The Magic Maker

by Susan Cooper

  Jack’s infectious enthusiasm filled the Potomac School with music, peaking around Christmas and May Day. Neither he nor Carol Preston had much time for institutional music, like School Songs, and he was never even required to teach his students “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Instead he brought music alive through performance, often involving the entire school population — as in 1958, when they gave one of the first U.S. performances of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde.

  Britten, whose work Jack had always admired, had often written wonderful things for young voices. He was also often at odds with the English musical establishment, but it was the senior English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, always benign, who told Jack in 1958 about Noye’s Fludde. Britten had written this enchanting opera almost entirely for children, basing it on a mystery play from the fifteenth-century Chester Cycle, and had presented it for the first time that summer at his Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, in the Orford Parish Church. The only adult parts were Noye, Mrs. Noye, and the Voice of God, and much of the orchestral accompaniment was written deliberately simply for strings, recorders, bugles, handbells, and assorted percussion, including homemade instruments, like sandpaper blocks. Britten specified that the opera should always be performed in a church or a hall, not in a theater; that the congregation (he avoided the word “audience”) should not applaud; and that they should sing the three hymns he included in the score.

  Jack of course loved this last element, particularly the use of the hymn “Eternal Father” to calm the storm of the Great Flood. He brought the score of Noye’s Fludde home from Britain, and he plunged the whole Potomac community into making an opera, under his direction. He also sang Noye, looking suitably senior in the square, rather Amish-looking beard he sometimes grew in the Fifties. The production was so successful that some years later they did it again, with children from three other schools, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. “Potomac did wonderful costumes, they really got into it,” Nancy says. “He had the entire school singing, and strings, recorders, two pianos — I played, with another teacher. After that he did the Play of Daniel too.”

  Jack taught at Potomac for twelve years. His own children were among his students — including the teenage Carol, for a while. “By then,” says Deborah Langstaff, “he was very strict — if someone was chewing gum, he’d make them swallow it. But as a father, if he found you reading under the covers with a flashlight, and you looked up at him with your finger on your lips, he could be counted on not to say a word.”

  Though he was often away, Jack’s impact on the Potomac community was so striking that long after he left, when Potomac had grown to a K–12 coeducational school of 950 pupils, they named their splendid new assembly hall the Langstaff Auditorium. Decades later, when the Revels was an established institution and he was traveling to some new city hoping to set up its own productions, he would first seek out any former Potomac students living in the area. He knew they would be natural supporters, and of course they always were.

  One nameless student tried to record his extraordinary effect on them all in a little Potomac School newsletter called The Elephant’s Trunk, mourning Jack’s departure at the end of his time as music director.

  When the students that have been going to Potomac for the past twelve years or so become middle-aged, and music is a part of their lives, they will understand why. It was Mr. Langstaff.

  When we were in the lower school, we were taught by Mr. Langstaff to sing “Christmass,” and it has stuck with us ever since. Everyone at Potomac sings “Christmass” and they will always sing it that way. We do not realize how unique it is because it is a part of us, much the way singing old English pub songs through the school halls is. It was Mr. Langstaff.

  At Potomac there is a singing atmosphere. Every morning the upper school sings a song in assembly. Every Monday, most of the school does so together. At Christmas, everyone takes part in a singing program. The whole school turns itself to music. It was Mr. Langstaff. All of the students, indeed, all of the people who ever knew Mr. Langstaff were infected with his dynamic enthusiasm for music, which he loves, because it is his life. Because Mr. Langstaff loves it with such energy, he taught it well. He loves children, and is a great teacher. His enthusiasm for music has passed on to the students, to stay with them the rest of their lives, and inadvertently, through their love of music, passed on to the parents. Everyone associated with Potomac has a passion for music. It was Mr. Langstaff.

  Mr. Langstaff could make people produce. He could make the smallest child or the biggest adult sing, and love it. Mr. Langstaff could make an onion sing!

  Mr. Langstaff’s leaving is not just the going away of a teacher. It is the going away of a life at Potomac, leaving a great gap in the school. There will be other music teachers, other Christmas plays, other music classes, other Noye’s Fluddes, but not another Mr. Langstaff.

  Even after Jack died, more than forty years later, there was an outpouring of affectionate reminiscence from his former Potomac pupils, now indeed well into middle age.

  “He would always get us to sing loudly, and stand up to sing,” one of them wrote. “He told us, ‘If you’re going to make a mistake, don’t shrink down and try to hide it’ (he bent over to demonstrate, with a little pained, fearful look on his face). ‘Stand up’ (he rose up super tall) ‘and make a BIG mistake!’ I’ve followed that advice ever since, and it’s saved me a lot of time and hedging in many situations.”

  They had never forgotten him. “I remember him, during music classes in the old field house,” wrote another, “stomping passionately around the room, throwing his entire body into the music in an effort to get us to sing louder and with more gusto. He simply would not tolerate wimpy singing. Also, we all had to start singing right on the first note of the song (what he called the attack) or he would make us start over and over until we got it right.”

