Album Spotlight: Musical Soup (Mozart for babies and toddlers)

As some of you may know, I have young kids, so since I've been exploring classical music lately, it has been natural for me to look into the use of classical music as lullabies. A lot of what I have found on my own has been quite bombastic and not very suitable for lullabies. After a little bit of searching, I was happy to stumble upon a couple of collections of Mozart's music called Musical Soup from Munchkin. Both collections consist of a selection of popular Mozart pieces that have been developed and arranged by neurobiologist Dr. Norman M. Weinberger and Grammy award winner Jimmie Haskell.

The two collections are called Mozart: Wombsong Collection and Mozart for Toddlers. The download page breaks each collection up into three sections: "Wake Up", "Play Time", and "Sleepy Time"; each album can be downloaded in its entirety, as one of these sections, or as individual songs.

You won't find any complete symphonies or anything like that on these collections. Instead, there are dozens of clips ranging in length from under a minute to just over three minutes. A lot of Mozart's most famous tunes are included; I often find myself thinking "I know that piece" while listening to them. So even if you don't have kids, these collections can still serve as great primers to Mozart's vast catalogue of music, made even more helpful by the fact that most pieces have their Köchel-Verzeichnis numbers included as part of their titles (at least for Wombsong Collection; for Mozart for Toddlers, this information can still be found on the download page), which makes looking them up elsewhere a snap.

Whether you're looking for some music to play for your young ones or you're looking for a quick primer on Mozart's music, the Musical Soup albums are a great place to start. Happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.munchkin.com/information_station/downloads.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köchel-Verzeichnis