Musical Teatime and the Music Animation Machine

This term we have been having a musical teatime on Fridays instead of our usual daily poetry teatime. We take our tea tray and go upstairs and sit in front of the big screen and watch YouTube. I decided to focus on Johann Sebastian Bach this term. We started with a lot of organ music, because the boys love their Opa's big organ. At some point we stumbled across Stephen Malinowski's Music Animation Machine,and SA was hooked. Check this out!

I love it myself, too. I think it's because it's a visual representation of what I hear in a much more direct way than a musical score is. Read about it at the Music Animation Website. I find it fascinating!

The boys enjoy watching live performances as well. Here's one they really enjoyed, on the largest church pipe organ in the world. My sensibilities were a bit offended by all the ostentation (Isn't a pipe organ beautiful without the garish lights?), but my children didn't mind that. JJ noticed that it had more stops than Opa's organ. (Ha!)


We also borrowed a CD from the library called "Mr. Bach Comes to Call." The story was fanciful and the quality was a bit spotty, but it had some good pieces of music on it. Another plus is that SA seems to have been inspired to practice more and more on the piano.