La Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris is a French cultural institution inaugurated in 2015 with the aim to provide a musical cultural experience to all. It also offers workshops for young children and their families. The workshops, designed as introductory classes, enable children to indulge their senses to emotional feelings arising through the exposure to music, those feelings being felt either per se as an individual or as being part of a group. A survey collected during the 2017-2018 musical programming season enabled to seize and to analyse a large range of feelings (among a list of 200 identified feelings) then summed up to 22 emotional patterns. Among those 22 patterns, 10 patterns would encompass most of the emotional feelings which have been precisely observed, out of which: enthusiasm, attention, lack of concentration, surprise or even boredom.
Beyond children’s emotional reaction, the survey also aimed at collecting data on parents’ expectations as the families of the children enrolled for the workshops often came from upper and well-educated classes. Parents see those initiation workshops as a means to foster cultural transmission to younger generations – a window opened to socialisation and emotional experiences that can be shared during chilhood through music, cultural openness, but also testifying to musical excellence.