Why a Mozart record intended for children?

Thank you, it would be nice to listen to the sounds of nature

https://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/2929-lee-piante-hanno-dimostrato-di-poter-emettere-alcuni-accordi-che-formano-una-sorta-di-melodia-ritmica-e-costante

fabio73 wrote:

Thank you, it would be lovely to listen to the sounds of nature and try to reorganize a sound universe drawn from this experience. There is something I would like to do before I die. Time will tell.

fabio73 wrote:

I realize now that the "gushing" has set in motion a multitude of thoughts.

There was no intention to complicate the discussion, on the contrary... I believe Mozart's music is "natural" and this undoubtedly catches us off guard.

I rely on instinct when I cannot catch all the threads with my mind, and with Mozart, I simply cannot. It is not a construction made of parts, but it is—the part!!

To put it briefly, I feel I understand it by listening to it, but I live within that very emotion; the same one that prevents me from deconstructing it. I believe this is why, even in moments of greatest expressiveness and depth, his music still appears to us as pure as it is simple.

Schubert also produces a similar effect for me, in a certain sense.

Blessed are you that it only happens to you with Mozart and Schubert—not being able to "catch all the threads."

In any case, I continue to think that if you truly wish to listen to the sounds of nature, the only solution is to venture into it, trying, as much as possible, to avoid any human "pollution."

In effect, the reference to Schubert, in this context, is truly apt. In his later years, Claudio Arrau stated in an interview: the ultimate problem of interpretation is Schubert. And then he corrected himself: in reality, the ultimate problem of interpretation is Mozart.

I am certainly not able to perform an exegesis of Arrau's thought, but I believe that - although presenting absolutely different difficulties - Schubert and Mozart are truly united by the same aura of mystery.

RedScharlach wrote:

Indeed, the reference to Schubert, in this context, is truly apt. In his later years, Claudio Arrau declared in an interview: the ultimate problem of interpretation is Schubert. And then he corrected himself: in reality, the ultimate problem of interpretation is Mozart.

I am certainly not able to perform an exegesis of Arrau's thought, but I believe that—while presenting absolutely different difficulties—Schubert and Mozart are truly united by the same aura of mystery.

Let us therefore go and discover Arrau's thought. In bold, I have highlighted the part that explains why Arrau considered Mozart—in particular—and Schubert to be the "ultimate problem."

Mozart is the very spirit of his time—of the convulsive 18th century. Within him, all the extraordinary momentum toward new and higher human goals, the vital force, the revolutionary courage, the capacity for invention and discovery—and faith in Humanity—are concentrated.

Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the 18th century as an era of upheaval and revolution. Together, however, let us also remember that it was the time that saw the birth of the ideal of freedom and the dignity of the person (unlike Haydn, Mozart was not willing to spend his life in livery, at court, and seated at the servants' table); that Goethe's *Werther* came out in 1774; that Maximilian Klinger's drama titled *Sturm und Drang* was printed in 1776 (and owes its name to an entire period of general restlessness and revolt—in conceptions of the world as well as in music and literature, long before the advent of the Romantic movement); that Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* saw the light of day in 1781. And what can be said of Voltaire, Rousseau, Beaumarchais? As for Mozart, not only was he a man of his time in all its multiple aspects, but he was so as a creator, as one who realizes his time in the fullest way and transforms it together into the timeless realm of great art.

Despite this, however, Mozart's greatness tends to be seen first and foremost as classical perfection, and classical perfection, according to a way of seeing that concerns us all somewhat, is somehow separated from the depth of human feelings. And it is precisely from here, naturally, that the trouble arises. What could be more absurd? Just the other day I happened to read somewhere a critique of a pianist because he played Mozart with too much... yes, nothing less than "with too much feeling." One needs all the possible feeling just to begin to understand Mozart's soul. Not only was Mozart all soul, and all feeling, and humanity (and he expresses this, and does nothing but repeat it, in everything he has written, said, or thought), but his very greatness arises precisely from being so fully and entirely human. In one person, he was Pamina and Tamino, Sarastro and Papageno. The human condition is expressed in Mozart in a way that is all the more touching precisely because suffering and tragedy are made to walk hand in hand, so to speak, with the musical style of his time—the rococo, the galant style, the symmetry of classical balance.

