# Classical Music for Kids



## JKBasabas (Sep 29, 2020)

Hello again everyone!

I created this thread to hear the community's thoughts on this topic. As said in my introduction, I am currently a student studying this topic. Any way you feel classical music influenced you growing up, whether you listened to it or played it; or if you are a parent who wants to introduce classical music to your children because you believe it to have a positive effect. Personally, I grew up listening to and playing classical music on the violin and piano, so I would love to hear what everyone else thinks. 

*As this will be part of my study, what is discussed here may be included in my paper*


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

Musical education should allow for creative expression. Mine (at schools) did not, and was a mixture of drudgery of exercises in a coursebook, and forced singing of campfire songs in a tutti and then one by one. It was my least favourite subject, to the point where I elected to do nonsense handcrafting arts course just to get away from it.

Privately I loved sung poetry, classical music, and jazz, and learned to play the trumpet. Pity "education" was less sophisticated than that!

On the other hand, my very first music teacher gave us the libretto of Ode to Joy, and played us a Tchaikovsky album, and both were transformative experiences. To me, at least. The boys next row chatted without any interest, and I was horrified and disgusted by them.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

My parents were uninterested in it and provided no support, sad to say. I still have bad feelings from when my mom kept referring to "my" music as "that long-haired crap." Oh well. 

Classical music still entered my life when I was a kid in two basic ways: from movies and some kiddie records that companies used to make.

When I was young, there were only a handful of TV stations but one local, independent one ran Shock Theater every Friday night and Saturday morning - they primarily ran the old, B/W Universal Horror films. I loved those movies - still do - and the musical style, that big, romantic orchestral sound found me a willing and eager listener. The soundtracks of Franz Waxman, Hans Salter and a few others were very familiar to me, so later learning the music of Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and such was really easy. As I expanded my movie interest it was the soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, and other Hollywood greats that taught me to love orchestral music.

And then there were the animated movies: Looney Tunes. It was the legendary arranger Carl Stalling who borrowed so freely from the classics - I knew WIlliam Tell Overture from Bugs Bunny long before I saw the Lone Ranger. As an adult, having spent 60+ years listening to the classical repertoire, it's fun now to watch the Golden Age of the cartoon and play Name That Tune. Once Stalling left, his followers Milt Franklyn and Bill Lava didn't borrow from the classics. Nor did cartoons much at all after 1965. Unfortunate, because I know lots of music lovers my age who agree that the cartoons introduced them to classical music.

The other learning source was a bunch of old 78s - pressed on yellow or orange plastic if I remember right. The one I remember most clearly had songs about the bassoon, french horn, clarinet and flute. I played that record to death. There were others including Peter and the Wolf. The records were all unashamedly classical. Nowadays, I would suspect kids get songs about guitars and drums set to hip hop. Of course, I grew up in the shadow of Sputnik, when there really was a concerted effort to make Americans smarter and more cultured. Didn't take but a generation for it to fall away.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I play music for my kids. I choose pieces I think they'll enjoy, and pieces they've heard on things like Looney Tunes. So I play them things like Rossini's overtures (William Tell, Barber of Seville, La Gazza Ladra), Tannhauser Overture, Eine Kleine Nacthmusik, Tchaikovsky's ballet music, and the like. They enjoy it quite a bit. They will also happily listen to Beethoven symphonies and the like. There are also disco versions of some famous pieces by Walter Murphy that they enjoy.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

I became interested in instrumental music when I was about nine, but my short attention span and novice ears ensured that I only connected with a limited number of pieces.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

My parents' philosophy was to always have a wide variety of "good" things around the house, and let each of us gravitate toward whatever pulled us. For periodicals it was Time, and Scientific American, and Natural History, and the Christian Science Monitor . . . and we all became eclectically voracious readers. For music it was my dad's old college collection of 10-inch 78s (primarily big band and arrangements of Strauss waltzes). Then 12-inch 78s that included Michael Haydn's "Toy" Symphony, and Tubby the Tuba. Then early LPs including "Carnegie Pops," and snippets from Great Composers. Also some '50s jazz, early Broadway cast albums, etc. I liked them all, but primarily drew the classical straw and was encouraged to run with it. Yes, cartoons helped, and my sister who had LPs of the Nutcracker and The Firebird, and Beethoven's Ninth, and gave me the Eroica for my birthday, and grammar school teachers who roamed widely (one of whom caused me to ask for Aida for Christmas in Sixth Grade). And friends' parents, who took us in to Boston to see "Die Fledermaus" and "Iolanthe," and a Boston run-out of the original production of "My Fair Lady." I trusted my own taste, and if I didn't particularly like rock-'n-roll or rock, I didn't pretend to just for the sakee of acceptance (which made me weird, but I judged that to be better than sitting through two hours of a deafening rock concrt and not enjoying it in the least.)


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