William Hong wrote: >Expose them to Baroque works, which often have movements that are concise >in length, but also have interesting instrumental colors and combinations >not found in later symphonic music. (Renaissance music can work in this >way as well--kids can get a lot of mileage out of the sound of a crumhorn). I can second this recommendation in spades. My older son Aaron, who has Down Syndrome, was quite enchanted by pre-Baroque dance music when he was a kid. We used to listen over and over to his favorite LP record: "Giles Farnaby's Dream Band", in which a renaissance consort/folk rock hybrid band ran amok through the Playford dance collection. Aaron has not turned into a pre-baroque music buff (he now prefers soft rock), but he still loves the Dream Band record, and so do I. [He never took up the crumhorn himself, but I did.] Another writer astutely noted that young people respond to "the good parts" in symphonic CM but grow restless at all the stuff in between. I vividly remember the same youthful experience myself. In the years since, I have come to understand that in the best symphonic music the good stuff is organically related to the stuff in between. But there is plenty of second-rate CM in which the in-between is, in fact, mostly padding. I think this is precisely the distinction between the first rate and the second rate in CM. Jon Gallant and Dr. Phage Department of Gnome Sciences University of Washington