Innocence & Despair

The Langley Schools Music Project | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 23, 2001)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Bar/None Records
• ASIN: B00005Q6NP
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,956 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #1 in Music > Indie Music > Miscellaneous > Experimental

Track Listings

1. Venus and Mars/Rock Show (Paul McCartney & Wings)

2. Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys)

3. God Only Knows (The Beach Boys)

4. Space Oddity (David Bowie)

5. The Long and Winding Road (The Beatles)

6. Band On The Run (Paul McCartney & Wings)

7. In My Room (The Beach Boys)

8. I'm Into Something Good (Earl-Jean/Herman's Hermits)

9. Saturday Night (Bay City Rollers)

10. I Get Around (The Beach Boys)

11. Mandy (Barry Manilow)

12. Help Me, Rhonda (The Beach Boys)

13. Desperado (The Eagles)

14. You're So Good To Me (The Beach Boys)

15. Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond)

16. To Know Him Is To Love Him (Teddy Bears)

17. Rhiannon (Fleetwood Mac)

18. Wildfire (Michael Martin Murphy)

19. Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day) (Klaatu/The Carpenters)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

In the mid-1970s, Hans Fenger taught music in the Langley, British Columbia, school district, using an experimental method inspired equally by Brian Wilson and Carl Orff. Occasionally he would record his students in the school gymnasium--elaborate affairs involving more than 60 kids per session. The result is this compelling collection of semi-accidental genius. Picture the Shaggs and Danielson presiding over an elementary school assembly for shy kids, and you begin to understand how sweet, sincere, and slightly unsettling these recordings are. The Langley students perform their favorite 1960s and 1970s hits as if they never heard the originals; they turn "Mandy" into the kind of lo-fi pop song that Neutral Milk Hotel would perfect 20 years later, and sing "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" like a delegation of extraterrestrial children on a friendship mission to Earth. Fenger's arrangements are spacious but elaborate, with prominent Orff percussion instruments that coat everything with a glimmering otherworldliness. The Langley students must've been proud just to hear themselves on tape, but for those of us encountering these artifacts for the first time, it's impossible to come away unmoved. (The photographs are precious, too.) --Mike Appelstein

Product Description

Ever since NPR aired an excerpt of this 1976-77 school project, it's been selling like, well, cookies at a bake sale! Imagine a gym in western Ontario full of 60 children aged 9-12, singing the pop hits of the day and discovering inside themselves for the first time a love of pop music the joy and wonder of these kids is palpable! Then add in some Carl Orff-like percussion, and rudimentary bass and guitar, and the whole thing even takes on some avant-garde dimensions. Trust us, you've never heard God Only Knows; Space Oddity; Rhiannon; Wildfire or The Long and Winding Road sound like this!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 121 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Musical Tresure Almost Lost October 24, 2001

By E. K. RIGHTER

Format:Audio CD

This is an astounding CD. The story that I read in the Vancouver Sun was that a hippie elementary school music teacher in 1976 recorded a choir of students from several schools singing classic rock/baby boomer music. The resulting album was pressed and copies were given to the students in the choir. Recently someone found the album on vinyl in a thrift store and fell in love with it. The recording was passed to radio stations and it was picked up by a record label.
While on vacation I heard the CD in a small coffee shop in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia and was immediately amazed. Covers of Wings, Beach Boys, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, etc. are transformed from standard FM radio fare into something more meaningful and strange as sung by children. The lyrics of Wings' "Band on the Run" come through as rather sad and downbeat yet very touching. The most arresting moment on the CD has to be a little girl singing The Eagles' "Desperado". The strangest moment is when the kids take on David Bowie's "Space Oddity". The background arragements are wonderful.
Want something unusual in your music collection? This is it!

65 of 69 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ahh...two tracks in a gym January 15, 2002

By Jeff Hodges VINE™ VOICE

Format:Audio CD

As a ex-rock musician who has found his career in music education, it would be an understatement to say that I can relate to this disc. When walking into a performance with students, a good music teacher hopes for perfection but expects disaster. Somewhere in between these two extremes there lies what we call in the trade a "musical experience". All music teachers have a story about their musical experiences, the times when we felt something that we've have never felt before, nor since, and that cannot exist without music as a part of our lives. This feeling drives us, and help us to keep music alive in young minds. We hope to impart one or two musical experiences in the average student's career, and these keep us going in a when our job is stressful or even sometimes thankless.