  It was summed up best, perhaps, by a former student named Ann Bradley Vehslage:

  I graduated from Potomac with the ninth-grade class of 1955, and was fortunate to have special time with Mr. Langstaff as he taught me the songs I would sing as Ariel in that year’s ninth-grade play, Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  Many of us had a crush on Mr. Langstaff. His huge, joyous, creative talent, his enthusiasm for teaching us the wonderful and original holiday songs he selected each year, and, of course, his striking good looks made for wonderful times at Potomac. I cherish those memories to this day.

  Each year in the Christmas play, we would sing our little hearts out as he directed us with a big smile on his face, urging us to do our best. And, thanks to Mr. Langstaff, I know now that we really were quite good! My mother later told me there were few dry eyes in the house when we sang, and although we were unaware of this, we all certainly knew we were having a ball. We were being taught by a master, and were truly privileged to be his students. I will remember him always, with affection and admiration.

  By nature, Jack was not so much a teacher as a missionary. It was his passion for communicating the joy of music that entranced these children, and for that matter anyone of any age who ever sang or worked with him. He was a firm believer in the principle of “learn it by doing it” and always maintained that music education was a matter of collaboration as much as instruction.

  He had already begun working with children on radio and television. The first connection had come in 1949, after he had made his two English records of folk songs for HMV at the Abbey Road Studios. Before he left, he had asked HMV if they would consider his doing some songs with children.

  I said, I’ve got some from the Just So Stories, or Winnie-the-Pooh. . . . “Oh, no,” they said, “not that nanny stuff.” “Well, then,” I said, “folk songs.” So we ended up recording a lot of those. All the records were 12-inch 78s in those days, two songs per side — you made about half a cent per song. I had a blind pianist accompanying me, Sam Mason. He would read Cecil Sharp’s tunes in braille, and sometimes he’d improvise. He was wo
nderful.

  Through the good offices of Douglas Kennedy, at some recording sessions Jack was also accompanied at the piano by the legendary Gerald Moore — who later played for his London debut recital at the Wigmore Hall. (“A singer whose verbal and musical intelligence is well out of the ordinary,” said the London Times.) And it was through Kennedy that Jack had become a friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams and other major figures on the musical scene.

  Everybody knew everybody in that English music world — Douglas was married to Helen Karpeles, who was the sister of Maud Karpeles, who was close to Ursula Wood, who lived with the Vaughan Williamses and of course was later Lady Vaughan Williams . . . so Douglas took me down to Dorking to meet VW in 1949. He was a very sweet guy. Later, one summer when I was over doing recordings, I stayed there with them, and Percy Grainger came by. . . . And VW came to my debut recital at the Wigmore Hall, I remember — and turned his hearing aid off when I sang a song by Charles Ives.

  Besides the network of celebrated friends, this small world also included every music producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation. Before long, Jack’s visits to England in the fifties were devoted not only to making recordings but also to singing with children on programs for the celebrated Schools division of BBC Radio. In classrooms all over Britain, by all accounts he had even the most resistant pupils singing along with him for twenty minutes three times a week. In due course BBC Television discovered him as well, and he made four seasons of a program called Making Music, coaxing a group of children in a television studio — and those on the other side of the television screen — into singing and playing simple instruments. Everyone had a very good time, even the cameramen, and the programs were later broadcast to schools in Canada and Australia. The deputy head of BBC Schools Television described the series as “one of the jewels in the crown of early Schools Television, which helped to revolutionize primary school music teaching.”

  Jack was still making records for HMV, overseen by George Martin at the Abbey Road Studios. Altogether he recorded about eighty-five folk songs, sometimes departing from the convention of piano accompaniment and singing to a guitar, or a cappella. Many were what we would call children’s songs (“Dance to Your Daddy” . . . “What’ll We Do with the Baby?”) but were not at first marketed as such.

  Then about that time we made an LP for children with some wonderful folk songs that had never been recorded before, and I included some things we’d done for the BBC programs. They were orchestrated by Ron Goodwin, a friend of George Martin’s, and I conducted them with a small orchestra of children playing instruments. We called it Songs for Singing Children.

  Songs for Singing Children was one of his most successful recordings, and was followed by another, Let’s Make Music. Like the first, it had notes by John Hosier, Jack’s Making Music producer and the BBC’s greatest champion of music for children. Jack’s professional life was always full of cross-fertilization. In the recording studio, as on television, he led choruses of English schoolchildren in folk songs and singing games. To his mind, that was always the best way of making records for children. “All my work with children is about participation — I’m not just interested in singing for children. Even with solo songs, I hope they’ll join in.”

  Soon he was reaching children not just through records but through books. Jack became a published author almost by accident, in the leaner years before he went to Potomac or made his BBC TV series. As a present for their small son John, he and Nancy — who was still an artist as well as a musician — had made a little book from “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” one of Jack’s favorite folk songs. He had compiled the words from several British and American variants, and used the tune he remembered from his own childhood. “And Nancy did two drawings for it,” he said, “one brownish, one greenish.”

  One day in 1954 this book was lying on the table of their apartment in New York when Esther and Meredith Langstaff came to tea, bringing a friend of theirs named Louise Seaman Bechtel, who edited the children’s book reviews in the New York Herald Tribune. Ms. Bechtel picked up the book — or considering the family history, perhaps Esther picked it up and handed it to her. Jack was astonished by her reaction.

