My little boy leaving me toungue tied.
 

Today my five year old son asked me two difficult questions:

How was the first human made? Whew, explaining natural selection to a child is a lot harder than Adam and Eve. You guys have it easy. But he seems to have gotten the gist; in fact somebody already told him about some basics such as the distant kinship between saber tooth tigers and tigers (may not be exactly right but works for purposes of general illustration). Any ideas of examples or analogies to give children?

Next he asked me why all the music we listen to was made by people who are dead. This came after he asked me wheter Mozart, Bach, Beetoven, etc. are still alive. (We only play Classical music to our children.) It's not easy to explain that the best way to know you're consuming wheat and not chaff is to wait a century or so after a work of art is created.

You should at least add some classical jazz to the rotation. You don't need to wait another 50 or 60 years to know that Thelonius Monk or Charlie Parker had it right.

Why only classical and how do you define classical?

Classical means dead at least 50 years it seems. Actually, this was a deal I made with my wife before we were married. Her mother teaches the violin across the nation and her father got a Masters in music before a PhD in something having to do with the history of Western culture at U. of Chicago, and he is a retired UW professor. They are very serious and buttoned down about their music.

We do play children's songs for them. In fact the children's songs are part of their music education.

Yikes. SOunds like they will be poster children for Penguin Publishing, not that there is anything wrong with that.

So are you saying they don't approve of something like T. Monk or Bill Evans or somesuch? Why not? Mozart and Monk co-exist very well in my universe.

I can see I have to become more familiar with Monk.

My mission president, after having been asked his definition of "classical" said: "If the composer has been dead for at least 100 years."

Too many of the music ignorant considered Vangelis to be classical.

As for what to tell your boy about where the first man came from, perhaps you could open the doors of both natural selection and creationism: some people believe that man evolved from... and others believe that man was created... simple stuff from both sides ought to satisfy a 5 year old.

I'm soprry to hi-jack your thread on a peripheral point, and I promise this is the last comment, but not just Monk, lots of good classical jazz. You mentioned earlier today your thought about the western canon not being closed. This applies to music also. Jazz, good jazz, is just as important and impressive and meaningful as classical music. And don't misunderstand me, I love classical music. Listen carefully to Bach and you can understand how Europe came to be what it is. Mozart is incomprehensibly clever and beautiful and Beethoven is indescribeable. But at the same time, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Monk (yes, i admit, I like Monk) are equally important IMO.

This is SOO much more fun than the Adam and Eve story. When the boy asked me some similar questions, I started off with the big bang, and started working forward from there. Children this age are so amazingly curious, and their minds soak this stuff up like a sponge. I went through the whole lifecycle of a sun with him several months ago, and thought that most of it went over his head, until a teacher told me that he was playing a science game in class (1st grade) and that he knew WAY more about suns than any child his age has a right to know.

My in-laws surely consider, for example, Shostakovich and Stravinsky as Classical, and I think they died maybe in the 1960's.

Please hi-jack. I'm always learning.