Hans Ferger was not only gave his students the opportunity to have as least (count 'em) nineteen musical experiences, he was smart enough to capture them on two-track.

The story of Hans Ferger, the music director of the Langley Schools, reads like the familiar story of a real-life Mr. Holland. Playing gigs by night and teaching guitar by day can pay the bills if you're thrifty, but when a child comes the story changes. When presented with this situation, Ferger got teaching certification and began teaching elementary music. However, it was in the format of the classroom that he finally found his "band". Instead of a bass player, or a drummer, his format consisted of sixty-plus kids, various drums, cymbals, Orff instruments, and "modern" electric instruments. He played guitar and piano. The result of this collaboration yielded some of the most energetic, honest, and musical performances that I can think of....

"Innocence and Despair", in its own way, totally ROCKS, but you have to be able to recognize how children express themselves. The Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" is an obvious example. Even the most lost kid comes in with the "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y - NIGHT" part of the song, so much so that the bulk of the ensemble misses the entrance of the first verse. Most of them would seem to be more than happy to just jeep singing the chorus over and over and clapping quarter notes all day long.

Remember, we aren't talking about the Vienna Boys Choir, here. "Innocence and Despair" is, above all else, a performance of sixty-plus public elementary school students singing hits from the sixties and seventies. The ensemble performances are of questionable intonation, timbre, and security. Most of them might bug you because of thier very nature, but think about it: an age-appropriate obstacle for some kids at this age is just to follow the melodic line. To get kids to follow a melody up and down is the goal of any elementary school music teacher, and this is something that Ferger's students are able to do almost flawlessly. They are even able to sing in harmony pretty well ("In My Room"). However, after an hour or so the average listener might not be able to keep tuned in, and this is quite understandable. Most elementary concerts don't last for more than thirty minutes or so for just this reason.

To get an idea of whether or not "Innocence and Despair" is for you, I suggest listening to "Band on the Run". The genius of Hans Ferger's arrangements meets the energy of the students head-on on this track. The song form of the original "Band on the Run" is not standard by any means, and it has some guitar playing that is integral to the song. Ferger's arrangement stays totally true to the original song form, but is able to distill the guitar licks into totally digestible and age-appropriate four-note Orff patterns. Ingenious. In addition to this, the kids really seem to LOVE the melody of the song. When they sing the line "I hope you're having fun", well, they seem to be - just listen to it.

As good as the ensemble performances are, there are also a couple of standout gems on this recording, and those are the solo performances. The subject material of both "The Long and Winding Road" (as performed by Joy Jackson) and "Desperado" (as performed by Shiela Behman) would most assuredly elude the average elementary student, but I cannot imagine a more convincing and heart-rending rendition of either of these songs. Both of them are eerie, and almost unlistenable in terms of their honesty and empathy.

Musicians, take note: perfection is not so important. Its not important that you hit every note every night. Its the love of what you do that drives you. How can you like both Nirvana and Frank Zappa at the same time? You simply have to recognize that both belived in what they were doing, and they were realizing thier vision to the best of thier ability. These kids LOVED the songs they were singing, and on the whole I think they believed in what thier teacher was saying. Because of this, "Innocence and Despair" is an indespensibly human recording.

