This is a series about coveting objects. But I think that urge and also the act of listening to music at all can go deeper. Depending on your choice it can be an urge of recovery, wanting to go back and recapture and reexperience the past and the way that you felt then and have felt every since. An almost primal urge.
The Langley School Music Project album Innocence & Despair give me that sense and drive more than any record I know. I don't own it and I'm not sure I need to but I find myself listening to it regularly and I find whenever I do. it triggers off a whole set of invaluable and incredibly resonant memories within me. I was growing up at the time these recordings were made so perhaps my reaction is understandable made and I share it with many,
Innocence & Despair is a set of recordings instigated and conducted by a Canadian music teacher Hans Fenger with students from four different Elementary Schools in the Langley Schools District on British Columbia Canada in the mid Seventies . The children are singing in a miked up school gym in Metro Vancouver covering songs by The Beach Boys, David Bowie, The Eagles and Paul McCartney and others. .
The resultsconsciously avoid the traditional associations of 'children's music' and focus on the elements of childhood that are dark, scary and spooky. Hence the title the album was given. There's a loneliness and longing in the recordings that frankly is quite extraordinary. There's a resonance here that I find quite incomparable. It captures an incredible painful longing. Hearing children singing of emotions they are experiencing and can't understand or will go on to experience and perhaps hearing these recordings will help them to come to tems with. But the fact that they're singing together gives them a sense of solidarity and strength.I hope so. It's a quite extraordinary document.
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