If it were not for the extraordinary fullness of his self-realization as a creator, one could almost say that Mozart (and with him Schubert) is the most tragic figure among the great composers. For him, tragedy was something that came from within, a part of the reality of his being and of his acceptance of life—and thus of death. In Mozart, contrary to Beethoven, there is no solution to tragedy. In Beethoven, the outcome of the heroic struggle is always an affirmation, a victory. But in Mozart, it is quite rare for tragic tension to lead to a victorious conclusion.

Mozartian literature for solo piano is still considered a sort of introduction to Beethoven, and is therefore given to be played, in most cases, by young students; and in this way, it almost always remains a closed book for them, and consequently for others. Like everything of Mozart's, however, this music requires the full maturity of an artist's meditation. Nothing less.

The piano was the principal instrument for Mozart. On it, Mozart was capable of improvising in such a way as to leave his contemporaries speechless, struck with amazement. For it, in his capacity as the greatest performer of his time, he wrote the most sublime symphonic compositions—the piano concertos. With it, throughout his life, he remained in confidence like a favored friend; from the beginning, and forever, it was the instrument of his most audacious creative flights.

And it is in music for solo piano that we can, for the first time, listen to the first intuitions of *Don Giovanni*, the great quartets, and the final symphonies; following the slow movements, one after another, we come to know the abyss of his despair, and from the pianistic music"}

of his later years, to a degree that is hard to find equal anywhere else in his production, we can perceive, and follow the traces of, the path of his entire evolution. Thus, in the succession of his final piano compositions, whether it be the two Sonatas K. 570 and 576, the Rondo K. 511, the Adagio K. 540 or the Sonata K. 533/494, the state of his mind and soul towards the end of his life reveals itself with almost insistent iteration. The struggle is now nearing its end, and everything is reduced to the essential in the naked purity of his contour lines, reaching the expressive spheres where everything is known and accepted, where extreme suffering and anguish stand naked, in solitude without fear.

The Piano Sonatas, from the six (K. 279-284) composed by him between the ages of seventeen and nineteen to the last one (K. 576) of 1789, narrate the story of Mozart's life. Almost from the beginning, he begins to fill the conventional forms of his era with the very blood of his own life. To the point of making them the internal testimonies of the totality of his being.

The first six are clearly works of youth. Mozart wrote them in Salzburg while preparing for his last great journey, which was to lead him to Munich, Mannheim and Paris in a further attempt to find a place suitable to his talents. The galant style pervades them all; but how much Mozart's genius sparkles through it! Almost all the slow movements foreshadow the sublime and tragic slow movements that will come in the future. The galant element never remains devoid of the redeeming breath of his genius. In particular, the first movement, splendidly expansive, of the Sonata in E-flat major K. 282, and the Sonata in D major K. 284, a large work, already predict the great things destined to come to fruition when a rich variety of new musical impressions and emotional experiences would strike him in Mannheim with the violence of an explosion.

From this fateful journey derive his subsequent seven Piano Sonatas (K. 309, 310, 311, which belong to Mannheim and Paris, and K. 330, 331, 332 and 333, linked to the return to Munich and Vienna) and also the completion of his first great opera, Idomeneo. All seven were published in Vienna, when his first great period of success was beginning to unfold. Six years would pass before he felt the need to write a piano sonata again, and this would happen at another decisive critical moment in his life.