People hold music they choose to listen to very close to their heart. Musicians in particular are shaped by the music that they love, and the music they listen to quite literally becomes part of them and their life's experience. Ferger was able to pass on to these children was the love that he obviously had for these songs. All music educators hope to inspire their students the way that they themselves were once inspired. Inarguably, Ferger achieved this aim, and was able to share an intimate part of himself with his students. More enviable, he found ways to express himself through an unimaginable medium. His arrangements and orchestrations were both meaningful and relevant to him and well as his students, and that is where he and his students shared something thatthe average educator will never understand. Read more ›

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Get this - you won't be sorry. January 3, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Audio CD

I first became aware of the LS Project when my brother's friend let me listen to their version of Rhiannon on his portable CD player. Although intrigued, I didn't even know who they were and didn't think much about them again until I saw the CD in a record store and made a spur of the moment purchase. WOW!!! I am so happy that I did. The singing and simple but dramatic instrumentation makes my scalp tingle and brings tears to my eyes. Perhaps I am more affected than some others because I was the same age as the children when they made these recordings and have special memories revolving around many of the songs they sing. But I would recommend this to anyone for its beauty and purity. Their version of David Bowie's Space Oddity is positively eerie and really captures the solemnity of someone lost in space. It's pretty weird but incredibly moving to hear a bunch of 10 year olds singing, "Tell my wife I love her very much..." Band on the Run brims with exuberance and Desperado - a song by the Eagles that I never cared for- takes on a whole different meaning when sung by then 9 year old Shela Behman. I have not gotten tired of it yet. I could go on and on as there is something special about each song. The one caveat is that because of the way it was recorded, the volume sometimes changes and it is difficult to pick up some of the subtleties that make this album so wonderful. It seems best suited to earphones where it suddenly is easy to hear everything.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Songs Of Innocence January 13, 2002

By sask

Format:Audio CD

Right now, every person who owns a copy of Innocence & Despair had to be originally drawn by sheer curiosity. After all, we haven't seen anything this weird come our way since perhaps as long ago as when The Shaggs beamed in from whatever planet they came from: here's a cd of nineteen sixties & seventies pop songs sung by suburban Vancouver elementary students twenty-five years ago, unearthed by a man who bought the original LP for a quarter and showed it to a New Jersey dj, who then championed it to the point where it received a wide release. This is the stuff of legend.

It is indeed the weirdness of it all that draws you in. Sixty kids singing in a gymnasium, with minimalist musical accompaniment consisting of their music teacher on guitar and piano and students themselves playing one-string bass, a drum kit, a big bass drum, cymbals, steel guitar, and xylophones. Some of the arangements are hysterical, with overeager drummers going too fast and almost confusing the singing kids, or cymbal crashes that come in half a beat too late. But it also has its weird, surreal moments, like the arrangement of David Bowie's 'Space Oddity', which is so creepy, so otherworldly, that it comes off as a masterstroke of demented genius.

Weird & funny, it sure is, but once you keep listening, Innocence & Despair gradually becomes oddly moving, thanks to the pure, naive earnestness of the children's singing. Their renditions of songs like 'God Only Knows' and 'In My Room' achieve such a sublime beauty that Brian Wilson himself couldn't have dreamed of. 'Saturday Night' and 'Band On The Run', on the other hand, explode with youthful energy. And of course, there's the incomparable 'Space Oddity' and a truly freaky cover of 'Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft'.... These kids transform one of the cheesiest songs on pop music history into something completely sincere; it sounds like they ARE singing out to other worlds, and when they sing the coda 'We Are Your Friends', well, it just splits your heart in two.

Standing highest above all performances, however, is the version of 'Desperado', sung solo by nine year-old Sheila Behman. Personally I hate all music by The Eagles, especially the overwraught piece of sentimental trash that 'Desperado' is, but Behman's insistent, elfin-voiced, completely unironic singing suddenly transforms such badly written, easy-listening tripe into a mighty powerful ballad, blowing The Eagles' version to smithereens.

I named this cd my co-album of the year alongside Bob Dylan's "Love And Theft"; the two albums kind of serve as a musical version of William Blake's Songs Of Innocence & Experience, the craggy old veteran's singing counterbalancing perfectly with the children's. The two-track recording is very primitive, the music isn't perfect, the harmonies are sometimes a bit off, but if you're not moved by these wonderful kids' voices, you'd better check if you have a pulse. This is completely different than an antiseptic, well-trained choir; this is just a bunch of kids having loads of fun thanks to their creative music teacher. It starts off as a musical oddity, but it'll end up staying with you forever. Absolutely amazing. Read more ›