "Melody in F," which has no words, in English or any other language.

She played the piano, but I never enjoyed Mrs. Pentstemmon's playing.

The teacher whose piano playing I loved was Mrs. Fury's. She opened and closed every assembly by playing a particular march on the piano. I think it was the Blisskill High School football fight song. I could hum it for you now. She had a style of playing I have since heard in other schoolteachers: a sort of rapid, uniform, rhythmic, oompah oompah oompah in the bass. It was absolutely wonderful. I wished I could play the piano like Mrs. Fury. I still do.

Mrs. Pentstemmon would teach us songs. She would first go over the words reading them aloud, as words, but with a highly exaggerated intonation. She would clap her hands to establish the beat. (It is the style Arlo Guthrie makes fun of in the "Garden Song" track of the "Precious Friend" album.)

She would stand in front of us, and declaim:

"CHICKS, and DUCKS, and GEESE, better SCURry;
when I take YOUUUU, out, in the SURrey;
when I take YOUUUU, out, in the surrey with the FRINGE--on top."

It seems to me that she gave a little smile on the word "nosey-pokes." Generally, however, she did not smile much. Her very precise, rhythmic clapping seemed to me to have something vaguely menacing about it.

If Mrs. Pentstemmon was aware that any of the children she taught were not Christians, she never let on. Year after year, pageant after pageant, I learned to associate the act of singing in public with the idea of being compelled to express sentiments my parents told me we did not believe in. It made me uncomfortable.

Mrs. Pentstemmon seemed unaware of the presence of religious diversity in her students. She did, however, teach us, all of whom were white, Negro spirituals. She also told us about Trinidad, steel bands, something called "Calypso music," and Mr. Harry Belafonte. I don't know why. Could it be that she, herself, personally liked calypso? Then why didn't she ever play any of it for us?

I had a friend named Alan. I had been sick and missed some school, and he was over at my house one day. He was rather excited about an upcoming school production of "High Water at Catfish Bend." His intention was to help me learn one of the songs. Alan was one of these people who seem to be tone-deaf. He didn't exactly sing in a monotone: I would call it a duotone. Like many people, he was completely incapable of dealing with the kind of long pause where you need to stop singing for a while and wait for the music to catch up. The way Alan taught it to me, the song began:

Won't you COME along with ME down the MISS-sis-sip-PEE:

The real song turned out to be "Basin Street Blues" (no old fogey, Mrs. Pentstemmon, always up with the latest modern trends) and it went more like this:

WON'Tcha COOOME aLOOONG WITHme
(pause while music goes: da ta dah, ta dah)
DOWN the MISSisSIPpy
(da ta dah, ta dada)

Alan could never get the tune or the rhythm of any song right. And Mrs. Pentstemmon always dealt with it in exactly the same way. What Mrs. Pentstemmon did was to reach out, grab his lower jaw, tell him to relax it, and waggle it (together with his head) left and right. There was no pain or physical cruelty involved. It was just...weird. Strange. Puzzling. Humiliating for Alan, embarrassing for the rest of us. And it did nothing, nothing whatsoever, to help him.

What on earth was she thinking of? Many, many years I decided that I wanted to sing, that I quite possibly I could sing, and took some adult ed voice lessons. Our singing teacher would do things like putting her hand on someone's belly to see if he or she was supporting; she would feel for tense muscles that should be relaxed; and sometimes, yes, she would waggle someone's jaw. We would all giggle a bit nervously and wisecrack about the minor physical intimacy, especially when she was working with the men. But what she did made sense, and it helped. And furthermore we had volunteered; the volunteering part makes a difference.

Maybe you're thinking, "aha! Mrs. Pentstemmon was trying to teach them singing as if they were adults." Yet Mrs. Pentstemmon never said a single word about taking a deep breath, or opening our mouths wide to let the sound out, or trying to get a yawny feeling. She never taught singing in that sense at all. She tried to teach us words and music; whenever someone didn't get it she would go over and waggle their lower jaw. I suppose she didn't have a clue as to how to help someone who didn't naturally know how to learn a tune. Maybe she had once seen a singing teacher waggle someone's jaw and figured it couldn't hurt to try. Poor Alan got his jaw waggled a lot.

I could carry a tune quite well, and she never waggled my jaw. But, you know? When I wasn't in Mrs. Pentstemmon's class, I just never sang very much.

After I left Kingscote Elementary, I went to Blisskill High School and heard the chorus practicing. They would warm up by singing descending scales starting from higher and higher notes. It was audible far from the music room; it sounded strange and powerful.

It never once occurred to me that singing in the high school chorus might be something I personally could do. I would listen to it at a distance, think it sounded amazing. I never asked whether I could join it, or how. I saw no possible connection between the sounds they made and the sounds that came out of my mouth. And this was truly a missed opportunity. I learned later in life that the director of the Blisskill High School was actually a notable name in the high school chorus biz. (In fact, thirty years later, when I finally joined the Wang Chorus, some of the music we used turned out to be his arrangements. )

Well, that was Mrs. Pentstemmon. I don't think she liked children. I'm not sure whether she liked music. She did her job with determination, she did it thoroughly, and by many measures she did it well.

When we left Blisskill, had there been a standardized test of the degree of cultural literacy expected of eleven-year-olds in 1957, I am sure I would have passed the music section with flying colors. I had heard parts of Mr. Peter Ilyich Tschaikovsky's "Nutcracker" suite and bits of Mr. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony Number Forty. I had been exposed to Folk Music, had sung "Goober Peas" and "I Gave My Heart a Cherry that Had No Stone." (Being named Dan, I had even been privileged to sing "Old Dan Tucker" solo.) And I had once listened with total, baffled incomprehension to a chorus of fifth graders indistinctly singing something that sounded to me like "his sisters and his cousins and his aunts."

When I was little, my mother rocked me in my arms and sang me songs from the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies. My father took me to see "Guys and Dolls" when I was six years old (where I was embarrassed by the abandoned sexuality of the Hot Box girls). And I had a neighbor, Charlie Willard, a couple of years older than me, who was absolutely transfixed by show tunes. When I was eleven or twelve, I would listen to Charlie, whose native vocal talent was about the same as Alan's, as he sang songs from "Carousel" or "Damn Yankees" in a braying voice, loudly, with tremendous enthusiasm and absolute sincerity.

With a background like that, Mrs. Pentstemmon could do no permanent damage. Lasting, yes. Permanent, no. Thirty years after Blisskill, I began to sing. Today, I am now in the bass section of a barbershop chorus. We don't win competitions, but we sound OK.

George Orwell once wrote about an Anglican clergyman "reciting the prayers in a swift, practiced voice, clear enough now that his teeth were in, and curiously uncongenial. In his fastidious, aged face, pale as a silver coin, there was an expression of aloofness, almost of contempt. 'This is a valid sacrament,' he seemed to be saying, 'and it is my duty to administer it to you. But remember that I am only your priest, not your friend. As a human being I dislike you and despise you." When I read this passage for the first time, I immediately remembered Mrs. Pentstemmon.