The Sonata in A minor, K. 310, composed in Paris in the spring of 1778, is the most surprising among these seven, and constitutes one of the peaks of piano literature, unparalleled not only in that period, but in Mozart's entire production. It is a great tragic sonata. Tragic as the Symphony in G minor is, as Don Giovanni is. But it is also something more. Here tragedy is brought face to face with youthful revolt against fate and, as in the midst of a turbulent fever of crisis, Mozart throws everything to the wind, gallantry and culture together, and something new emerges, something surprising even for him—the pinnacle of human passion made art.

It is a grandiose sonata, romantic in every sense of the term, the true musical counterpart, several years before sonatas such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata, of the Sturm und Drang. Suffering is felt from the very beginning of the first movement, and for the first time there is no proper second theme, but only a sort of lateral figuration, as if it were impossible to arrest the torrent of wild passion for the usual requirements of form. In the development section, this flaming eruption expresses itself in the sudden alternations of fortissimo with pianissimo, in which Abert sees "sudden flashes of light that for an instant illuminate the black nocturnal darkness". In the central section of the slow movement, in the gasping of its breathless phrases, there are dissonances as strident as almost nowhere else in Mozart, and the final Presto, with its dramatic leaps and the use of thirds in the low register, with its wild cries wrung from pain, is almost demonic.

After the great Sonata in A minor, the one in C major K. 330 arrives not as an anti-climax, but as a necessary reaction. Intensity and passion had been expressed and exhausted in the first. The same can be said of the famous Sonata in A major K. 331 which, inspired by the "Moresque" vogue of the time, seeks a pleasant pleasure. But even in this sonata, which intends to be "light", there is never anything that is merely light; the galant element is always elevated by the personal one, and in the third variation, in minor, the personal becomes dark. There is a melancholic vein running through the entire composition,

and it is not a worse error than that of playing it as if it were a simple little joke and at great speed. In Mozart, it is precisely pieces of this genre, the most disarming ones, that most strongly require the ability to discern that inner core that is almost never lacking.

In the Sonata in F major K. 332, Mozart has given us a work that, if it does not reach the turbulence of the K. 310, is nonetheless personal, touching, and original. For St. Foix, the first movement is in the manner of Beethoven, and for Einstein, it has nothing Beethovenian about it. But it is simply Mozart, the Mozart in whom gallantry is transformed by dramatic flashes in the first movement, with its strange threatening accents that recall *Don Giovanni* and together make one think of Beethoven, and with the sublime slow movement, similar to a great aria from one of his suffering heroines, and with the magnificent final movement, full of incomparable modulations of extraordinary effectiveness. The Sonata in B-flat major K. 333, the last of the seven, now definitively shows us a new sense of tranquility, a new level of maturity, as can only be achieved after a great experience that has forced us to face all the accounts of our spiritual existence.

The five or six years that pass between the K. 333 and the Fantasy and Sonata in C minor were the years of Mozart's greatest success as a composer and pianist in Vienna. They are the years of his "academies" (paid concerts in his name), to which the aristocracy as well as the Viennese public flocked because they were fashionable, and during these years he wrote most of his piano concertos. But when his life reached a new moment of emotional upheaval, he returned to addressing the piano alone.

In my opinion, the Fantasy and Sonata in C minor, K. 475 and K. 457 (the first dated Vienna, May 20, 1785, and the other October 4, 1784), represent a crisis in Mozart's life not dissimilar to the one he encountered when he wrote the K. 310 in Paris. Mozart himself wanted the two pieces to be published together, and together they form an impressive unitary work, so much so that it is quite difficult to understand why it still happens so often that the two works are performed separately. Playing the sonata alone is like presenting a great drama amputated of its prologue. The dedication specifically by Mozart himself to the first edition reads: "Fantaisie et Sonate Pour le Forte-Piano composées pour Madame Therese de Trattnern par le Maitre de Chapelle W.A. Mozart. Oeuvre XI."

It is not precisely known to us what the relationship was between Mozart and his beautiful, gifted, and married pupil Therese von Trattnern, but we know that he sent her a letter containing instructions on how the piece should be performed. It has unfortunately been lost or destroyed (as have all the letters she sent to Mozart). The Fantasy could indeed have been composed on the very day the manuscript bears as its date, judging by the intensity and depth of feeling that animates its rich improvisatory flow. It seems like a small fantastic work, an entire world concentrated into five tiny scenes.

