In case you haven’t picked up on it -- we love exploring great classical music with young children! Over the past year, we’ve created music courses and packed our YouTube channel full of active listening activities featuring composers including Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and many more!

We also share activities in an audio-only format on our podcast.  Search "Clap for Classics" wherever you listen or go here.   Episode 23 features Handel's Water music.  We've also got a free printable of the string and brass families that accompanies this activity.  You can grab the freebie at www.clapforclassics.com/episode23.

In today’s video, we share a famous piece called Water Music written by George Frideric Handel. It’s our first time featuring Handel’s music, so we thought we’d share a bit about the composer and the context of the piece below.

Handel was a composer from Germany living in London in 1717. King George was throwing a huge party on the river Thames, and he asked Handel to compose a grand piece of music specifically for the occasion. 50 musicians would perform on a boat trailing behind the king’s boat. Partygoers would listen from the King’s boat, their own boats, and the shore.

Water Music was actually comprised of 3 suites -- each suite in a different key, and containing multiple movements. All together, Water Music takes about an hour to perform! Today we’re sharing the “Alla Hornpipe” movement from the Suite No. 2 in D Major.

In today’s video we hope you and your little(s) enjoy the lego stop-motion re-enactment of King George’s party on the river, brought to you by Elizabeth’s talented teenage daughters! Next, we dive into the music, encouraging kids to listen and respond to the themes played in alternation by the string families and the brass families.

The king loved this music so much that he asked for it to be performed at least 3 times! (I hope those musicians were well-paid!) We hope you listen to this music again and again too, giving your child the opportunity to learn and appreciate this music more and more as it becomes familiar.

Here are a few ideas for how you could extend the learning and the fun from this video:

• Teach your child about an orchestra -- show pictures of the full orchestra, or watch some YouTube videos of great orchestral performances.
• Teach your children about the instruments of the string family, and the instruments of the brass family. (We have some amazing resources inside our membership to help you with this, but you can also just google it and search YouTube for samples of professional musicians performing on each instrument for a good start!) You could even download our freebie: pictures of the two instrument families, and have your child point to them or hold them up when they hear them in the music.
• Imaginative play: Have fun with this piece by pretending to a) be the King, hosting the party (construction paper crown?), or b) attend a fancy party on a boat (put on a fancy shirt, hat, or necklace and lay out a quilt for a “boat” where you can also serve some “fancy snacks”)
• Learn more about composer George Frederich Handel from Alice at “Baby Loves Baroque” - find simple facts, pictures, and a video of a great performance on her blog.

What your child is learning:

• Active engagement with a piece of classical music
• Instrument identification: string family and brass family
• Musical concept of form (ABA)
• Body awareness
• Gesture imitation and use
• Noticing similarities and differences/discrimination

Join us in our All Access Membership and get immediate access to a library of activities like this one, click here!