🎵 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC: Happy Birthday Bach!

Take a “little” homeschool time today to introduce your students to a four-minute musical masterpiece, the Little Fugue, written by one of the world’s greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born on this day in 1685.

Here’s a beautiful version of the Little Fugue played by Stephen Malinowski and presented in what I think is a really captivating manner for kids: a graphical animation of the notes with their pitches and durations.

And here’s another version of the Little Fugue performed by Jonathan Scott in what might be called its natural habitat: the organ loft of a church. (Much of Bach’s music was church music written for the pipe organ, “the king of instruments.”) The video does a good job of showing the complex operation of the organ, which requires the performer to exercise not only both hands, but both feet as well.

And here’s the Little Fugue again, but arranged this time in a very different way for a saxophone quartet by Staff Sergeant David Parks of the United States Army Field Band.

If any of those performances catch your students’ attention, there’s a whole universe of Bach available online — more than enough to convert today’s little homeschool lesson into a week-long music festival of your own devising.

As one next step, you could watch this wonderful 14-minute educational performance of a Bach concerto by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, complete with a detailed musical introduction from a young Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), and with a very young Glenn Gould (1932–1982) — one of Bach’s greatest twentieth-century interpreters — at the piano.

And here’s a remarkable thing for your students to observe: Gould plays the entire piece with no sheet music. He kept every note, every inflection, all in his head.

What musical discoveries have you made and what artistic anniversaries will you and your students be marking in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: The “Noted Personalities” section of your recommended world almanac includes several lists of famous musical composers and performers. Why not use those lists and make up an impromptu homeschool research project: have your students copy out the names of composers from different centuries, or from different countries, and find examples of their music online. Can your students get a sense for how musical styles changed from century to century? Are there distinct national styles that they can recognize? Do they have a preference for one style or time period over another? 🎵

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