YMB #20 Song, Stories, and Memories Made Together

Pam: This is Your Morning Basket where we help you bring Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 20 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy you’re joining me here today. Well, we have a real treat for you today. I remember about five years ago heading into my very first homeschool conference and one of the booths that I stopped by was the Maestro Classics booth. There, I think I picked up a copy of Peter and the Wolf; it’s hard for me to remember because now we have so many Maestro Classics CDs that we enjoy as a family. My children love the various titles that we have in our collection, and so I was really delighted to get to talk to Bonnie Simon today from Maestro Classics. We’re having a chat about the role of classical musical and delight in classical music and how we can introduce it to our children in Morning Time. I think you’re going to really enjoy the conversation so we’ll get right on with it. Bonnie Simon has a deep love of classical music that started in childhood and has lasted a lifetime. She has degrees in both music and music education and has experience as a teacher, a concert producer, and as an orchestra executive. Bonnie is the former executive director of the Washington Chamber Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. where alongside her husband, Stephen, she created the Chamber Symphony Concerts for Young People series. Bonnie and Stephen went on to produce Maestro Classics Stories and Music series, CDs to help families enjoy classical music together at home. These CDs feature narrated stories such as Peter and the Wolf, Swan Lake, The Tortoise and the Hare, and even Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

These are accompanied by beautiful music of the symphony orchestra. Today, Bonnie continues to serve as the president of Maestro Classics and the executive producer and creative director of Stories and Music. She inspires and equips families to experience great music together. Bonnie, welcome to the program.
Bonnie: Thank you so much, Pam, it’s my pleasure to be here.
Pam: Well, I am just so excited to get to talk to you because I have to tell you that Maestro Classic CDs are a favorite here at my house.
Bonnie: Oh, that’s great to hear.
Pam: We love them. We have a number of them. We have Peter and the Wolf. We have Juanita the Spanish Lobster, which is hilarious. And we also have Swan Lake as well, so, a lot of favorites.
Bonnie: Great. Well, you have three wonderful ones and of course, there are many others that you will be able to enjoy in the future.
Pam: That’s true. Well, tell me, what were some of your own earliest experiences with classical music as a child? How did your love for music begin?
Bonnie: Well, I guess I was very lucky. When people ask me that question I always remembered going to sleep on Thursday nights because on Thursday nights my parents with friends played string quartets. My father was an English professor and my mother was a biologist but in their early 20’s they took up the violin and the cello, and being somewhat compulsive, they practiced. And so by the time I came along they were playing Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven string quartets, and on Thursday nights we would be sent to bed and they would play. I still hear these quartets and think of those moments, though those many, many decades ago, where I was introduced. But then there were other things that happened in our household. WQXR which was the New York classical music radio station had concerts that were broadcast live and I think they were on Saturday afternoons, and my parents would sit and listen to them. And we were never required to listen but we were required to be quiet. So there were real concert hall manners even though it was happening in our living room and it just wafted in and out and sometimes we’d stay a bit, sometimes we wouldn’t. And then another experience was my father, who had taken up the violin, really loved violins. Some people rescue dogs, my father rescued violins. So he had a small collection of them, and in this collection there also was a quarter sized violin. And I, of course, heard him playing and I wanted to play so I would beg him when he came home from the college to give me a violin lesson. And he very kindly did that, and those were my first violin lessons. But I think the thing that sticks with me more than anything else was our experience of family orchestra. My parents- there were four children in my family- and each of us played an instrument and on Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving dinner my father would announce, “Alright, it’s time for family orchestra to begin” and he pulled out a set of Christmas carol arrangements and we each sat down and began to play these, and between Thanksgiving and Christmas, every night after dinner, we sat down for, I don’t know, perhaps half an hour and we practiced or played together these Christmas carols and then on Christmas Day when friends and family would stop by we would play for them. And of course, at times, I guess, we rolled our eyes thinking ‘do we have to do this?’ but we have all sorely missed it in the years that have gone by when we haven’t done this sort of thing. It was just a very nice tradition that they started. So I grew up sort of feeling that everybody played an instrument, and that this was just part of life. So I was very fortunate that way.