The Fantasy constitutes "a gigantic entrance arch" to the Sonata, to use St. Foix's words. And, as we can see in all three movements, they are elements taken from one to serve as the skeleton for the other. In the last movement, four times Mozart makes the melodic line of the left hand descend to the extreme bass of the keyboard. And it is a mysterious thing, it even has something grotesque about it, like a descent into the abyss. He does the same thing four times in the first movement and twice in the second, and three times he repeats it in the Fantasy. There must be a symbolic meaning.

The symbolism of this piece mutates into the grim reality of the works for solo piano written in his final years. The sense of tragedy and the suffering of life mutate into resignation and the premonition of death. Almost all of his last great compositions for solo piano bear the marks of this last strange phase of his creative evolution. There is still the tremendous Sonata in F major K. 533/494 to consider. The Rondo K. 494 is from June 1786, just over a year after the Fantasy in C minor, and the *Allegro* and *Andante* date back to January 1788. As with the Fantasy and Sonata, it is Mozart himself who paired the previous Rondo with the more recent *Allegro* and *Andante* compositions to make them a single work.

The *Allegro* and the *Andante* have the breadth of polyphonic respiration and harmonic audacity that so characterize this zenith of his creative life. The height of perception touched by the *Andante* is something incredible even for Mozart. The Rondo, with its three-part trio in F minor, concludes this entire majestic and ineffable wide composition with a

a new cadence that reconnects everything together and manages to make, in its own specific way, one of the highest results he ever achieved in any musical genre.

The Sonata in C major K. 545, which precedes K. 570 and 576, is commonly considered an "easy" sonata, or "kleine," as is written in many of its editions. Mozart himself wrote "for the use of beginners." Yet nothing could be more misleading, because while it is simple enough to play, it is anything but easy to interpret. Composed in June 1788, it is entirely permeated by a sense of an ending, especially in the slow movement, and is written entirely for the soul of a child. This is the final Mozart, simple and profound at once, to be taken seriously and certainly not lightly. Seen in this light, this becomes another sonata - a revelation.

The last two piano sonatas, the one in B-flat major K. 570, and the one in D major K. 576, are so to speak the conclusion of a spiritual experience. In the B-flat one, in particular (the D major one is more of a galant sonata), Mozart strips his pianistic construction down to almost its barest outlines and, in a tone of abstract remote distance, of solitary farewell, pushes into one last plunge into the very painful roots of being in the world.

And finally: I always wonder why on earth I perform all the ritornellos, which in Mozart after all is not as obligatory as in Beethoven, who is more volitional. I do it because it is so beautiful. It withstands repetition, and in fact, it almost always strengthens the structure and the greatness of the expression. And then it is important to keep in mind that Mozart is timeless - timeless beyond "authentic period instruments," but not beyond an authentic performance practice, which is part of his voice and his expression. Timeless beyond every single interpretation, but not beyond the interpretation of feeling, sense, and transcendence that belong to him eternally.

danielescarpetti wrote:

I don't have the exact phrase at hand, but Hegel regarding Rossini

Rossini represents the right balance between Form and Content

danielescarpetti wrote:

perhaps due to his old age and the stupidity that it often causes, he much preferred Rossini's Figaro to Mozart's.

I fear it is not a case of senile dementia ...but rather of philosophical orientation, while remaining certain that this does nothing to diminish one's own tastes; besides, the philosophical means can also be seen as a way to "justify/motivate" one's own point of view and indeed it can happen that different philosophers express extremely contrasting opinions on the same works.

Frank wrote:

I fear it is not a case of senile dementia... but rather of philosophical orientation, while maintaining that this nothingness cannot take away from one's own tastes; moreover, the philosophical means can also be seen as a way to "justify/motivate" one's point of view and indeed it can happen that different philosophers express extremely contrasting opinions on the same works.

