How To Listen To Great Music - Robert Greenberg

Author: Robert Greenberg

Book: How To Listen To Great Music: A Guide To Its History, Culture, and Heart

Age Range: 12 and up

Description: This book puts in writing what composer, professor, and historian Robert Greenberg has taught in his popular Teaching Company CD/DVD course.  It's an entertaining survey of what we in the Western world commonly refer to as classical music and which Greenberg prefers to call concert music, focusing on the concert music composed between 1600 and 1900.  He's a biased observer and lets that come through in his writing, which is usually good in that it helps focus the attention on particular artists rather than letting the reader get lost in the weeds of dozens of artists whose music is unknown outside their most devoted aficionados.  (It's sometimes a bit excessive, as when he presents the superiority of concert music over every other style of music as essentially fact, and not just a reasonably argued opinion.)  Some music reading ability is helpful, though I think you can get a fair amount out of it without that knowledge.

Why am I mentioning it here on a kids music site?  I didn't get much theoretical and historical knowledge of classical music of when I was Miss Mary Mack's age and learning the organ and violin, and in retrospect, I wish I had.  So if your kids are starting to take lessons of their own, and exploring the concert repertoire, I think this would be a good book for you and, if they're mature older tweens, for them to read to give a framework to understand the different eras of classical music.  

[Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for possible review.]

Learning to Play Piano for the Very Young - Marty Gold & Debbie Cavalier

Author: Marty Gold and Debbie Cavalier

Book: Learning to Play Piano for the Very Young

Age Range: Ages 4 through 7

Description: Regular readers are probably more familiar with Cavalier's kids music side project, Debbie and Friends, but she's also an administrator at the Berklee College of Music, with more than 100 music method books and arrangements to her credit.  Marty Gold arranged and produced many artists and dozens of records (and is Cavalier's grandfather).  So this slim instruction book is very much down their alley.

The 24-page book will not turn your child into the next Mozart.  Rather, it's a good introduction to the piano (or full-sized keyboard) that can be useful to gauge your child's interest in and readiness for actual piano lessons.  (Or patience -- Little Boy Blue, six years old at the time we received the book -- probably isn't ready for the attention required of piano lessons.)  The use of little pictures (an elephant to represent the note of "E," for example) is cute, and pretty useful.  There are seven songs (with chord notations, though I suspect that anyone adept enough at reading chord notations won't actually need them for these simple songs).  It's a fun little book and so long as you have the properly-scaled expectations for what's inside, you'll probably like it.

[Disclosure: I received a copy of the book for possible review.]

Augie to Zebra (An Alphabet Book): Kate Endle & Caspar Babypants

Artist: Kate Endle & Caspar Babypants

Book: Augie to Zebra (An Alphabet Book!)

Age Range: 3 through 6

Description: The title of the third book from wife-and-husband team of Kate Endle and Chris Ballew pretty much says it all.  Alliterative activities featuring kids playing with animals, highlighted by Endle's delightful collage-work (among my favorites, the feline jug band featured in "Josie jams with jaguars.").  And, as you may surmise from that example, besides the repeating letters, 4-through-6-year-olds will have fun finding other items in each illustration that also start with the relevant letter.  The accompanying free mp3 for the book (available here) is nice, but tied as it is to the non-story (but literal) text, isn't particularly exciting.  In any case, fans of the previous two books from the duo will likely be pleased with this new entry.