Every Halloween, my heart always breaks a little bit.\u00a0 Somehow, the organ has been established as a Halloween instrument, evoking images of gaunt hunchbacks with pasty skin and fanged teeth flinging back a cape to break into the Bach d-minor toccata. \u00a0<sigh> \u00a0Yet, each year, I hop on the bandwagon and play the organ for the trick-or-treat festivities with the nursery school hosted by CathedralLite.<\/p>\n
This year, I tried a few other pieces to avoid getting trapped into a one-hit wonder Halloween. \u00a0I had a group of about 15 four-year-olds, and after the obligatory spooky stuff, I tried out some other pieces that evoked costumes. \u00a0I played a pirate song and asked if there were pirates in the group (there were). \u00a0I played a ballerina song and asked if there was a ballerina in the group (a princess sufficed). \u00a0I am full of ideas for next year: the bridal march, Star Wars theme, spiderman theme and fairy sounds (hello zymbelstern) would round out a program for that age group. \u00a0Four-year-olds have an attention span of 45 seconds, and I can play any theme from any action movie for just that long.<\/span><\/p>\n So, hook them with the d-minor toccata and then switch to show everything else that the instrument can do. \u00a0The best kind of bait-and-switch, and take every opportunity to have some show and tell time with the instrument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every Halloween, my heart always breaks a little bit.\u00a0 Somehow, the organ has been established as a Halloween instrument, evoking images of gaunt hunchbacks with pasty skin and fanged teeth flinging back a cape to break into the Bach d-minor toccata. \u00a0<sigh> \u00a0Yet, each year, I hop on the bandwagon and play the organ for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[15,19,21,25,27],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","tag-education","tag-halloween","tag-kids","tag-nursery-school","tag-outreach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/organrep.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}