Pam: Yes, you were. It’s amazing that your parents decided in their 20’s “we’re just going to take up playing these instruments” and they started doing it and became proficient at it even as adults. I think that’s wonderful.
Bonnie: It was quite amazing. They have discovered now in doing studies that if you want to ward off Dementia in your later years take up an instrument; seems to be very good for the brain.
Pam: I may have to add that to my ‘to do’ list then. Well, why do you think it’s important to introduce children to classical music, because some people think of classical music as kind of stuffy, so why introduce it to kids?
Bonnie: Well, I always say that classical music is just part of this wonderful landscape of music and that there are all kinds of music. My husband used to say, and I think he was actually quoting Duke Ellington, who said “There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” And so I view classical music as being like asking your children to taste everything on their plate at dinnertime. It’s an experience that you want to offer them so that they know that it’s out there. For some of them, they’ll like it immediately. This will not be all of them jumping up and down because classical music is very complicated. And so I think that you need to be careful in how you introduce it. You need to make sure you find things that you, as a parent like, because if you don’t like it, your child won’t either. And there are a number of ways if you’re not a parent who’s had experience with classical music to go about finding things for your children. So, I’ll go into that in a minute if you’d like me to.
Pam: Oh, I’d love it.
Bonnie: It’s one of those things that you just have to say, “I’d like my children to be exposed to this because music is a very important part of life.” Just as you go to museums and you go to science fairs and things, music is one of those things. I always say there are two parts; the one part is why introduce kids and the other is to classical music? And with children it’s very interesting. At the age of 2 or 3 you have more synapses in your brain than you will ever have at any other time in your life, and your brain begins to slough off these connections if they’re not used. So, for example, if a child hears Swedish at the age of 2 or 3, they will be able to hear sounds that, as a teenager or as an adult, they will never be able to hear, and its simply because those synapses were used, those connections in the brain, suddenly they said, “OK, you can’t get rid of that one, that’s one we need” and so classical music is the same sort of thing. If you are willing to introduce it to children, the brain will already, just unconsciously is saying, “OK, we need to keep that part” and now, of course, with all of the imaging that they can do with brains, they can see this going on in people’s brains that music actually makes a different part of your brain function. So doing it young is important. They’ve done studies where parents who have taken their children to child-parent music classes between the ages of 2 and 5, where you sit there and pat your lap and you sing some little silly songs and play on a drum and it seems like good entertainment but those children at the age of 5 or 6, if they’re tested for music ability, actually consistently show that they have more musical ability. It’s almost like saying you can teach talent to exposure, which is pretty surprising. The other thing about the kids is anything they learn at an early age stays with them forever. So, a song that they learn at 5, 6, or 7 they’ll probably be able to sing when they’re 50. Childhood’s a very important time. Classical music- there are several ways you can look at it. You can be very pragmatic and say, “This is good exercise for my child’s brain” and studies have shown this is certainly true, or you can simply look at it and say, “I want my child to hear things that are beautiful and that evoke deep emotions” and classical music is one of the ways this can happen.
Pam: You know, it’s interesting you were talking about them having the synopses when they’re younger and those, kind of, firing them and having them for the rest of their lives because you expose them at a young age. We use some of the Maestro Classics which are the fun stories and the things of that nature and then also we’ve just listened to music and it’s something my kids take for granted that we do because we’ve done it ever since they were very little. So I don’t get a lot of push back or ‘Oh mom, I don’t like this’ or ‘This is too hard for me, let’s listen to this other stuff on the radio’ which they like they things on the radio but they also just take the classical music as matter of fact, too, because it’s what we’ve always listened to.
Bonnie: I think that that’s a very good thing and it’s so important and you’re doing the right thing for them. I was very surprised the other day, I have a new puppy and so we’re going to puppy kindergarten, and the dog trainer said, “Now you should put the dog in the crate two hours a day and put on classical music” and I thought, ‘My goodness!’ He said they find it very calming. And I think a lot of parents have found that a lot of classical music is calming and is nice, and if you play it all the time, and it sounds like you do and do it in the kitchen and you put it on in the car, then it’s just part of life, which I think is the best way to have it.
