Music

Tuneful Tuesday: The 1970s

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Welcome to this week’s instalment of Tuneful Tuesday.

Today I’ve chosen to take the Oh Waily kids down Memory Lane into the ‘way out’ 1970s.
Disco, glam rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, soul, jazz, punk, R & B, new wave… oh so many genre choices!

I narrowed it down to a few of my favourites, and added in a couple of extras courtesy of some feedback one of our lovely ‘followers’ over at our Facebook page suggested.  I can see that this time period is going to need to be revisited at some point to cover those great songs, singers and bands that we’ve missed this time around.

You can find the full play list here on YouTube.  Enjoy!

And here’s what the Oh Waily Kids thought of it all:

On seeing “YMCA” from The Village People:

“Hey, the minions dressed up like them.”

This didn’t stop Master Oh bouncing around to the song and saying, ‘That was quite good wasn’t it Mum?’, and Miss Oh calling it “the Gru song”.

Miss Oh wanted to share a pun with me too… apparently we should call it “Gru-vy music!”

All-in-all the Oh Waily kids weren’t really taken with this decade.  Master Oh did dance a little bit to other songs, but perhaps they just felt like doing other things today instead of dancing.  After all, one of their all-time favourites was in this list… ‘Hot Legs’, and they didn’t even turn their heads from what they were doing when it came on.

Based on that I’m not giving up hope that they will come to like one or two other songs. There’s still the remainder of the week with this as our background music so something might click for them.  If things develop further I’ll come back with an update.

In the meantime I need to head over to iTunes and see if I can find “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” since that doesn’t appear to be going out of fashion any time soon.  (Seriously, you should go listen to it with your kids… it’s ridiculously catchy.)

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Music with rocks in

/ Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

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.