There’s a piece of music that takes me straight back to a field in the dark, watching a light lift off from a concert stage into a star-filled sky.
It was right after Covid. We’d been locked inside for what felt like forever, and we took the kids to an open air concert. They played the theme from ET, and as the music built to that soaring finale, a lit drone rose slowly from the stage into the sky, like ET’s spaceship rising into the stars at the end of the animation. The whole audience gasped. The children stared up at it, open-mouthed. I stared too. It was one of those moments where everything that had been difficult just fell away for a few minutes.
Now, whenever we hear that music, we’re all back in that field. Every single time.
That’s what music does. It locks itself to a moment, and it stays locked. Not loosely, not vaguely. Precisely. Four bars of the right piece and you’re standing in the exact spot, feeling the exact feeling. Psychologists call it mood-dependent recall. I call it the reason I still get a lump in my throat in the supermarket.
My own first concert was Nigel Kennedy in Hyde Park, ripping his way through Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I was only ten. I can still feel the grass under my legs, the excitement of it, the feeling of being somewhere special. The Four Seasons is hundreds of years old but the way Kennedy played it, it could have been written that afternoon. That was decades ago. The memory hasn’t faded at all.
This is the quiet case for classical music in a child’s life. Not instead of the noise and the mess and the chaos. Alongside it. As the soundtrack to the bits you’ll want to remember.
The argument isn’t that classical music is somehow better for children. It isn’t about raising a little genius. It’s much simpler than that. Classical music is old, and because it’s old, it doesn’t expire.
The songs that were in the charts on your first birthday are probably mortifying now. If we soundtrack a child’s special moments with whatever’s number one this week, those songs will sound dated within a few years. A beautiful classical melody sounds in 2046 exactly the way it sounds now. It’s the opposite of a fashion. It’s a floorboard — something that will still be there when the wallpaper is long gone.
There’s also the matter of how classical music feels to a small child. We sometimes forget that a two-year-old doesn’t hear lyrics. They hear shape. They hear a cello going low, and a flute going high, and a pause, and a swell. Classical music is astonishingly well-suited to being two. It tells a story without words, it has characters and a journey, and it tends to end the way a child’s favourite picture books end — with a satisfying return to home.
Put on a waltz while they’re opening presents and watch what happens. They’ll slow down. They’ll hold an object up to the light. Toddlers do not, as a rule, listen politely. But they respond to music that has shape.
And then there’s the thing I think about the most. If you play the same piece of classical music at a fifth birthday, and again at a tenth, and again when they go off to university, you will have built a small, private soundtrack that will return to them forever.
You can’t do that with whatever’s currently trending. You can only do it with music that’s already outlasted a hundred years of trending.
That’s why I fell in love with classical music. Not because it’s highbrow or clever. Because it lasts. Because it attaches itself to the moments that matter and it stays there, perfectly preserved, for as long as you need it. A child who grows up with classical music woven into their happiest memories carries those memories differently. The music doesn’t age. The feeling doesn’t fade. And one day, standing somewhere ordinary, they’ll hear four bars of something familiar and find themselves suddenly, inexplicably, back in the kitchen on their third birthday.
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