I am honoured to have been asked to write for my lovely friend Jennie a post about classical music play for children. My area of expertise is classical music, and to be honest, the best way you can create music play for children around classical music is simply to let them hear it! Put it on or play it, sit back and watch what happens. Kids love classical music, in fact most kids love music of all kinds but classical music is especially great for them, and just seeing and hearing great music and being allowed to react freely to it is playing! Let me explain:

I became passionate about music of all kinds around the age of 3. Having being raised on a diet of The Beatles, The Shadows and ABBA but exposed also to Mozart operas and other classical music, I remember feeling hungry for that “tingly-tummy” feeling certain chords and harmonies gave me as young as aged two. I would latch on excitedly to any music that had them, whatever the genre. This is what I remember being addicted to as a small child: not sweets or TV shows but certain songs and chord progressions and I learned to use the record player by myself before I started school. Aged 3, my favourite thing to do was strip off all my clothes and dance around the living room to ‘Super Trouper’!

It’s no coincidence that these classic pop songs are closely based on the rules of harmony set down by the earliest classical music – chord progressions found in Pachelbel, Bach, Mozart and others. As I grew up, I more and more found pop song structure too simple and repetitive in structure and I just couldn’t get enough different ‘juicy’ chord progressions and textures to satiate my craving! I was finding more and more of the “tastiest” stuff to be classical although I still loved all kinds of music. I took up the violin, then the piano and gradually delved deeper and deeper into the world of classical music with all it’s many varied styles and genres and a bottomless pit of great emotional worlds to discover.

Now, 6 years of music college and two degrees later I am a professional violinist, the wife of a concert violinist and mum to two small boys and the Director of Classical Babies bringing classical music to children as widespread and as early as possible – it’s my passion! I’ve always loved children and teaching the violin, but I didn’t give much thought to children listening to music or any thought at all in fact until I found myself pregnant with baby no. 1. Sitting at work in various London orchestras with all that sound directed at my belly, low and behold, here was a wriggly baby clearly reacting to the music but not necessarily in the same way as me. From the way Gabs moved in my bump I could tell he clearly had his own feelings and reactions to the music and his own distinct taste in music right from the start! He loved it when I played in a Beethoven Piano Concerto but when I worked with Annie Lennox (an awesome musician, in my humble opinion!) he hated it! I also practised a lot at home and was surprised one day to discover he would firmly elbow my insides when I played lovely calming Bach with a definite message of “Shut-up, I hate it!” but when I switched to a very fast, virtuosic Paganini piece he calmed right down and “rolled” gently… funny boy!

Since he’d been surrounded by music for months already, I wasn’t about to take it away from him once he was born, so right from birth I made sure to play CDs of Mozart Piano Concertos and violin music around the house.

I had heard of the ‘Mozart-effect’ before, and it made sense to me on an intuitive level even if I couldn’t quite articulate clearly the science behind it. But suddenly, bending over my tiny infant son, singing runs of fast notes along with the piano part, suddenly jumping to the bass line, then to the orchestral tutti violins, then back to the piano part again and watching his little face twitching and his eyes alight with excitement I could see with my own eyes what music did to him! You could practically see the sparks firing in his brain and his little legs going like the clappers… I got so excited to introduce him to my world of music. This was brilliant! And suddenly I found myself wishing everyone’s babies could have the same.

Serendipitously, when Gabs was six months old, my wish kind of came true! I was telling a friend at baby yoga how much I missed playing concerts and also how I felt that my new mum friends didn’t really know me because being a violinist was such a huge part of who I was, she had the brilliant idea of putting on a concert for them and their babies. So I did! In my living room, a bunch of my NCT friends and their babies watched my string quartet play Mozart and Dvorak and sat transfixed all the way through… My friends were gobsmacked at how these tiny babies listened. They literally sat on their bottoms and stared up at us, barely moving a muscle! I was impressed, but I’ve never been bothered about whether the babies moved or sat in silence or not. I find the way we adults listen to classical music, sitting stiffly in our seats, totally unnatural. I hate being in an audience instead of on stage because I can’t keep still! Who could listen to this knock-your-socks off piece without at least wiggling a toe?!

So, my music-play challenge to you is this: Put some classical music on the CD player or the radio, turn it up loud and then let your child react and see you react! Twirl them round, tap your toes, wrinkle up your face, throw some crazy shapes… because classical music throws up some amazing physical feelings and emotions in our bodies and we all ought to let ourselves be free to experience them! Not just sat in a seat in the concert hall. Classical music is for everybody, everywhere and no one is too young to love it!

In my next post I’ll talk you through a Classical Babies concert and explain just why I believe classical music is so meant to be for children.