Journal: News & Comment

Play that fuguey music, white girl

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Is quality music really timeless? I think so.

My youngest daughter, who is four, likes to put on music and dance around the living room. Her favourite song? Nothing by Barney, or the Wiggles, or Charlotte Diamond. Given the choice, she'll set up Rondo Alla Turca, the final three-minute movement of Mozart's Sonata No. 11 in A major, written in 1783. It's the seventh demo setting on our Korg digital piano, and she now knows by heart the key combinations to start it.

Both she and her sister like other demo tracks on the piano as well, but the ones they prefer are by Mendelssohn, Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin. They don't mind Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" (from 1902) either. But most of the remaining tracks, which are anonymous demos written specifically for the Korg piano, don't do much for them—or for me. So maybe well-written music transcends age and era.

Then again, both kids do like a particularly cheesy electric piano demo track that sounds like a watered-down TV theme from the late '80s. So I could be wrong.

 |