.
Beth Frack has a target audience in mind when she sits down at the piano to write.
Get a load of her song titles — “Don’t Pick Your Nose,” “The Bath Time Blues,” “Don’t Be a Tattletale” — and it’s immediately apparent that Frack’s audience are not iPod-carrying tweens and teens, but young tykes just learning how to shimmy and shake.
Frack is the artist-in-residence at Forsyth Country Day School, where she teaches music to children through the fourth grade. This week, her pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students will perform in the school’s annual musical, written and directed by Frack.
A musician and composer, the Kernersville native has written hundreds of children’s songs, from bouncy ditties intended for infants to tunes meant to teach school children about such things as manners, salamanders or math.
“I love what I do,” Frack said one day last week, in her FCDS classroom. “I can’t imagine not creating anything. As long as I can keep coming up with new stuff, I’ll be here.”
Frack lives in Winston-Salem with her husband, Kevin, the pastor at Cornerstone Christian Church in Mocksville. They have two grown children, Seth and Sara.
Q. What is your background with music?
Answer: My whole family sings. We have a joke that, once we had a baby who couldn’t sing and we got rid of him. Of course, we sang in the church and I sang in high school and just always wanted to be a singer.
I was singing backup vocals for a friend who was opening for Eddie Rabbitt. We were watching from the audience and I told my friend, ‘We could do what we’re doing, but let’s do it for kids instead of grown-ups.’ I went home and was all excited. I wrote my first three songs. My first was called, ‘Eat ‘em up. Drink ‘em Up.’ That’s when thematic units were just coming into play in the classroom. So I went to Sara’s teacher and said, ‘You tell me what you’re teaching and I’ll try to write a song about it.’
Q. What do you like about the genre of children’s music?
Answer: I love that kids love to sing, and they can learn things and not even realize it. The musical we’re doing right now, there’s a song about salamanders in it. I do research before writing songs and find facts about salamanders and I use those facts while writing those songs. So kids are singing about slimy, slithering salamanders, the tiger and mud puppies. It’s getting facts in their head and they don’t realize they’re learning about salamanders. It’s fun to get the facts and just creating, ‘Where am I going to go with this?’
Q. So many children’s songs have simple melodies. How hard is it to not be repetitive with your melodies?
Answer: There is a range you want the songs to be in to make them easy for children to sing. A lot of children’s music is in ranges that make it really hard for kids to sing along. I find that usually, I do my best writing in the car, getting ready in the morning. I’ll try to go to sleep and then all of a sudden, a line will pop up and I’ll get up in the middle of the night and write something down. And these new phones are great. I’ll record something instantly. If I sit at a piano, songs tend to sound the same as opposed to singing off the cuff.
Q. How young do you see musical responses in kids?
Answer: Babies. I sing with infants at Forsyth Medical Center and the big thing is to sit up and shake your instrument. You can tell with kids, music just lights up their souls. They’re shaking. They’re bouncing. I’ve seen so many children come up, from babies to 4-year-olds, and some have just blossomed musically. Some cried when they saw me as a baby and they have become great little singers.
Q. Arts are often the first area cut from the budgets of schools. What is your argument for preserving funding for music education?
Answer: It’s been proven that students who do music academically do better, especially in math. Music is math, basically. It’s a creative outlet for kids to come up with their own songs. It teaches rhythm skills. Everyone needs to know basic music skills because music brings joy to everybody. And you don’t need to be an accomplished musician. Some kids who struggle academically in reading, geography or history, music makes them come alive.
lo’donnell@wsjournal.com
(336) 727-7420
