Music Appreciation

I have offered to help our home-schoolers next year by teaching "Music Appreciation" once per week. If it goes ahead, four children will attend ages from 9 to 11, of which two are my granddaughters. I wonder at what level to pitch it?

My plan is to first define "music" and then give a very simple explanation of the physics that results in the major scale and harmony; then to introduce the various instruments and discuss musical genres, in each case with examples. There is so much good stuff on Youtube. Overall I want to inspire them, motivate, open their eyes (or ears); encourage them to both enjoy and make music.

In preparation I have been assembling a list of pieces we might listen to.  Strange, but it seems that the list mainly comprises pieces I personally like...

Alresford Preparatory School 1968

My sister drew my attention to this photo, as she is there on our left of Daisy "the fat miss Curtis" who is in the centre of the picture. Dorothy or "the thin miss Curtis" is on the other side of Daisy. My days at that school were a few years earlier and my memories of the two teachers' physique was far more extreme than this photo suggests, which says something about how children view such things. Besides, Daisy dyed her hair orange and, for a kid, that's weird.

One afternoon each week Miss Cobb would come to teach us music. We would sing English folk songs while she played the piano. I can distinctly remember the time when I noticed (for the first time?) that what she was playing was a good deal more than just the tune that we sang, and I liked the added complexity. That was my first memory of the Appreciation of Music.

Fidelity tape recorder

Later in my childhood I saved up and bought a Fidelity reel-to-reel tape recorder. I used to listen to music on the radio and record pieces I liked. A bit like cell-phones and Spotify. I remember one piece that stood out - it was only later that I identified it as the first movement of Bruckner's 7th - and thus started my infatuation with this man and his symphonic music. My friend David also bought a tape recorder - a more expensive one than mine. He was much stricter in his tastes in classical music: for me it was sufficient that I liked what I heard, never mind whether it was high or low brow.

At grammar school I took music O-level and thus repeatedly listened to a few set pieces including Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Brahms Variations on a theme by Haydn and came to love them, although I failed to understand their structure in the way that the O-level apparently required. Thus, although my music theory was excellent, my overall grade was mediocre. Why are students expected to disassemble beautiful works of art and fawn examiners with accepted explanations against their better judgement?

This morning whilst waiting for the world to wake up I stumbled across this recording of Lascia ch'io pianga from Handel's opera Rinaldo (1711) sung by boy soprano Aksel Rykkvin (age 14). I found it to be agonisingly beautiful, spine chilling. The audience - some listening intently, like I was, others gazing patronisingly and some apparently unmoved. How was that even possible?

In my last post I quoted an admirer of Alexander Malofeev saying "I wish it were possible to be inside him.. in his mind and his heart.. WHO he is... for just 10 seconds...". At time 38:44 in the following video Alexander gives an encore after his performance of Gershwin Piano Concerto in F.  Note how the conductor urges him to play, note the resulting joy on Alexander's face. I cannot find any reference to exactly what he was playing so I assume it was his own improvisation.  In any event it is intensely beautiful yet so simple in structure. Listening to it is perhaps the closest any of us common mortals will get to being "inside him".

My point being that youngsters do have the ability to deeply appreciate music - from what age may depend on the individual but Mozart started composing at age five!  Alexander started piano at the age of five and by seven he became interested in the music of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Mahler, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. Aksel received voice training when five years old.

In this perilous time of the coronavirus, what an amazing salve is music, and what a gift is Youtube where you can enjoy serious music for free and even watch the body language of the performers
whilst it is being played!