Recess! Media

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That’s part of the lovely Andantino from Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. You can hear the rest of this gentle reverie on a new CD called In Utero, for parents and their as yet unborn but still attentively listening little ones. And following this, there are more than a dozen other works, by such composers as Mozart and Faure, Mahler and Ravel, Britton and Bach. Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium, ” from his Carnival of the Animals, is especially appropriate for young, soon-to-emerge music lovers who are totally submerged themselves:

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As researchers and mothers know, children actively respond in the womb to the sounds all around them. One experiment even read to children, before they were born, selections of Dr. Seuss’s poetry, and then read these verses again, post utero, to the same infants and noticed their distinct responses of recognition and pleasure. It would be very interesting to try a version of that experiment using the classical music from this recording. There shouldn’t be any problem playing these pieces over and over again — for those young ears that are tuning themselves to the delights of these sublime sounds, and for the older ears of their parents, who will find their own comforts in their quiet, calming beauties.

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