The reasoning Hegel expressed to justify his preference was clearly self-ironic. It could very well be that behind this preference there were also philosophical motivations, but I presume that the choice was more related to musical and theatrical tastes than anything else.

In any case, my motivations are certainly limited to the latter, since from a musical point of view there isn't a single moment of Rossini's Barber that I don't like or that, theatrically speaking, bores me; whereas I cannot say the same for Mozart's Figaro, where despite some somewhat boring theatrical moments, musically speaking it saves itself—from the standpoint of my tastes—with the most famous "Dove andrai farfallone amoroso" and, in particular, all the arias sung by Cherubino... and little else here or there.

That said, even if in this regard the discussion did not develop as I would have liked, and given that Arrau is Arrau and I... am but a simple consumer of classical music, I wish to specify that his thinking regarding Mozart's piano Sonatas does not find me in agreement with a large part of his reasoning.

I very much like the distinction he makes regarding the Mozartian and Schubertian approach to music compared to the Beethovenian one where, as can be seen, nothing stands out that recalls nature or the natural, as has been evoked in various previous interventions, but rather a different characterological and philosophical distinction is highlighted between the two Austrians and the German; I can only share his thought regarding Sonata K 310, the true maximum peak of Mozartian piano sonatism. While I find absolutely unconvincing the part concerning the pre-Parisian Sonatas, as they are still very much tied to a very conventional galant style. As for the post-K 310 Sonatas, one can only recognize a certain relevance in them, but in these Mozart no longer reaches the levels he had already reached and which he instead reaches again only in the Fantasy K 475

I am pleased to share the reflections of a great musician on the subject we discussed some time ago.
Alexander Lonquich
September 28 at 7:11 PM · Florence, Tuscany ·

REGARDING THE NATURE IN MUSIC

What lies behind the fact that when musicians who esteem each other meet, the premise for being able to play together consists of a shared “syntactic” code, felt point by point and certainly not merely theorized? Capable, when tackling works of the past, of making the group recognize, if necessary—beyond perhaps the generic dynamics present in the score—the ability to feel together undoubtedly when it comes to growing or diminishing, even regarding microscopic events, by leaning on certain values more than others? To perceive a piece's tensive evolution, catching peaks and valleys until identifying its climax and perhaps its subsequent flowing away? To have the sensation of catching the right time, precise rhythmic relationships, being able to agree on subtleties of articulation, beyond the approximation of the writing and the rigidities present in the metronomic indications? To identify in many cases the need for various agogic freedoms and possible rubatos, making convincing, moreover, the continuous shifts of balance within the sonic texture between the horizontal flow of individual voices and the vertical density as a harmonic result, certainly taking into account reverberations, knowing that every acoustics requires slightly different timings? And, finally, to perceive clearly the expressiveness of individual intervals, one by one, intuiting, for example, at a basic level what distinguishes the “objectivity” of a fourth or fifth from the affective action intrinsic to the lived experience combined with a third or sixth, metaphorizing steps regarding ascending major seconds or perhaps feeling laments reverberate in descending minor seconds?

