Today at the Patch I’ve been instructed to choose ‘Rock’ music for our new area of exploration, hence the name of this post.  Not sure about the ‘pop culture’ reference?  It’s a very stout nod to my favourite of favourite places, The Discworld.  In this case it’s Soul Music.

Anyway, I digress.  Back to the music.
We’ve been doing this exploration on and off for a while and have nice playlists for a variety of Classical music and the very favourite Boogie Woogie.  Most of them are tracks in our digital library, and the Boogie Woogie is online at our YouTube channel.

So far I have managed to entice them to listen to the following bits and bobs.

Baroque

• Vivaldi, The 4 Seasons
• Handel, Music For The Royal Fireworks

Romantic

• Beethoven, ‘Moonlight’ Sonata
• Chopin, Waltz in D-Flat Major, Op 64 No 1 ‘Minute Waltz’
• Wagner, The Valkyrie: Ride of the Valkyries
• Strauss, On the Beautiful Blue Danube
• Tchaikovsky, 1812 Festival Overture
• Grieg, Peer Gynt Suite  (In the Hall of the Mountain King is THE favourite piece here – and it has to be loud enough that we entertain the neighbourhood, as well as run crazy around the living room)
• Elgar, “Pomp and Circumstance” March No.1 in D

Modern Classical

• Prokofiev, “Peter and the Wolf”

Boogie Woogie

• Dr John & Jools Holland – Four hands boogie
• Silvan Zingg – “Dancin’ the Boogie”

And naturally the kids are exposed to our own musical preferences and therefore seem to have taken rather too well to The B-52s and “Planet Claire”.

Ah well, as an eclectic home educator I’m pretty happy to say that musically they’re definitely developing an eclectic taste in music – and are happily creating an array of quirky and expressive dance moves to go with them.

I need to confess to being pretty musically illiterate, and learning as I go along with this.  I have eclectic taste in music and have plans to explore jazz, blues, and soul in the next few months.
If any of you are musically knowledgable I’d love to hear what genre and individual pieces you would be introducing to your kids and why.  Please leave a comment if there’s something you or your kids love to listen to.

Happy “Patch Music Day” to you all.

• short note for clarity…
  this list is not the entire list of music my kids have heard!  These are the pieces I’ve chosen to give some sort of representation to the genre or sub-genre of music we’ve chosen to listen to each month.  We listen to plenty of other stuff too.