Pam: Well, you mentioned earlier that there are things that parents can do if they don’t have a lot of experience themselves with classical music. So what are some tips that you have for the parent who might be feeling a little bit intimidated about this entire process?
Bonnie: Well, Pam, it’s interesting because my first family concert series that we did at the Kennedy Center, the whole philosophy was we want to educate the parent with the child at the same time, and so you’ll notice on every Maestro Classic CDs they’re always are tracks that really are geared to helping the parent become what I call the instant expert. So when the conducted talks about the music, he’s really telling things to the parent as well as the child so that the parent can go back and say to the child, “Did you hear that? There was the theme that we heard in the beginning” (for example) that the child might not pick up on the first listening on that track so within Maestro Classics there’s certainly the attempt to make a parent feel comfortable in talking about classical music but then just for classical music in general it doesn’t sound like a very nice website but it’s a wonderful website, it’s called KickAssClassical.com. And they have put together 100 of the best loved pieces of classical music and they have actually been very careful to find very good recordings of each one of these, and if you go through their samples on it, so you can listen to a little bit of everything from Beethoven’s 5th to Handel’s Water Music, to something by Samuel Barber and they’ll give you a 30 or 40 second clip from it and then if you decide you want to buy that, you can go there, they have an iTunes or Amazon button you can click and it will take you right to the website. But I suggest to parents that they go to this site and they just begin to click on things and listen to them and when they get to something they like, that seems to speak to them, then they should spend $1.00 and buy the track and listen to it. And in fact, I often say if you have teenagers give them a budget of $1.00 a week and say, “Go on this site and find anything that you like,” and I guarantee that you will find something. And for some people it will be something bombastic and loud like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or you may find something like Barber’s Adacio which is overwhelmingly sad and tragic, or you may find the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and that may be something where you say, “Oh, I’ve heard that before, I wonder what a little more of it sounds like.” So as a one-stop shopping, that’s one place that I would begin. As far as younger children are concerned, I always say anything with stories is good. So there are, of course, Maestro Classics Stories and Music series but Susan Hammond created Classical Kids and she was the first person in the late 80’s to first want to introduce kids to classical music through stories, and she did a Mr. Bach comes to Call CD and a Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs and now there are about 10 or 12 of those that are out there, all of which are wonderful and great ways to introduce kids to classical music, and parents at the same time.
Pam: I love the way that you focus on delight. The most important thing as your criteria for choosing something to listen to is that you like it. I just love that.
Bonnie: That’s so important. I remember my husband, the conductor, saying, “If you don’t feel better when you leave my concert than you did when you walked in, you should have stayed home and taken a nap.” And I think that’s something that we forget with classical music. It is something to delight in. Now, the delighting isn’t always laughing out loud. It may be just something that’s extremely beautiful. But music is entertainment and classical music was created to be entertainment. So, you really need to think about enjoying it and perhaps if you’re not enjoying it, maybe you just haven’t found the right piece or the right performance for you at that time.
Pam: With Maestro Classics you talk about families making new musical memories together. What do you mean by that and why is it important?
Bonnie: I think music, which in a way is the most abstract of all art forms, you hear it and then it’s gone, it’s just gone so it remains only in your head, but music is like smells. Have you ever walked into a place and said, “This smells like my grandmother’s house!” and suddenly all of those memories flood back and music has the same kind of power that you can hear something and you can remember it and the whole experience of that comes back and for the child, the child will remember sitting with the parent when he’s 40 years old, when he has his own children or she has her own children. Those childhood memories and everything that surrounds them will somehow return and you, as the parent, will know you will still be there. You may not be with us physically but you will be with that child of yours that you spent that time with listening together. And of course, family time is important to try to preserve at this point in time where everybody has multiple TVs and now we have iPads and cell phones. There’s a tendency for everyone to go his own way and seek their own entertainment and I feel that kids often miss a great deal by not, sort of as opposed to going outward turning back in to have shared memories with family because it’s not just listening together, it will be the other things that happen when you talk about the music, or when you listen again, or when you say, “Oh yes, I remember- the first time I heard that weren’t we in the car going to Boston?” or something like that.
