Music (classical and other genres): Songs named 1st?

I want to really encourage you to, in most cases, stay AWAY from “best of” cd’s and get the REAL music.  Listening to a “Best Of” cd would be like reading only a “best chapters of” Little House.  Or only reading fragments of The Little Princess.  Or doing a picture study of the lower left corner of the painting only!!!  Why bother?  Good art should not be chopped into bits.  Get ONE good recording of a complete work by the artist.  Listen to it several times at lunchtime.  Tell the children the title of the piece and then just listen.  Next time ask the children if they can identify when the music changes movements.  Then tell them the names of the movements.  They will learn so much more about the work, about the artist, this way.  They will learn to identify music from an artist much better in this way than if you just throw tidbits at them, even if you could name the tidbits as you tossed.

We like the Vox CDs too.  We usually start with that as our first intro to the composer, then we move on from there listening to the actual pieces…but admittedly this is not an area of our schooling that I’m very consistent with.   

Another website to look into is classical cat:  http://www.classiccat.net

Jen – those “Rise of the Masters” compilations are a really great price!

Gina – I’m new at this and we’re just starting out (early years – 1st grade) but here is what I picked up for our music study this year:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000058HV/ref=oh_details_o01_s01_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1.  They have several different ones and are a pretty good price, and also have good reviews.  I plan to buy more with my next Amazon order.  Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven are $6-7, while other composers like Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, and Handel are around $3.  They seem like a good intro.

I still hold that the entire work is far superior.  I did not even begin to get a feel for a composer’s true voice until I began frequently listening to whole works.  “TV commercial” snippets just do not convey the entire heft and feel of a composition.  Do compare to picture study.  What if we only cut out a portion of a painting?  Just Mona Lisa’s smile and nothing else?  Would we know as much about da Vinci?  Of course not.  And, further, what if we used a blurry black and white copy of the painting?  Would that do as well as a good quality color reproduction?  No, of course not.  (Of course, there is no real substitute for seeing the work in person!) Similarly, good quality recordings of an entire work are just fundamentally different.  They don’t have to be expensive–I get most of mine at swapacd.com  One good quality symphony is a better experience than an entire stack of chopped bits of indifferent quality.

I agree — the whole work is by far best.  However, just like people’s names get all jumbled up in your mind, so do tunes and composer’s names.  So, those Beethoven’s Wig CDs are just the ticket for learning to associate which tune with which composer.  Another way to solidify the tune with the compose is to give the back story…in other words, using biographies, living books, etc.

I use the Beethoven’s Wig CDs once or twice a week, when we’re learning about a new composer.  I play the “real”, entire work first for several days.  Then we listen to the Wig version once or twice a week — just enough to get some of the words to stick in their heads.  The whole time, we’re listening to the entire work (or just one movement, depending).  

I’m amazed at how my girls can tell composers apart.  Of course, we listen to classical music when I’m driving (if we’re not listening to a story) and they’re subjected to my favorite game – “Guess the composer or the time period”.  Sometimes they’re right! And we’ve not even studied that particular compser.