Classics For Kids

After Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote music for a play called The Inventor and the Comedians, he put selections from that music into a concert suite called The Comedians. Listen to what’s […]

After Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote music for a play called The Inventor and the Comedians, he put selections from that music into a concert suite called The Comedians. Listen to what's going on in that suite.

By the time Dmitri Kabalevsky was 14, the Russian Revolution had turned his country into a communist state. In spite of the Soviet Union’s control over artists of all kinds, […]

By the time Dmitri Kabalevsky was 14, the Russian Revolution had turned his country into a communist state. In spite of the Soviet Union's control over artists of all kinds, Kabalevsky managed to make a successful career as a composer.

Jonathan Larson, the composer of the musical ''Rent,'' used the same plot for this musical as Puccini did for La Boheme. Other composers also used classical music when they wrote their Broadway hits. ''Kismet'' is adapted from compositions by Russian composer Alexander Borodin and ''The Song of Norway'' uses tunes by Edvard Grieg to tell the story of Grieg's life.

Giacomo Puccini's opera La Boheme is about struggling artists in Paris. Its title means ''the bohemian lifestyle.'' But Bohemia isn't in France; it's in the Czech Republic. Other composers such as Antonin Dvorak, Bedrich Smetana, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Jules Massenet, were also inspired by this part of the world, using its music and describing its beautiful countryside in their works.

The Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms were never really intended for dancing. But that doesn't mean that people in Hungary don't dance! Richard Graber, the director of a Hungarian dance company in Cleveland, talks with Naomi Lewin about Hungarian dancing.

When he was a young pianist, Johannes Brahms accompanied a Hungarian violinist, and fell in love with Hungarian music. His own Hungarian-flavored dances were written to entertain his friends at parties. Those friends convinced Brahms to publish his dances. When the first set was a hit, Brahms wrote and published another set.

Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven are known as the "Three B's" of classical music. Brahms always knew that he wanted to be a composer -- by the time he was six, he had thought up his own system for writing music down on a page.

William Grant Still was a 20th century African-American composer. But hundreds of years before he lived, there were other black composers. And there are black composers of classical music alive today.