How do you get kids interested in classical music? As the conductor of CBeebies, I can tell you: it's the wow factor | Kwamé Ryan

In 2019, at a concert by Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, the final chord of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music swelled and then died away into reverent silence. On any other night, connoisseurs of such an event would freeze for a few seconds before erupting in applause. But on this occasion, the sacred silence was shattered by a shrill “Wow!” from the stalls, where Ronan, a nine-year-old boy with special needs who was attending the concert with his grandfather, could no longer contain his excitement and immediately gave his glowing review. The moment was captured by local radio and eventually made its way to social media, where I discovered it along with tens of thousands of others. As I listened, I remarked to myself that as a professional conductor, I would be thrilled to inspire such spontaneous fascination in a young audience, especially since childhood exposure to the orchestra sparked my love of classical music and a fulfilling career in its service.

I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago in the late '70s and early '80s, where, while I wasn't particularly interested in calypso or carnival, I was fascinated by orchestral movie soundtracks, annual productions by the country's Opera Society, and televised live concerts from Studio 8H, an NBC venue where the New York Philharmonic (NYP) performed. When I was just Ronan's age, I had videotaped one such performance, featuring soprano Leontyne Price, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and conductor Zubin Mehta, and watched the performance ad nauseam until one tragic day the machine ate the tape. I realize now that every time I watched that concert, I also thought, “Wow!” and imagined what it would be like to hear the NYP play in real life, or even do what Mehta did.

But what about today's children? Some commentators would have us believe that it is fundamentally harder to get young people interested in orchestral music today than it was when I was young. They associate the genre with the need for anything from prior knowledge to a high income, not to mention the demands of modern attention spans stunted by the internet and social media. The current context may be different, but in my experience the fundamentals of music reception are unchanged – and the key is connection.

When I hear people describe orchestral music as arcane or unsuitable for young ears, it occurs to me that any young person who has enjoyed a Marvel or Star Wars film has heard a longer orchestral performance (of some sort) and might be willing to hear and see more if it was presented in a similarly imaginative and relatable context. So in the summer of 2019, I was thrilled to be at the already popular CBeebies Proms for Off to the Moon, an ‘edutainment extravaganza’ celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first astronauts on the Moon, featuring giant video screens, a Saturn V rocket model, a new work by Hans Zimmer, popular TV presenters as crew and myself as the conducting Mission Commander! Cinematic appropriation? Perhaps, but popular cinema has adopted some of its most evocative musical vocabularies from the concert world, so it’s only fair that the educational concert world occasionally adopts cinematic storytelling in return.

My own Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in North Carolina uses similar methods to create youth-focused programs. Building on strong relationships with partner schools, future projects aimed at Generation Z include concerts featuring music from popular video games or mixing the music of Beethoven and Beyoncé, which have seen a recent increase in attendance among our youth.

We also take our music outside its usual context: the CSO Roadshow performs directly in churches at the request of the church leadership, selecting the content in collaboration with them. All of this is free of charge to them, because making orchestral music more accessible is both a financial and a motivational consideration. I know this is true because just nine years after the videotape disaster in Trinidad, I found myself in London among a crowd of “prommers,” having paid only a small allowance to see Mehta, the only conductor of color I knew, conduct the NYP at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the ultimate “wow!” moment of my life, made possible by the right price.

Since my trip to the moon at the 2019 Proms, I have returned to the Royal Albert Hall in 2022 for an Ocean Adventure and again for this year's Wildlife Jamboree – not least because it has been uniquely fulfilling to share the 'Power of Wow' from the very platform that taught it to me as a boy. As I walked on stage at my last CBeebies Prom, I heard a gasp from the audience that stunned me. Backstage, after the show, the director told me that this was actually the moment when the children excitedly recognised their trusted musical friend and the only conductor they knew from watching previous Proms on iPlayer. I thought: if this signals the start of a lifelong musical journey for even a handful of them, then it's come full circle. Mission accomplished.