One Sweet Song

A little girl listens and watches as a person in the window across the street plays a single note, and the little girl joins in with a chime on a triangle. Two notes become three, and soon a sweet song embraces a whole community.

At one level this is a simple counting book, where the reader can count first one quaver, then two and so on all the way to ten, and as the days draws to a close back down until ‘a hush, a silence, blankets all’; at another it is a wonderful exploration of a crowded area of a city, where we have glimpses, not only of musicians, but other lives, united by the music they create together. And (going deeper still), we see the diversity of the characters living in the district, their occupations and cares – a violinist, a child and mother drumming, a couple playing with a pot and a cup with their spoons. Incidental characters – the boy blowing raspberries, the dog howling along – add to the charm of the artwork.

The text is evocative, expressive: ‘A violin croons liltingly’; ‘Ten notes swirl and whirl and wing, sparkling, glittering, a living thing’ and presents (lightly) words like ‘melody’ and ‘rhythm’ as well as, in passing, giving us ‘violin’ as well as ‘ghatam’ (a south Indian clay drum) and morsing (a jaw harp, also from south India), less familiar to some readers. This is a book for a classroom or home collection, where the vocabulary is to be savoured as much as the artwork.

A (very slight) issue is that the musical note which multiplies and diminishes throughout the book might be more clearly drawn, and that one note (where we start) cannot strictly be said to trill, but these are really minor concerns: this is a book whose main message is not formal music education, but a celebration of the power of music. The dedications at the end – ‘To music and its wondrous power to heal and bring us together’ and ‘For my family, especially Helena, who was born in the pandemic time,’ tell us something of the motivation for this book, and a message of joy and solidarity from a troubled time that we should not forget.