Peter & the Wolf

Depending on what my client schedule is for the day, I often spend a lot of time in the car, particularly on Wednesdays. Today, I got a huge treat. 89.9FM (Portland's classical music station) was playing Peter & the Wolf from start to finish. Remember??? It's a narrated story filled with musical interludes and each character is represented by an instrument or a group of instruments:

Peter= Strings
Bird= a flute
Duck= an oboe
Cat= a clarintet
Grandfather= a bassoon
Wolf= 3 horns
Hunters= timpani & bass drum

Hopefully that helped whet your appetite. It's pretty cool. I remember it was one of the first things to turn me on to classical music as a kid. It took one of the simplest stories imaginable and brought it to a whole new level of excitement and interest. Seriously, if there was no music, there would be nothing exciting or orginal about the story at all...and it would be over pretty quickly too:-) I love that. I love the powerful effect that music can bring to the simplest of things. It's one of the many reasons I became a music therapist. Another way to look at it...imagine watching your all-time favorite movie with all of the music taken out of it. I will end with that:-)