ALL GUITAR CHORDS SHEET

Judith Leyster portrayed children sympathetically, allowing them expressions and emotions, music and art, at a time when many of them did not survive their early years. The child in Boy Playing the Flute has fallen on hard times. He is teetering between poverty and comfortable domesticity. Though he still has a home with a violin hanging on the wall, there is no music master in the room. He is going it alone. But he seems to hear harmony from above.

This young musician still has an advantage over many of his contemporaries. He is healthy, having so far escaped the scourges of his times, though impending poverty undoubtedly puts him at risk. Pneumonia, diphtheria, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, and streptococcal infections were major causes of childhood illness and death, as they still are in much of the world. Some, among them respiratory infections that might have cut the youth's flute career short, are now under control because of expansive vaccination programs, including in today's Netherlands.

But while a young boy might tap into the music of the spheres for inspiration and survival, those who try to break the axiomatic connection between wealth, poverty, health, and illness can only rely on programs aimed at the great killers of children. Persistent and unrelenting disharmony, caused by diseases upon diseases emerging and reemerging amidst endless complicating factors, interferes in public health with their orderly conquest, one by one, in any kind of anticipated pattern or ratio on a cosmic scale.

April Dean '07 was a music major. Part of a series on Seniors for the Graduation Issue for the Wake Forest University Old Gold & Black.