-If music be the food of love, play on-

It's a well-known opening line, and doubly on my mind. It's the first line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Although the Bard said to "play on," he never said to play on what. (Sorry, Anna Russell.) The line is in my head because I have been rehearsing Twelfth Night with ArtFarm in Middletown. The play opens tomorrow outdoors in the Grove at Middlesex Community College. Curiously, because it's a mostly traditional production, our play does not begin with that famous first line.

Through some sort of synergy, syzygy or serendipity, we had a story on page 11 of Wednesday's Record-Journal about music being, if not quite the food of love, certainly the food of loving families. Reporter Jessica Calefati visited Felice Danielson who has recently opened a studio in Southington. It's called Circle of Friends Music Together, and it's a place where young children and their parents, grandparents or other caregivers may acquire and absorb "primary musical development." Observe: the center is not a place where children or their parents are taught specific musical skills or learn to read music.

Rather it's an environment where young children and their parents may become familiar with the language and movement of music.

I have just finished reading the studio's pamphlet "Music Together," created by the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, New Jersey, and that pamphlet and, I presume, the studio are right on target.

Often over the last couple of decades I have noticed that people assembled at a restaurant or home for someone's birthday party have difficulty singing "Happy Birthday" coherently. Yet I know that it is possible for some groups of people -members of a choir or theater organization - to produce casually a "Happy Birthday" in full harmony that draws ears.

I've often had discussions with friends who have noticed that people no longer sing. Out loud. Casually. We listen to music, mainly songs from contemporary culture, constantly, but we don't sing it ourselves, and we don't think of it as something we can do. More of us say we're "tone deaf." Music education in schools is difficult, at best, and certainly not part of our obligatory CAPT tests - so why bother?

The Center's pamphlet addressed this sort of concern in a gentle and non-doctrinaire way. That accords with the emphasis on listening and playing: it is not about teaching or performing.

Among the skills that very young children learn with their parents, for example, are the simple tunes and rhythms of nursery rhymes. Since many people today feel incompetent to sing to their kids or to dance with them - or, sadly enough, work so many jobs they have no time to do so - the primary musical development just doesn't happen. The pamphlet suggests that if this development is postponed too many years - until a child is ten - it may not happen at all. Our language skills become too distracting. Words drown out the music in our minds.

The pamphlet also talks about the difference between musical achievement - learning to sing in tune and to keep in time with tapping, clapping or walking - and any inborn musical aptitude, of which most of us have an average amount. People often say that a person is from a "musical family." Music may, indeed, be in the family, and even in the genes, but most of what encourages a musical family is a strong, supportive musical environment, one where people sing, at least occasionally, together, where tunes are shared and where instruments to make music are available and in use.

As a scion of such a musical family, I know how true this is. We were not the Bachs. No geniuses. Our musical abilities were the result of growing up with a piano in the living room, a piano that was played by someone. Among my early memories is that of climbing up next to my mom at the piano and sitting there while she played it. I wanted to learn to play the instrument too, and I duly had lessons. No apter demonstration could be found of the difference between achievement and aptitude: although I can sit at a piano, sight read moderately, accompany hymns and carols and other music formats, I am not a concert pianist and never could be.

But my mother's father, a man who could sit at the piano or organ and who, my uncle repeated to me just yesterday morning, always knew ahead of time just what note he wanted to play next and how it would feel, was surrounded by music. He loved playing music. His diary as a young teen, records that he spent many hours a week at the keyboard, and he took his aptitude and developed it as far as he could. He could extemporize any tune, transpose it to any key, and he could do this without thinking. He took his children to concerts, and after the performances, dragged them backstage to meet the performers, or at least to shake hands with them. It was important. And he learned it from his family: his mother played hymns on the piano and her grandfather had a violin which he played and passed down ultimately to my own uncle and then my sister.

It was always assumed that I'd play piano and then learn an instrument. Mom played the flute, Uncle Bob played violin, cousins Roger and Cindy the flute and bassoon. At about age 9, I was given Grampa's old silver clarinet, and at Thanksgiving, when there were still two pianos in the living room of my grandparents' house, we all took chairs and joined the pianists in a family orchestra.

Such musical environments are rarer today. Music lessons are less fashionable. And, as the pamphlet notes, we listen to so much recorded music - mixed, re-recorded, blended, professionalized - that we regard our own music or that of our friends as "not worth listening to": and therefore not much worth doing.

Most of my family was at best average performers. But we learned basic musical language this way, a common language, a shared language. Even today, half-a-dozen decades later, some of us sing or play with pleasure.

Doing music yourself is terrific fun. It's exciting to take a birthday moment, for example, and sing that stupid song in six-part harmony, each person finding a particular note to add to the blend that fits and yet remains individual.

I've traveled a long way, too long, from Jessica Calefati's news story yesterday, but sometimes you just have to let the music take you.