The temptation to want to assert without a doubt that in human nature all this is Platonically predisposed and simply to be recognized is great, which would probably trigger the mockery and anger of the majority of those who today conduct aesthetic and philosophical research in the field. As an active musician, I have by no means the pretension or ambition to give judgments in this regard. However, as a working hypothesis, that search for breathing together based on a common feeling—so often rewarded by the good results described above—works egregiously. Perhaps comparative disciplines have already demonstrated through careful analysis of music far from our cultural area that a “universal” sharing does not exist; for example, that the psychology of sonic communication in the traditional music of Aborigines does not correspond at all to ours. It remains, however, evident that for us, the intuitive approach combined with the capacity for analysis is the compass. And it seems it may have been even more so in the past; one only needs to think of Renaissance and Baroque affect theory, or the practical explications in eighteenth-century treatises.
However, it must also be observed that, I would say clearly starting from the last decades of the 1700s, the growing tendency toward maximum subjectification in composing pushed some authors to abandon the previous naturalness of a common approach, at least within their own geographical area, to throw themselves into hand-to-hand combat with what previously seemed a universal law. And so we find the thousand strained sforzandos followed by a piano immediately in Beethoven, as if he wanted to bend to his will, in a much more accentuated manner than his immediate predecessors, that which was previously entrusted to the occurrence of a “natural” flow, inaugurating a hitherto unprecedented game with melodic and harmonic tensions. Intensifying the discourse also rhythmically, up to prescribing a strong separation from the previous one at every half-measure in the fugato of the last movement of the Ninth, a vocal and instrumental effect that is almost percussive, an expression of Dionysian feeling.
Later, particularly in Schumann and Mahler, music will be written increasingly to comment on other music, thus breaking the illusion of the psychological unity of a single piece. One can no longer bask in the illusion of formal and emotional immanence. Allusions from external sources (self-citations, allusions, and citations in general) confirm that we are required to turn our gaze outside the garden in which we were previously so well acclimatized. The composer's indication on how to play a passage will have maximum importance. In Schumann, these can be quite imaginative: Wie aus der Ferne (as if from afar), Ungeduldig (impatient), Sehr rasch und in sich hinein (very fast and turned inward), Etwas hahnbüchen (a bit nonsensical, crooked). The "Innere"

"Voice" (internal/inner voice), for an auditory experience that is purely chimerical, in the Humoreske, modifies the approach to the voices present. Furthermore, returning to steps already heard, the young Schumann loves to modify the dynamics and articulation of many details, almost as if obeying an instantaneous whim. And, indeed, he leads us through a game of mirrors and reflections to recognize his own previous works and those of others, to identify real and imaginary characters and events through the means of his own personal musical cryptography. This leads us out of the well-defined space of the completed work, encouraging the mind to weave complementary, sometimes even supplementary, plots.

The warning "Mit Parodie" (parodistically) referring to the band-like evocation of the third tempo of Mahler's First definitively breaks the illusion of a musically self-sufficient form, which was already compromised in other ways at the time through the blurring of genres in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and the use of associative techniques in the symphonic poem. As has been said many times, starting from Adorno, Mahler often cultivates from the beginning the "as if," the insertion of foreign elements, not intrinsic to an organic discourse, to such an extent as to cast doubt on whether such a discourse can still exist. The apparent "already heard" dominates his constructions, even if it deviates greatly from the models suggested to us as a foothold. The initial theme of the Fourth, derived from Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, finds no real correspondence in the named authors. His hyper-precise indications irrevocably testify to the shift of the ground upon which the creator moves, delivering to us the result of his elaborations; he has become a kind of theatrical director of his own work, already so far removed from this in comparison to the otherwise opposite worlds of Bruckner and Brahms.

Yes, Brahms: he makes the final effort to keep formal immanence intact, but all the splendid melancholy housed in his extremely dense work seems to result from a precise hermeneutic intent: to constitute itself as a late commentary on a world destined not to remain perceptively whole. There will then be many authors up to the present day tending to re-establish in new forms equilibria that are purely internal to the musical occurrence, making a clean slate of all previous experiences like the first serialists, or instead seeking to conquer a "new" naturalness of writing. But it seems evident to me that the "original sin" of a collectively occurred perceptive split is irrevocable.

How can the performer (by this I also mean the reader of scores and the listener) react to this? In my opinion, by trying to go to the heart of every single author's writing, grasping not only what corresponds to an idea of performative naturalness, but also the corners and edges, where the Schubert or Debussy in question has entered into a perceptive contradiction with the surrounding environment, where their personal grammar had the fortune of altering the generally shared grammar. Perhaps the group of kindred musicians evoked above will be able to organically identify even those particularities that escape every type of universal law that for many centuries seemed to dominate the art of composing. Including locatable linguistic, "dialectal" specificities.

