Ready or not, here comes the second semester.  And maybe you’ve been thinking about some curriculum adjustments, maybe working more arts, music and Western cultural history into your homeschool curriculum.  Or maybe you’ve avoided thinking about curriculum by . . . watching sports!

There are several sports options this time of year: football, basketball, or hockey, to name a few.  And whether you are aware of it or not, while you watch sports, you may be exposed to some significant works of music, especially if you’re watching live.  You might hear them in the form of stand tunes.

‘What’ tunes?  Stand tunes.  Those little tunes –snippets of tunes, really – which the band launches into between plays or during commercials.  And most of the time, they’re arrangements of pops songs, easily recognizable to the average pop culture consumer.

But not always.  In fact, which of the following might figure into the background noise at a sporting event?

1. A collection of secular Latin poems from the 11th – 12th century.
2. A song from 70s one-hit-wonder Garry Glitter.
3. A piece of late nineteenth-century Russian orchestral music.
4. The theme from Rocky.
5. All of the above.

That’s right – 5.   All of the above.  Even the Latin poems.   Though no lyrics will figure into the mix – and in some cases, that’s just as well!  At any rate, the music based on these very diverse sources is so universally compelling that 21st-century spectators find it all stirring.  Stirring enough to stand up and cheer at a sporting event.  Which helps call into question the notion that “classical” music or “art” music is boring.  Or archaic.  Or inaccessible.

Exposing children to the arts when they are young helps them choose what they like based on its own merits, not on the cultural stigmas and trappings it may have acquired.  In our car, Vivaldi and Mozart are both likely requests (along with assorted other composers and musicians).  No one has yet told our kids that this music is boring, archaic, or inaccessible.  And if anyone ever does, it will be too late; the music in question will already be too dearly loved to reject.  To say nothing of how much fun it will be for them one day to recognize 19th-century Russian Modest Mussorgsky’s orchestral piece, Night on Bald Mountain, at a football game.

Next post, we’ll look at which of the choices mentioned in the “quiz” above has made appearances in the following venues: figure skating routines, aftershave commercials, credit card commercials, line-up music for professional sports teams, bumper music for television talk shows, and even professional wrestling matches?  Hint: It’s not the theme from Rocky.