Pam: So music is a huge part of that shared family culture that you’ll have, that you’ll remember, even as you age and the kids leave home and have their own children.
Bonnie: Absolutely, yes.
Pam: Tell me a little bit about how the stories in music CDs are structured and how we might use them in our Morning Time in our home schools.
Bonnie: I guess that I would begin first with an overarching theme that says, “Don’t view music as a subject, but rather view it as educational entertainment.” So if you take, for example, the Mike Mulligan CD, you have a story with music, that’s something which you should simply listen to with your child and you may find your child wants to listen to it over and over. I actually had a parent come up to me at a home school conference and say, “I have to buy another one of these CDs. My son actually listened to it so many times that he wore it out.” So, that should just be step 1. Then you will discover that your 2 or 3 year old may just sit there and listen to the music. He may not understand the story. Your 5, 6, 7 year old will certainly understand the story. And I would stop there if it’s the morning. And then, the next day, or maybe after you listen to it a couple of times, I would go to track three where there’s the Mike Mulligan song and it’s a new song to listen to, it’s something that is based on the music that you heard in the original story. And then if you find you have a child who you need to take a break from math or something and you’re working say, with more than one child, you can take your older child and say, “Go to the Maestro Classics website, click on Mike Mulligan, go to Math,” and when he clicks there he’ll find a whole range of math activities that center around Mike Mulligan and his adventures; how many men would it take to dig this hole if it took a steam shovel so many days? That kind of thing. Then you can listen to the track which is always about the composer of the story, which is more of a history lesson. It’s trying to surround what you’ve heard with some context, so if you’re listening to the Handel CD, you learn about King George and you learn about the fact Handel may have been a spy. It’s sort of makes the story more whole and more rounded, and then you listen to what the conductor has to say about it, probably on another day. First he begins by telling you why he chose the bagpipes to be the solo instrument in the orchestra. And then he tells you want he was thinking about when he it was being composed and why he chose certain songs to weave into the music and how that has a special name in music. So you begin to learn a little bit about having a musical vocabulary and learning that music doesn’t just come out of a composer like sausage comes out of the machine. But actually there’s a lot of structure and a lot that a composer is thinking about when he’s creating the music, and then you’re almost always invited to listen again to the stories sometimes with the narration and sometimes without the narration. And I like particularly the ones without the narration because it gives children a chance to form their own pictures in their minds and they are discovering that children increasingly having difficulties in creating their own pictures in their imaginations because they’re fed so much video so this is a chance for a child to really just explore their own imaginations as they’re thinking about this. And then finally, there is almost always a play-along, or sing-along, or dance-along track because kids should interact with music. That’s part of the fun of music. So, they are meant to be listened to over time, over many ages, in many parts, and you can put it on in the car and listen to the full hour- everything, or you can have it just as part of your Morning Time as a sort of a delightful interlude and you’ll be surprised at what they know at the end of it. I’ve had parents come up and say, “I couldn’t believe it. My daughter heard something on the radio and she said, “That’s Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake,”” and of course, she was thrilled to have this. And the idea is that children, if they’re exposed in this way, as they get older I always say, “If you have a child who is at Harvard and a friend says, ‘Someone gave me tickets to the Boston Symphony, do you want to come with me tonight?’ the child knows enough to say, ‘What’s on the program?’ and they say, ‘Oh well, Handel’s Water Music is on, and something-and-something,’ and they’ll say, ‘OK, I know what that is, I can do that.’ It’s just part of a general well-rounded education.
Pam: Oh, I love that there’s multiple reasons to listen to the piece again and again and again. You have a little bit of history, you have a little bit of lets move and dance, you have now let’s learn about the music itself, and so there’s all of these different reasons in there to unpack, like an onion, to peel away all of the pieces to this music and enjoy it. And so, I love that.
