Francis Poulenc in Pathum Thani: how Pim hears The Story of Babar the Little Elephant and spots the finger number on the first note before her AI piano lessons

Pim is seven and lives near a canal in Pathum Thani, in a wooden house with a big mango tree in the yard. Her grandmother collects picture books from secondhand stalls, and one of them is about Babar, a small elephant who runs away to the city, buys a green suit and later becomes a king. Pim has asked for it so often that the cover is falling off.

One evening her grandmother found a recording of the same story read aloud with a piano weaving around the words. The piano tiptoed when Babar was shy, galloped when he rode in a lift, and turned sad and slow when his mother was lost. Pim sat motionless, staring at the speaker as if the elephant might walk out of it.

The music was written by Francis Poulenc, a French composer born in Paris in 1899. His mother was a fine pianist and gave him his first lessons. His father wanted him to follow the family chemical business, so he never attended the Paris Conservatoire, and he learned much of his craft from private teachers and from listening.

An elephant on the music stand

According to a story Poulenc told, the Babar music grew out of a family visit. Young cousins put a Babar book on the piano and asked him to play the story. He improvised, they loved it, and over the following years he shaped those ideas into L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant for narrator and piano, finished in the mid-1940s.

Around 1920 a Paris critic grouped Poulenc with five other young composers and called them Les Six. They shared a taste for short, bright, witty pieces, influenced by music halls and circus bands, and a dislike of long, gloomy works. Poulenc's early piano set Mouvements perpétuels from 1918 shows that playful spirit clearly.

Yet Poulenc also had a serious, religious side. After a close friend died in a car accident in 1936, he visited a shrine in southern France and began writing sacred music. People who knew him liked to say he was half monk and half naughty boy, and his music swings between both moods.

Pim does not care about that yet; she simply loves the elephant. Her grandmother, who once took a few keyboard classes herself, decided the girl should have proper piano lessons. With buses from their village slow and irregular, the family chose TIGA ALPHA, an online piano learning app that runs on the tablet they already owned.

The AI piano teacher waits patiently while Pim finds each note, then praises her with a small star when the rhythm is steady. When she plays too fast, it gently suggests trying again with a slower click. Pim feels it is a bit like having a calm aunt sitting beside her who never gets tired.

Pim taps the paper above the opening note, where the printed number 1 tells her the thumb begins, and only then places her hand. She used to start pieces with her pointing finger out of habit and would run out of fingers before the tune ended. Her grandmother laughs that the little numbers are like house numbers for each finger.

Her book in the beginner piano course includes a short march inspired by elephants. It plods heavily in the lower notes, then lifts into a lighter melody, so Pim gets to imitate both a parade and a dance. She practises hands separately, then together, counting out loud with her grandmother tapping the table.

Some evenings she invents her own tunes instead. A rainy afternoon becomes three drippy high notes, and the mango tree swaying becomes a slow rocking pattern low down. Her grandmother writes the ideas in a notebook with the date, just as Poulenc's cousins might have scribbled down his first Babar improvisations long ago.

Poulenc proves that music written for children can be just as clever as music for adults. For anyone wanting to learn piano, his pieces show how a few notes can paint a character. That idea helps young beginners play piano with imagination instead of treating each page as a test.

At school, Pim's music lessons involve singing and banging small drums, and her teacher was curious about Babar. Pim brought the book, and the class listened to part of the recording while she held up the pictures. A boy at the back asked whether an elephant could really learn to drive.

Before bed, Pim now chooses between Babar and her practice. Usually she does both, ten minutes of AI piano lessons first, then the story. She dreams of the day she can play music for her grandmother from a real score, with her own elephant march as the grand finale.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What is The Story of Babar by Poulenc? A: L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant is a work for narrator and piano that Francis Poulenc composed in the early 1940s, based on Jean de Brunhoff's picture book. It was later orchestrated by Jean Françaix.

Q: Who were Les Six? A: Les Six was a nickname a Paris critic gave in 1920 to six young composers, including Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre, who favoured clear, witty music over heavy Romantic styles.

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