But there is something more: I often read indignant comments about many operations of juxtaposition between elements that are very far from one another. Whether it be, for example, operatic stagings very far from the authors' prescriptions or unusual pairings of videos with well-known music—in short, all the postmodern mess, including actual vertical falls in taste and style. Often this indignation of ours is fully justified, especially when the commercial intent of an operation is evident. However, let us not forget that we cannot live in a mental Arcadia; it wouldn't even be desirable. The apparently distant is around the corner; we are the first to continuously project ourselves toward chains of unprecedented associations. Creating synaptic bridges is a purely human activity. Why be surprised if this happens in artistic and interpretive practice? The quality of the lived experience counts. A work will begin at one moment and end at a subsequent one; our attitude toward unifying the lived experience goes far beyond that short duration, and will certainly not be delimited by it. Therefore, if we are musicians, the concrete performance with all its merits and defects in that moment is the most tangible part of our activities, the only one that the listener can evaluate and perhaps make their own, but there are many perceptive layers that do not coincide with that span of time, keeping us constantly in motion. Let them come. Something fragmentary will persist.

anyway, even in an apparently complete way of expressing oneself. And that is where we will find the next hook.

Hello everyone, I'm jumping in...
I have a new TV that lets me watch YouTube, and I am a new dad.
I have searched, also driven by those studies on children (which, among other things, I don't believe), for Mozart music to play for my little one, but it hasn't always attracted his attention. In these cases, once one piece of music finished, another had to be found. Searching for "Mozart for children" yields videos made by people who don't know anything about it.

Prosseda, probably with the same problem as me but a musician, has put together an album that meets certain characteristics. Likewise, he has offered the "product" in a new packaging. I almost want to ask: why only now?

Regarding children's tastes, I don't think we understand them. Mine can show attention to a piece that we consider difficult to listen to and ignore a catchy Mozart track. Sometimes I think he is attracted more to the musicians than to the music. In the following track, he shows attention at the beginning, then it wanes, but then it returns when the castanets come in:

If he sees the piano keyboard, he looks at it enchanted, even if it were Prokofiev, but let's consider that children are attracted to strong color contrasts. They prefer an old black and white Zecchino d'Oro song over its modern edition with a very colorful video. They prefer a black remote control to a multicolored toy, yet it is taboo to create black toys.

Two curiosities:
- The other night on that TV I mentioned, Beethoven's Ninth conducted by Muti started playing; you know, one video ends and another begins, and if it's not good, you have to change it; that's what I wanted to do that time, but he was watching it... he was calmer than usual even though he wasn't watching the TV for the entire duration of the symphony, which is difficult for many adults. He isn't even a year old yet.
- When he is very agitated and won't sleep (because he was at his little cousins'... he saw fireworks...), no track makes him fall asleep like this one, ever since he was a month old; perhaps the percussion "stuns" him:

Open content (youtube)

Open content (youtube)

I remember that Frank had dedicated a topic to music to dedicate to little ones, but I can't find it

It would be nice if you could propose it

I remember that Frank had dedicated a topic to music to dedicate to little ones, but I can't find it

It would be nice if you could propose it

https://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/7076-primi-ascolti/

Thanks, I will try the pieces even if perhaps for him there is still no clear distinction between music suitable for children or adults, so I try a little bit of everything or almost (the ninth was an "accident" as I described above; I wanted to interrupt it, but his reaction surprised me: he doesn't know how to walk and was climbing onto the small table to look while standing... perhaps the orchestra attracts him, but I don't think that alone is enough).

This, moreover, allows me to be selfish and choose a piece because I like it

I want to clarify that I wrote my post off-topic, because when I reached the bottom of the first page I saw the text box. I hadn't noticed that after that first page there were 3 others (which I read later), and that the discussion had taken a completely different direction from the initial one.