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Sarah Canice Funke
- Children's Music
The music we listen to as children sticks with us and can bring back floods of memories whenever we hear it again in our adult lives. For me personally I remember dancing around my living room to Waltz of the Fairies and the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky’s
The Nutcracker. The lilting rhythms of the waltz and the powerfully driving force of the Russian Dance inspired me to move and turn in time to the music.
Peter and the Wolf introduced me to the ways of weaving narrative and music together in order to tell an engaging story, and I even had my piano teacher find an orchestral reduction of the music to stretch my own developing piano skills. I learned about the different instruments in the orchestra (like how to tell a flute from a piccolo) in Benjamin Britten’s
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Not only was I learning how to distinguish instruments, though; I was learning how to enjoy the vast variety of sound available to a composer.
Does anyone out there have some favorite memories of the music you enjoyed as a child and still occasionally play to relive past experiences?