MusX

- a Music Home Page for Children

Around the Milennium, Danmarks Radios (The Danish Boradcasting Corporation’s ) Classical channel P2 had a weekly programme for children called Piccolo. With the increasing internet use (still analogue …) it was wished to involve the listening children more. Mogens Christensen became the main architect for the establishment of a site, which was designed in order to, in a playing way, create interest for the channel’s music profile (classical music, jazz, and new composition music), and was to contain games, and was meant especially as well to offer a composition corner.

In the games, children might piece music correctly together. And wrongly: to mix pieces by Mozart with pieces by Schott Joplin, Satie and Vivaldi. Or piece a renaissance canon correctly (and wrongly) together. In other games, children might train their feeling for pulse. If, during these rich universes, a child would come across a music piece, he or she liked, they could pick it up and keep it.

In the centre of the site was the composition workshop, where the graphical placing of the music gathered, as well as the workshop’s sound library, resulted in a rather controlled auditive result, lead to a rather controllable auditive result, which might reach from just to substitute the bang of the champagne gallop by a farting sound, to independent sound sculptures.

The children (and a number of grown-ups, too) were able to save their little compositions, to continue to work on them, and finally via the site to send/upload them to P2. P2 would every week select the 10 best compositions, which could both be made available on the site, and could be played in the radio.

The site stayed for many years attracting great activities – even after the Piccolo programme had been closed.

Now,  the site has been closed.