Moving on to Longer Pieces - Classical Music for Kids Part 2
Building up an attention span!
In the first part, I focused on emphasizing that listening to Classical music isn’t just for stuffy weirdos. Once that hurdle is cleared, you can start exploring longer pieces of music.
I have a full playlist for the post here:
Pictures at an Exhibition
If you’ve seen The Big Lebowski (and who hasn’t?) you know at least a bit of this one.
Mussorgsky is sort of inherently hilarious. He was the cringe, drunken, emo weirdo of his musical clique. Pictures is not necessarily intended to be childish, but even at the time, it came across that way. But it’s fun, and my 15 year old son, in particular, loves it.
Peer Gynt
Edvard Grieg wrote this music for Ibsen’s play for children. It’s based on an old Norwegian fairy tale, and the first piece, Morning Mood, is definitely something you’ve heard before. If your kids can tolerate creepy and weird puppets, there’s a somewhat deranged version on YouTube that has been used to scare children for generations.
Rhapsody in Blue
Jazz it up a little with Gershwin—this video is from Fantasia 2000.
The Planets
So this suite by Gutav Holst was big in the 1960’s. It was cinematic, before that was really a phrase, and therefore, it was head of it’s time. George Lucas had it mind when he made Star Wars, and insisted that John Williams use it as inspiration.
Symphonie Fantastique
Berlioz wrote this to impress a woman, and he was on a lot of opium at the time, so it really may be a very early bit of psychedelia. The story of the piece is pretty trippy and full of witches and weirdness.
Gayane
It’s very, very likely you know Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance already. The entire suite is fun and easy to listen to, but Sabre Dance has been in about seven million cartoons and commercials. Gayane is a 20th century ballet; Khachaturian did a number of movie scores (Spartacus) and a really lovely suite called Pictures of Childhood that is also excellent chill out music for kids.
Don Juan
Okay, so, pretty much every list out there will tell you to play Strauss’s Blue Danube for kids. And the intro to Also sprach Zarathustra is absolutely insane. Those are on the playlist, but I’m going to bat for Don Juan, because my 7 year old sat through all 20 some-odd minutes of it in a weird, ecstatic trance the first time she heard it, and that has to count for something.
Honestly, both my kids just really like Strauss.
Grand Canyon Suite
Ferde Grofé did quite a bit of work for Disney back in they day, and it’s easy to see why with this one.
Tale of the Tsar Sultan
This is the one that has The Flight of the Bumblebee. It’s based on a Pushkin story, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed it for the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth.
The Magic Flute
The amount of opera may be a hard sell, but my son really likes, it, so who knows? At the very least, it’s worth knowing The Queen of the Night aria and the Papageno-Papagena duet.