Growing Up With Music

Posted by Vulnadia on Jan 06, 2011 at 09:02 AM The fine arts post got me to thinking & thinking A LOT about some things. This morning, on the way to school, in an attempt to get the babies out of the bad mood their terribly 16 teenage big brother had put them in, I found myself teaching them a new song... That's when it struck me, we do things differently at my house...Do-re-mi...do you know what that is, where it comes from? I was shocked to find that not everyone knows, not everyone grew up the way I did...I thought EVERYONE grew up watching musicals on the tele, listening to the soundtracks on their record players (the mp3 player of its time, revolutionary, I promise!) Sadly, tis not the case...Not knowing any different, I accepted all of the musical & operetta movies as kid-fare growing up-I watched My Fair Lady & pined to grow up to be Eliza when I grew up (& almost was once in high school but due to age had to settle for the youngest girl in the grown-up chorus) I knew my Sound of Music and could tell you which songs got cut when they edited the final movie for tv...and always wondered why... At 5, I enjoyed and quite purposefully stayed up to see the end of Zefferelli's Romeo & Juliet, and tried desperately to play the love theme from it on mum's baby grand to no avail (I would be 13 before I was able to find & read the sheet music well enough, but it was quite an achievement in my mind since I'd only been trying to suss it out forever!) But, sadly, not everyone thinks of letting their little ones watch these things, doesn't think that they will like it, or take to it or accept it or I don't know what...so kids grow up not ever having known the Von Trapps...or singing in the tub about how they are "Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair" or knowing quite well "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" or that the proper song to sing while dancing round that fountain is "Do-re-mi"... And it's a shame...an awful shame, because kids LOVE LOVE LOVE music...and the first & most accepted thing a baby does is want & love for you to sing to them...and what better source of songs to sing than ones from musicals and operas? Sure, they haven't a clue as infants what Les Mis is, or Cats or Phantom or that their favourite lullaby is actually from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Origin of Love is beautiful & one of my favourite things to sing to mine even now) but once a child is old enough to watch tv and you pop in a DVD of one of those musicals & or operas, they become enraptured...tis magical...and the best part is they are learning! You don't have to like it, you don't even have to watch if you don't want to, but there are musicals & operas for every taste just as there are tv shows...in fact this is how Kian came by his life of piracy... He watched Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates Of Penzance, and later the kooky 80's version The Pirate Movie, and he and his sibs learned EVERY LAST WORD of both...they could perform it for ya today if you wanted...& they often reproduce it in the backyard, at the park & in their nursery... When Bregon was 5, he wanted to be "Ralpheo" which was his way of lumping the actor with the part from Lurman's version of Romeo & Juliet...but he LOVED that movie for some reason & as a result loves his Shakespear (all of it, sonnets & plays) even to this very day. My daughter watched The Wizard of Oz, and roots for Margaret Hamilton to win, EVERY time because she also has a copy of The Wicked that I somehow found online...she loves both equally, and can tell you the