  Miss Bechtel looked at the book and said, “You should take this to a publisher.” Well, I didn’t even know there were such things as children’s book publishers. So she gave us a list of ten children’s book editors, all women, with the youngest at the top of the list — and that was Margaret K. McElderry at Harcourt, Brace, so I went and showed it to her.

  Margaret McElderry had a nature as full of enthusiasms as Jack’s, but she also had a strong business sense. She told Jack that Frog Went A-Courtin’ would make an excellent picture book, but that since Nancy was probably not familiar with the four-color separation process necessary in those days, the pictures should be done by a professional illustrator, perhaps her friend Fritz Eichenberg.

  “So I walked out,” Jack said.

  But I was only doing a few concerts then, trying to make a living, and when I went home and told Nancy, she said, “Look, if Margaret would like to do the book, let her. I don’t care about the drawings — we need the money.” So I went back to Margaret and explained, and she was very nice, and she said maybe Fritz Eichenberg wouldn’t do it but there was this famous artist from Europe who’d done some books for Golden Press, The Three Bears and a Mother Goose, and his contract was coming up for renewal and maybe she could get him. That was Feodor Rojankovsky, and she did get him, and he did the book and it won the Caldecott Medal.

  According to Margaret McElderry, the Caldecott and Newbery Medals did more to increase a book’s sales than a Pulitzer Prize.

  So Margaret calls me up and says, “Quick, we need another book that Feodor Rojankovsky can do.” And I looked at “Over in the Meadow” in Cecil Sharp’s folk-song collection — he’d taken it out later because it wasn’t really a folk song, the words had come from a poem by a woman in the nineteenth century. I made up some words, with help from Deborah, who was two or three years old at the time — and that was my next book with Rojankovsky.

  It was a beautiful book, even more engaging than the first. By the end of his life, Jack had published more than thirty books, many of them — like the glowing first two — picture books based on annotated folk songs. One of them is his version of the folk play St. George and the Dragon, drawn from several of the oldest English texts; it became the basis for every variant of the play that’s been performed in the Christmas Revels from the beginning. Writing was not his favorite occupation, and Nancy acted as his first editor and sometimes collaborator, but the impetus always came from Jack; his enthusiasm shines out of all the books.

  In 1966 Jack was persuaded by Lavinia Russ — another feisty book person, a senior version of Margaret McElderry — to take books to children, and parents, through television. American TV had already learned from the BBC about his talent for teaching music through performance, and he had done a series of programs of songs with children on WNDT-TV in New York. This new book series was to be called Children Explore Books; he enjoyed it, he said.

  Lavinia had convinced NBC Television to do a weekly program on children’s books, so for a while I led this double life, teaching at Potomac in the week and flying to New York on Friday night to have a script conference at NBC. We’d rehearse on Saturday morning — they’d picked children of all ages — and then we’d come on set and tape for two hours on Saturday afternoon. I was the moderator. We’d have a theme — say it was pirates — and I’d get them talking, to and fro, all on camera, in a room full of books, and I’d have an old flintlock or a pirate song. Then Lavinia would have a new book, and I could read some of it to them — then they’d come back the next week having read it themselves, and we’d discuss it. We did twenty-six programs all told.

  “Double life” was an understatement as a description of his time at Potomac. Here’s a “Studio Note” from the magazine Musical Courier written late in 1957. Bear in mind that i
t deals with a man also employed as music director of a notable school.

  John Langstaff is now on an extensive tour that will take him across the country to Texas, Colorado, up the West Coast to Yakima, Washington, and into the key cities of British Columbia. After Trans-Canada broadcasts and recitals in Vancouver, the baritone swings back to New York City for the Town Hall Christmas concert, followed by a Christmas recital production in Washington, D.C. In the late winter, this busy artist . . . sings the Bach Kreuzstab Cantata with the Saidenburg Symphony in New York; is soloist with the Springfield, Massachusetts, Symphony in February; is booked for the world premiere of Antal Dorati’s work for baritone and orchestra in Minneapolis and an all-French recital in Washington, D.C.

  So it went on, for the next ten years. From his family base in McLean, Virginia, Jack sang in a total of forty-seven of the states of the Union, including a twenty-eight-concert tour of Alaska; he had joined the roster of the Eastman Boomer concert management. Glamour magazine published a picture of him that was indeed glamorous, and said felicitously that he had “a voice like strong, dark honey.”

  Always his concerts included his trademark mix of the classic and the modern. Among the American composers whose work he sang, Jack’s closest friend was John Edmunds, who was some years older — he had been a contemporary of Jeanne Behrend’s at Curtis — but was very much like him in enthusiasm, creativity, and perhaps temperament. Edmunds was a scholar of early music: medieval, Renaissance, and baroque music, from the Middle Ages to about the time of Mozart. His own work included beautiful settings of poems ranging from Middle English texts to Yeats and Hardy. The two of them fizzed with ideas for joint projects, though they were seldom both in the same place at the same time. Edmunds wrote in 1959: