Kids and classical music

The benefits of exposure to classical music at a young age are no secret. Numerous studies have shown its effect on the plasticity of the brain, benefits to brain development, function and health.

But what's the best way to get kids interested in classical music? Not only to enjoy listening to classical, but also to encourage them to become active participants as musicians. There are lots of different avenues, and we are not in control of all of them, but we can try to engage them early on. And if they’re absolutely set against it, more power to them. They are individuals and have the right to follow their own passions, and interests.

But for someone like me, who fell in love with it, who became a classical musician, it’s hard not to want to encourage them to follow that same avenue, because it can be so fulfilling. And they can’t crave what they don’t know. If they’re never introduced to classical music, then they’ll never be interested. I've taken my own kids to concerts so that they can experience being in the presence of great musicians, the concert hall and the beauty of the orchestra. I've talked to them about composers: Beethoven, who kept a chamberpot, which was often full, just under the bed, but who strangely, had clean teeth, because he brushed them regularly with a stick. Or Satie, who wrote music that instructed the musician to play ‘light as an egg’. 

Going to the concert hall

Concert-going can be tricky with kids: the timing has to be just right. Too late in the evening and they're too tired to get through it and matinee concerts usually clash with extra-curriculars. And at the end of the day for me, the concert experience is just part of the whole. It's a way of appreciating the production, the effort and the inner workings of the music. To see all the musicians of an orchestra is priceless for children. It's like seeing the elements of a machine. Every part has a function, is vital and operates in it's own way. And in order to produce something, those parts all need to work together.  

Music lessons

Some kids start learning because their parents want them to learn and others because they've begged their parents to let them start. In my experience, it's the kids who have exposure to classical music that develop a passion or desire to keep going at it and to get better. That exposure can be as simple as a brother or sister who also plays, and the desire to keep up with them. Or it can be a pure love of music. It could even be inspiration drawn from background music in kids audio books.

Kids need inspiration as much as adults do in order to push themselves to achieve bigger things in music. And by bigger things, I don't mean being able to play a Bach Prelude and Fugue by memory, I mean the daily urge to move from the current state of play to the next best thing. Whether that means learning how to comfortably move between an 'A' and a 'B' on the clarinet without squeaking or missing a beat, learning how to differentiate between the air pressure to produce a first, second or third octave on the flute, or being able to play a hemi-demi-semiquaver run with completely even notes, no matter the complexities of finger combinations.

Listening to stories with music

I’ve always thought that classical music is a form of storytelling. It’s evocative, it’s descriptive and it is impactful. Music, when combined with narration or storytelling, empowers a story, and actually directs us to feel a certain way about the trajectory of a story. Non-diegetic music in film has a powerful effect over how we interpret a scene or character, and has the same effect in audio books.

I recently rediscovered the Tail Spinners for Children series, recordings that I had listened to as a child. Vinyl recordings, made in the 1960s, by the BBC.  Tail Spinners were produced with a philosophy of 'bringing theatre, drama and emotion into the living room' with voice actors and the Hollywood Studio Orchestra.

I’ll never forget as a a child, how powerful it was to listen to the Tail Spinners recording of the Little Mermaid, set to Tchaikowsky’s beautifully dramatic Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op. 23. It featured Denise Bryer, a BBC voice actress and a frightening sea witch, played by Judith Whale. It struck a chord in me, and I think it was at that moment, as a child, I really learnt the power of music as a method of storytelling. It didn't need the words, it seemed to carry them. The story gave me a direction for my imagination, but the words did not play foreground to the music. Rather the music carried me off and set the story alight for me.

I played Tail Spinners to my own kids. They were enamoured, and I was so pleased. I felt I’d hit the jackpot. Introducing your kids to the stuff of your childhood and they love it? Unheard of. Children are so naturally keen on storytelling, and absorb it with such great curiosity. Capitalising on this for the sake of music education is a wonderful way to enrich their lives and to create beautiful memories.

Exploring repertoire

Introducing children to classical music doesn’t need to come to a halt with Peter and the Wolf,  although it is a beautiful piece of music and children do love it. Nor does it need to sit within the Baroque, Classical or Romantic or New-Romantic category. Children love 21st century composition just as much: John Adams, Max Richter, Sally Greenfield, Stuart Greenbaum, Nigel Westlake and Dustin O'Halloran, Alexis Ffrench.

There's Lemony Snickett's The Composer is Dead, which the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will perform later this year (10 Nov 2018), and has a similar approach to the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Peter and the Wolf, in that it’s intended to introduce the audience to the orchestra. It's a murder-mystery, with everyone in the orchestra a suspect.

Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts from 1958 on YouTube are another amazing resource. Bernstein had a beautiful way of describing how composers wrote. He describes at one point, how Mussorgsky tried to do with music, what painters do with paint. ‘He tried to do with notes what a painter does with paint. Now of course, all of us know, that notes can’t do what paint can do. You can’t draw your nose with F sharps. You can’t draw a building or paint a sunset with notes. But you can sort of … try to do it.’ He demonstrates a painting of children playing in a park and explains how Mussorgsky has written to try to paint the sound of childrens voices when they play. The sing-song way that they speak, even tease one another.

And there are loads of other amazing pieces that will inspire kids:

• Saint-Saens – Carnival of the Animals

• Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition

• Britten – Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

• Prokofiev – Peter and the Wolf

• Mozart – The Magic Flute

• Tchaikovsky – The Nutcracker

• Tchaikovsky – Swan Lake

• Satie – Gymnopédies

• Anything by Beethoven

• Mendelssohn – Songs without words

• Holst, The Planets

• Beethoven lives upstairs, originally made in 1992. The original audio recording of Beethoven Lives Upstairs claimed dozens of top music, educational, and parenting awards. It was made into an Emmy award winning film.

• The list could go on and on.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to want children to be interested in classical music for the sake of it. It needs to mean something to them, and poetic and dramatic associations like literature provide a really nice entry point for them to increase their engagement with classical music. Once kids have an internal reference point for what moves them musically in classical music, it's only natural that they'll want to learn more.