Bonnie: Right. And the idea is that both the child and the parent, although the parent when they listen to it the first or second time, will of course get everything and the child as he listens to whatever she listens to it over time will discover how much more they get out of it after either they have gotten a little older or after they’ve listened to it more. Part of the beauty of classical music is that it’s like a good book or a good painting. You can go back to it over and over again, over a span of years, really a lifetime, and as you re-read a book, a second time maybe 10 years later, you see so much more than you did the last time. And it’s the same way visiting a great painting- you go back and you just see other things and classical music is the same way.
Pam: Let’s talk about the role of story. So what you have done in many of your Maestro Classics is match them up. Some are overtly done like with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel or Casey at the Bat, and even Peter and the Wolf, there’s the story of Peter and the grandfather and all the birds and the wolf but how are you tying, why is it important for you to tie story to all of these different pieces of classical music? What role do you think story plays?
Bonnie: Well, each of these pieces of music that’s chosen is really, almost what’s called a tone poem. The music is supposed to tell its own story but it’s very difficult for a young person to understand the story. So, for example, when the Merry Pranks of Master Till this is Tillwood and Spiegel by Schaus and it is one of the great tone poems in all of classical musical but it was written for German children and German children all knew the stories of the naughty boy named Till. But American children don’t know that so if you don’t tell them the story they’re not going to know that there is humor in the music and that music is making fun at times and that there are jokes in the music so having a narration with it is really like having a guide that takes their hand and takes them through the music. Something like Swan Lake was written as a ballet but, of course, it’s a story ballet. So the story is embedded in the music but a young person listening to that wouldn’t know if somebody wasn’t telling them the story as the music went along.
Pam: So, do you think the story adds to the richness of the music for the kids?
Bonnie: Absolutely. Everyone loves story but particularly children love stories. So, on the first level, when many children listen to these, maybe it’s just the story that they hear the first time through and maybe it won’t be until the second or third time that they listen that they’re going to begin to really hear the music and over time they will hear more and more of the music and then, in a case like Merry Pranks of Master Till there is a track that just has the original music without any narration and they’ll listen to that and they will get it. And that’s, of course, what you want. You want them to feel that they have ownership of this music because then they have it forever and then it’s theirs. And of course, when you own something it means more to you than if it’s passing you by.
Pam: Well, I tell you, the Peter and the Wolf story just absolutely delighted my children and I. We did it a couple of years ago and I have these great fond memories of them tip-toeing around the room and being sneaky and being quick- the different sounds of the instruments in there were the different characters and so they were playing those animals based on those sounds. It’s a fun memory.
Bonnie: It is a perfect piece. Peter and the Wolf was set in the late 30’s by Prokofiev who decided that this really was the way to introduce children to classical music. And he had children of his own so he really knew this. And I say no child should grow up without knowing Peter and the Wolf. It is the great classic. So when people come to a homeschool fair and we’re standing there in front of a dozen CDs and they say, “Which should I have?” And I say, “If you can only buy one CD I would buy Peter and the Wolf because your child should grow up with it.” So, I’m delighted to hear that your kids enjoyed it so much.
Pam: They did. Well, have you ever had the experience of seeing a child respond to or connect with a particular piece of music in a way that you weren’t expecting?
Bonnie: Oh yes! The first one was with my own son, Basil, whom I did not allow to watch any TV for his first couple of years and then some friends said, “You are raising a freak, you have to expose him to some things.” And they gave me a video (a VHS tape in those days) of The Red Balloon which is the great French movie which has no talking and only video and music and so he watched that about 200 times and I thought, ‘OK, enough of this, we have to move on,’ and so I got him The Nutcracker video. And so he watched that, again, hundreds of times it felt like, and so I thought, ‘Enough of this, we’re going to finish the ballet craze now once and for all. I will buy him Swan Lake. For sure, Swan Lake will not appeal to him.’ He looked at Swan Lake and he thought it was wonderful, and so he listened to that hundreds of time and continued to enjoy music. In fact, he’s in the music business now. But the other really funny one was several years and I was sitting next to my younger son, who’s in engineering, and he was not the one who got all the music genes like his older brother did, and we were at one of Stephen’s concerts and the Barber’s odacio for strings began to be played and he could barely sit still in his seat. And he said, “Mom! Mom! I didn’t know that that was a piece of classical music.” It was something he had heard in movies and probably in the video game or something and suddenly now it was on the stage being performed by his father and his father’s orchestra and it just took on a whole new meaning for him. So, you never know where these things will come up and some kids just hear music and you wouldn’t ever expect it, but they’re the ones who get up and dance, and some kids are the ones who pick up a drum when they hear asuza march and it’s the beautiful little girl who loves ballet lessons and suddenly that moves her. So you don’t know what music will bring out in your child.
