Children’s music

All just child’s play?

Far from it. Would you call Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” child’s play? With its first documented performance having taken place at a girl’s school in Chelsea, this work is regarded as the first ever opera for schools. What about Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel”, Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” or Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony”? Likewise such contrasting pieces as Claude Debussy’s “Children’s Corner”, with its charmingly self-effacing dedication “To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows”, and Anny Roth-Dalbert’s “Trio for Flute, Violin and Piano”, which she wrote at the age of 91 for her great-grandchildren Res, Barbara and Michi, can hardly be dismissed as childish frivolities.

Music for children?

Distant memories will instantly resurface for many Swiss people, who as children would have leafed through “The Great Song Book” illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, and every single one of them probably sang the nursery rhyme “All My Little Ducklings”. The 1927 edition displayed in the exhibition adds a subliminally educational aspect to the pictures: the ducklings replicate the notes in the melody, with the larger ones denoting crotchets and the smaller ones quavers. Alfred Felder’s “Water Plays”, commended by the European String Teachers Association, bring children into contact with contemporary music.

Intended for teaching, Johannes Fries’s “Synopsis” bears striking similarities to a modern-day introduction to music theory by Josef Röösli and Walter Keller-Löwry (1975). The songs of Hans Georg Nägeli, who applied Pestalozzi’s ideas to music, were also written for schools, as were the several generations of modern songbooks in the exhibition and “We’re off to the Zoo”, published by the Zurich Songbook Institute and performed by Cabaret Rotstift with the Schlieren Children’s Choir. Rudolf Schoch’s recorder course and Carl Orff’s “Instrumentarium” are also sure to bring back vivid memories.

Music by children?

Music for children has often involved kids themselves in the creative process, examples being the illustrations by schoolchildren in “We’re off to the Zoo” and the ten canons with lyrics by children in “The Rooster Flies onto the Roof”. The first opera by Othmar Schoeck, who set Karl May’s “Treasure of the Silver Lake” to music when he was about fifteen, shows how younger and older children often choose themes that are close to their hearts. His brother Walter wrote the libretto. The diversity of young talent across the full range of musical fields is reflected in the fact that only a minority of the child composers featured in the exhibition went on to have careers in the same discipline. Besides pianist and composer Wladimir Vogel, we find Beethoven scholar Willy Hess, German language and literature expert Emil Staiger and a trio of conductors: Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer and Hermann Hans Wetzler.

Music by children for children?

Of course, children’s music is not limited to games and lessons. Children also perform in their own right, often for an audience of children, be it by the Christmas tree, at a school opera or – perhaps more commonly these days – in a musical. There is a long tradition here stretching from Henry Purcell via Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith to contemporary composers. Alongside the Schlieren Children’s Choir, the exhibition features “Smudge and the Cat’s Festival in the Schoolhouse” by Alfred Felder and Dieter Jordi’s Christmas piece “Light of the World”.

Music by children for children and adults!

This journey through the world of children’s music has something for everyone – children and adults alike. The memories will come flooding back.

Exhibition concept: Angelika Salge