If you're of a certain age, you most likely have fond memories of when and how you were first introduced to classical music, the symphony orchestra and its families of instruments, through movies like Walt Disney's Fantasia, and compositions like Benjamin Britten's A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, or my favorite, Sergei Prokoviev's Peter and the Wolf. (I used to sit quietly in front of the record player, mesmerized by the music). They tried to engage later generations of children by using narrators such as David Bowie or Sting to rejuvenate the story, but with today's children attention span deficit and ubiquitous cell phone technology at everyone's fingertips -- who knows what a record player is these days -- a different approach was necessary.

Best-selling author Dan Brown (yes, the Da Vinci Code Dan Brown) decided to write a storybook titled Wild Symphony, "to provide a fun, fresh opportunity for families, parents, children, and people of all ages to reconnect with the magical experience of classical music." He even composed all of the music for the story himself, which was orchestrated by Karl Blench. Each and every animal in the story is ascribed a pertinent piece of music based on its persona, which is automatically played when, using a free app, a cell phone scans any given page of the book, which can't be more in sync with today's tech. And best of all, is that all of the music well captures each animal's character or habitat. For example, the buoyancy of the ocean is well projected to describe the manta ray, and the comical clumsiness of the boar or the powerful bounce of the kangaroo are all very well portrayed within the music, with colorful illustrations by Susan Batori to match. One might say it's like a 21st century Carnival of the Animals.

Classical music need not be pedantic, pretentious or boring. Help your child experience, as you did, the fun and captivating magic it can add to one's life.