Pam: So we just have to reach for that exposure?
Bonnie: That’s right and watch.
Pam: Well, besides listening to Maestro Classic CDs what are some other enjoyable ways families can experience classical music together, maybe outside of our Morning Time?
Bonnie: Well, the first concert experience I always suggest is an outdoor concert. And it can be an orchestra concert if you’re lucky enough to live near one of the great Tanglewood or Saratoga Springs where major orchestra give orchestra concerts or free concerts in parks, Central Park- the New York Philharmonic gives concerts, or if it’s the town band, the local town band. But outdoor concerts are great places because it’s OK to whisper and if you have a young child it’s ok to bounce up and down and perhaps even walk around the picnic blanket with you, so it’s a very stress-free environment to listen to music. I think concert hall family concerts are great but I caution all parents, I say respect the age suggestions when they say 5 and over. You need to understand that that orchestra wants to sell every seat it possibly can and when it says 5, it really does mean 5 and if you bring your extremely bright 3 year old they’re going to have a tough time, probably, and you don’t want to do that. You want the experience to be a good one. The other piece of advice that I often give is sometimes you will buy tickets to something and you will just know your child has had enough at intermission, and you will not have. You will want to go back for the second half, but you should, at that moment, say ‘We’ve had enough for him, and if I leave now it’s going to be a great experience, and if I make this child sit through the second half they’re not going to want to come with me again,’ so you want greatness in child size portions and you need to respect the fact that children do appreciate greatness but they can’t sit as long as you can.
Pam: So you definitely want to stop while everything is still good.
Bonnie: Yes, that’s exactly right, Pam.
Pam: Well, Bonnie, thank you so much for joining me here today and talking to us about classical music and story and just how we can bring this into and enrich our lives. Could you tell everyone where they can find you online?
Bonnie: They can find us on MaestroClassics (I always say, don’t be embarrassed many people have problems spelling Maestro) MaestroClassics.com and on the website I encourage you to explore because we have free curriculum guides that link every CD to every subject in your curriculum, and we’re very careful about testing all of the links and making sure they’re safe so you can put a child on there and say, “Explore and enjoy these things,” and offers you many activities that you can use if you want to build around the story or the CD that you’re listening to. They’re also a group of articles that are interesting for parents who want to know a little more about introducing your child to music.
Pam: Great. And then the music is available there as well and it’s available on CD and then it’s also available as mp3 downloads as well.
Bonnie: That’s right. It’s also available on Amazon should you want to go that quick and easy route. But most of all, Pam, I want to thank you for having me and thank you for sharing the importance of music with your audience because I think it’s a very joyful thing that we need to spread the word about and you’re being wonderful in doing it.
Pam: Oh, I agree. Well, thank you.
Bonnie: Thank you.
Pam: And there you have it. Now, the Basket Bonus for today’s episode is Bonnie’s quick guide to introducing your children to classical music. On there you’ll find some questions you can ask yourself and some developmentally appropriate activities that you can do with your kids at various ages to start building that love for music that we want to have, in our kids, in our homes, in our Morning Time. So you can find that in the Show Notes for this episode of the podcast along with all of the links and resources that Bonnie and I chatted about today, including the link to the Maestro Classics website. And you can find that at EDSnapshots.com/YMB20. Now also in those Show Notes you can find instructions for how to leave a rating or review for the Your Morning Basket podcast on iTunes. The ratings and reviews you leave on iTunes help us get word out about the podcast to other listeners. And we really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to do that for us. We’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great interview, some more information to help you build your Morning Time, and until then, keep seeking Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in your homeschool day.