Sing what you hear

The other morning my two youngest sons were sitting at the table singing about 'nasty nachos'.  For a brief moment I thought they'd listened to some horrid rap music and were trying to mimic what they'd heard.  I questioned my husband on this and he started laughing.  He'd been playing the Marriage of Figaro and they were singing what they heard.

At first I thought it was a terrible way to introduce them to opera.  They would never appreciate the true beauty and power of the music.  They would think it silly.  I changed my mind, however, as I heard them ask to listen to it over and over.  As I saw them crowd around the computer with big smiles on their faces.  And as I watched them laugh and laugh over what they heard.  Here are some examples:

Nasty nachos

Oh pajama!

Hot dog protector

Spaghetti

Potato

Mozart may or may not be mortified at this introduction to his opera.  On the one hand he took his music very seriously.  And on the other he had a rather quirky sense of humor.

For now, my kids are interested in listening.  They find it enjoyable.  And I hear them humming the music around the house and singing what they hear.

Marriage of Figaro (also known as Mozart’s Wedding by my 7-year-old)

Act 3 Ecco La Marcia

Composer Study

I briefly hit on how we do composer study earlier, but thought I'd expound on it and give you my list. We are trying to study them chronologically, more or less. We read a short bio, usually from the Mike Venezia series. If he doesn't have a book we try to find some other children's picture book. When they are older we'll use The Gift of Music and The Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers.

We listen to the Classics for Kids presentation and then to various other pieces by the composer. My husband has a rather extensive collection of classical music so I have a lot available. What I can't find we search the internet. We also watch YouTube clips now and then to see the people actually performing the work.

We will also do a study of a few "types" of music including opera, ballet, the orchestra, broadway, Jazz/Big Band and classical guitar.

For opera we will use:
Sing Me a Story - Jane Rosenburg
Bravo! Brava!: A Night at the Opera - Anne Siberell
The Hamster Opera Company - Janis Mitchell

For ballet we will use:
A Child's Introduction to Ballet - Laura Lee
Illustrated Book of Ballet Stories - Barbara Newman
Dance Me a Story - Jane Rosenburg
The Hamster Ballet Company - Janis Mitchell

For the orchestra we will use:
Story of the Orchestra - Robert Levine
Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin - Lloyd Moss
whatever books we can find by Anna Harwell Celenza

For broadway we'll read The Great American Mousical by Julie Andrews, then listen to and watch a few musicals.

For jazz/big band/rag time we'll watch some video clips on YouTube and listen to some CDs.  My husband is a huge fan of this music so he'll be teaching more about it than I will.

And here are the men we'll be studying:

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Cristoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787)

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840)

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Charles Gounod (1818-1892)

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Guiseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Richard Wagner(1813-1883)

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884)

Leo Delibes (1836-1891)

Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)