Here’s something that always lifts the spirit: kids talking about what music means to them. In the video above, watch as elementary students in Manhattan and Queens react to and talk about their relationship with classical music.

During its second run this spring, one of WQXR’s in-school concerts featured the Decoda Ensemble, which took students from the Castle Bridge School in Washington Heights on a trip to … the circus?

Well, not exactly. The ensemble performed some of the music Prokofiev wrote for a quintet inspired by his ballet Trapèze, which evoked the scenes one might behold under the big top. Decoda used each vignette to illustrate a different aspect of composition and music-making, and the students, from grades three through five, used their musical vocabulary to describe the colors, moods and ranges of both the individual instruments and the ensemble as a whole. It was an energetic exercise of the imagination, one that hopefully highlights the importance of supporting music education in an academic landscape that continuously deprioritizes it.

Via