Flight of the Bumblebee

My siblings and I were weird kids. I blame it partially on my parents and partially on where we grew up. Small town, yes, but we weren't even in the town. We lived between two small towns (right on the school line actually) in the middle of no where. After school, weekends, and summers were spent entertaining ourselves as our friends were all spread out so much. Growing up in Michigan we also learned how to play both in and outdoors since eight months out of the year Michigan has winter.

One of the things we used to do for entertainment was listen to classical music. Yes we did. Our mom is a clasically trained singer and I think we can all verbatim quote Verdi's La Traviata. In the original Italian.  A favorite tape, yes I grew up when not only cassettes but also records were still used, was Hooked on Classics and our favorite piece was Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee". It was also my mom's favorite or most hated piece, I'm not sure. Either she hated it because we played it all the time and were really annoying when we listened to it, or she loved it because it exhausted us.

How could a classical piece of music exhaust a bunch of kids? you might might ask. Well I'm glad you asked. We were sedate children who sat quietly on the couch experiencing early music appreciation lessons. We played to the music. And really if you don't know the piece, check out the Wikipedia link and listen to it so you can better understand our game. And was was our game? Glad you asked!

We ran around and around and around in circles.

And around and around and around some more.

And then we stopped the cassette, rewound it, and did it again. A lot.

Wikipedia says: ""Flight of the Bumblebee" is recognizable for its frantic pace when played up to tempo, with nearly uninterrupted runs of chromatic sixteenth notes. It is not so much the pitch or range of the notes that are played that challenges the musician, but simply the musician's ability to move to them quickly enough, because of this and it's complexity, it requires a great deal of skill to perform."

In addition to running around and around and around in circles we also raced to see who could do it the fastest. Not that there was a start and end point by whcih to judge this, I think we just decided that you had to pass the other two more often than they passed you. It got somewhat rough and my brother, who is the youngest, probably took the brunt of it.

He's 6'7" now. We no longer play this game with him.

The moral of the story is that if you want to both tire the heck out of hyper kids AND give them a deep appreciation for music...encourage them to run around madly while listening to the classics.

P.S.
The depiction there of my living room does not do the rough, dark brown, wood paneling and the red and black shag carpet nearly enough justice.