Give them roots and wings

Elkan and Elias do not get to go to the library very often nowadays.  So when I go to the library, I would search for books related to their areas of interest.  Since Elias has recently started music lessons, I now look for books on music.

I found this amazing book – Can You Hear It – which effectively introduces children to both classical music and classical art.  It contains thirteen masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and thirteen tracks of matching “pictorial classical music”.

For example, this is a painting of the streets, with cars, horses and pedestrians.  The accompanying music was “An American in Paris”.  The book tells the reader that “french horns and actual car horns make these noises”.  Readers are told to listen to “horses, clomping in and around the traffic, played by the woodblock” and to the “people, rushing by on the side-walk, played by the xylophone”.

Here is another example.  The painting is “Ocean Life” and the accompanying music is “The Carnival of the Animals: The Aquarium”.  The book tells the reader that “the flute and the violins play the fish, using soft clusters of notes, to show the fishes’ graceful movements underwater”.  Readers are told to listen to “the bubbles, rising to the surface in a zigzag motion, played by the pianos” and to the “sunlight, shining down from above, played by the gentle ringing of the glockenspiel shortly before the end of the piece”.

The book also tells us more about the painters and the composers.

It also tells us more about each piece of instrument in the orchestra.

We finished listening to the thirteen pieces of music over a twenty minutes car journey.  The children enjoyed it.  It was very interesting for Edmund and myself too.

An artist captures a scene at a moment in time, and through painting it on a canvas, freezes it for a future audience.  Similarly a classical music composer writes a timeless story through various instruments of the orchestra.  Each of them comes alive when we look at or listen to them.  It is wonderful seeing both of them come together.

The children only wanted to listen to the thirteen tracks of music once.  However, for that twenty minutes, we shared the vision which great artists and composers of the past had of the world.  We also shared it with millions of others past and future whose hearts and minds were, and will similarly be captured.

To me, that is the value of art.  It is to share in the beauty of the world with kindred spirits, regardless of when or where.