I for one owe my passion for and eclectic tastes in music to Sesame Street. I may have begun listening early on to the music of Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and their contemporaries early on, thanks in particular to my paternal grandmother's collection of classical music LPs, but I have realized that my constant exposure to various types of music played on Sesame Street helped me to learn to appreciate a wide range of music, from the Medieval up to, some extent at least, today's pop music. But I must admit that I still find most of today's pop music boring and heavy rock intolerable.
One of my early favorites is the one about the Jazzy Triangle. I probably saw this while still in preschool and the music has stuck with me since. Of course, it was only later that I learned that the background music was jazz music. So, as it turns out, this was my first introduction to jazz.
Then this one taught me about different vocal ranges and ensemble performance.
And who could forget the orange singing an excerpt of "Habanera" from Bizet's opera Carmen? While it was truly hilarious to see this fruity diva go out of tune and see all that stuff fly off, I was equally fascinated by how all those common items (the duster/mop, bottle caps, rubber band, gerbera petals, etc.) came together to form a face.
This is another one that I liked because of the background music which already intrigued me the first time I saw this while in grade school. Then about a decade later while taking piano lessons at the University of Sto. Tomas I attended one of the weekly music recitals held at the Conservatory of Music. I was awaiting my turn to perform when a guitar quintet went up stage. and started performing some excerpts from Praetorious' Dances from Terpsichore. I thought, "Gosh! That sounds so much like the music from the Simple Simon cartoon in Sesame Street." And so I was introduced to Renaissance music.