How to Introduce Your Kids to Classical Music (When You Don't Know Much About It)
Where to start, and how to make it fun and unintimidating!
It started because my youngest had a hard time falling asleep.
When my daughter was 5, at the very beginning of the pandemic, we started playing “relaxation” music for her—I asked Alexa to play Chopin, because it was the first thing that came to mind. She spent a solid year listening to Chopin to sleep. She asked for piano lessons. By 6, we’d found a teacher.
The problem? She refused to listen to anything else. This was not a great situation for her brother, who is more of a pop rock Imagine Dragons fan. It honestly wasn’t super great for me—I really only knew ballet music, and that was because of a few classes in college, twenty some-odd years ago. And no one should be stuck with Chopin on repeat for eternity.
So, to save everyone’s sanity, and because it sounded like a reasonable adventure to embark on, we became a family that went on a classical music journey.
If you’ve got a children that could use some cultural enrichment, kids who are taking music lessons, if you’re home schooling and would like to broach the subject, or if you are just sick to death of listening to pop on the radio, a crash course in classical music could be for you.
The biggest hurdle is overcoming the idea that it’s boring and obscure.
Take advantage of your captive audience.
Honestly? Start in your vehicle. My kids are in my car a minimum of half an hour a day. It adds up quickly. It has 100% been worth it to just get a family plan on Spotify, but we’ve also done a lot of checking out CDs at the library.
If you are looking for something easy and centralized, I’ve got a playlist for this post:
Where to begin?
We started with David Walliams’ Marvelous Musical Podcast. It’s 10 episodes long, and it is done in a very kid-friendly radio show format. Fair warning: it’s got fart jokes, because Mozart liked fart jokes. The show covers a somewhat random mishmash of topics, but it does an excellent job of making the idea of classical music very accessible.
From there we listened to music written with children in mind:
Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of the Animals and Britton’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
These are sort of the OGs of introducing kids to classical music, and with good reason.
There are quite a few versions of Peter and the Wolf. The Maestro Classics version with Yadu is fine—Yadu has a gentle tone and an accent that my daughter rather liked. There’s a David Bowie recording that is available on YouTube. Disney has a cartoon version from 1946.
The best version of Carnival of the Animals, in my mind, is the Leonard Bernstein recording from 1960. His Peter and the Wolf (included in the playlist) assumes that children already know the story, so it may not be the best introduction.
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britton is really fun to listen to with the volume up.
Maestro Classics
Maestro Classics produces a small library of classical albums for children. We found a number of these CDs at the library. Their version of Swan Lake was a favorite, but it’s a lover’s leap story—it may not work for very sensitive kids. And they’ve got The Nutracker!
Fantasia
Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 are both easy to find and fun to watch. The soundtracks are on Spotify, but it really is better with the animation.
Steve Martin introducing Izthak Perlman:
Moving on to Movie scores
Another easy intro point, particularly for slightly bigger kids, is John Williams: A Life in Music. It’s basically a Greatest Hits album, full of music that most kids will recognize. My teenager was thrilled with this part of the program. Musical scores are a great way to point out that we’re already familiar with orchestral music. We hear it all the time.
Joe Hisaishi (Mamoru Fujisawa) composed the music for a ton of Studio Ghibli movies. He’s a Spotify artist, and his profile features a two part overview of his Ghibli music: Studio Ghibli Exprience part 1 and part 2.
Older teens may be receptive to Hildur Guðnadóttir, who composed the music for Joker, Chernobyl, and other movies and TV series. It’s dark, moody, and experimental. She appears to maintain her own lists.
Setting a mood with compilations
My kids both love Decca’s Danse Macabre, which is full of spooky tunes.
Simply Fantastic is a CD & book set you might be able to find at the library that we ended up playing on repeat in the car. Beware, though. You’ll end up with this stuck in your head:
YouTube channels
All else fails, resort to YouTube, which is apparently just catnip for children.
Vinheteiro is known in our house as “the creepy staring piano man.” That doesn’t stop them from watching him.
TwoSetViolin does viral videos. My daughter gets a real kick out of the “fail” videos and the musical prodigy reaction videos.
Classics Explained makes animated biographical videos about famous pieces.