Music and the infant mind
Scientists will tell you that variety is key, and that there's very little reason for parents to play their babies music that they don't like themselves. Here is a highly subjective list of some personal favorites that have worked well during my own "field research," along with album information where relevant:
Arvo Pärt, "Spiegel im Spiegel," and "Für Alina" as performed on the album "Alina" (ECM Records). Beautifully hushed, meditative music, built of the simplest materials.
Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 18, No. 6, first movement; and String Quartet Op. 132, third movement. One fast and one slow movement, from the composer's "early" and "late" periods respectively. Sure, the latter is perhaps the hallowed pinnacle of the quartet literature, but the experts tell us never to condescend to the infant brain.
Steve Reich, "Drumming" and "New York Counterpoint." Vintage and more recent American minimalism, with all its slowly shifting patterns and mind-expanding rhythmic drive.
Bach, "The Art of Fugue," Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon). This arrangement for string quartet brings formal clarity and wonderful coloristic detail to Bach's most abstract and beautiful work.
Reynaldo Hahn, Songs, as performed by Susan Graham and Roger Vignoles on "La Belle Époque" (Sony Classical). Elegantly crafted and infinitely tender art songs, performed in French by a singer who has made them a specialty.
Alfred Schnittke, Concerto Grosso No. 1. An edgy 20th-century Russian take on older Baroque styles. Beware of unexpected tangos on harpsichord!
Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364. Don't listen because it makes your baby smarter, but because it's one of the most incomparably sublime works in Mozart's entire catalog.
John Coltrane, "Ascension." Less sophisticated ears hear only cacophony in Coltrane's gloriously anarchic 1965 recording, so making sense of it all must be a job for the infant brain.
Brahms, Sextet No. 1, with Pablo Casals, Isaac Stern, and others (Sony Classical). The sound is a bit creaky, but you won't find a more impassioned or marvelously old-world recording of this cornerstone of Romantic chamber music.
Olivier Messiaen, "Quartet for the End of Time," last movement. A slowly soaring prayer for violin and piano, one of the spiritual peaks of classical music in the twentieth century.
Ivo Papasov, "Balkanology" (Hannibal Records). Ecstatic Bulgarian wedding music with plenty of rhythmic complexity.
Arnold Schoenberg, Second String Quartet, last movement. Listen as music drifts eerily, momentously free of its tonal moorings. Your baby will explain the music theory.
Carlo Gesualdo, Madrigals. This riveting ancient music can sound ear-bendingly modern.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111. Late-Beethoven piano music at its most luminous. Adults don't really have words to describe the "Arietta" movement, so you and your infant will be on equal footing.
— Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff
