A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra

By Robert Levine (2019)

Recommended age: 7-9 years old (or even slightly older)

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Review

At the time of writing this review, there are 12 books in this series. We have only read the one on the orchestra, but because this book is educational and well done, we will look to read the others in the future.

This book is aimed at older readers, though we read it to my little one who is not in kindergarten quite yet, and it held my little one’s attention really well. My little one’s music teacher also uses the book in the group class she teaches to help the kids learn more about music. After hearing the book read in music class and after we got a copy for home and read through some of it, my little one had questions about the composers and the instruments and learned a few ideas such as baroque music enough to know what it is and express baroque is my little one’s favorite era of music.

The book is essentially a textbook, but a textbook done in a manner to hold a child’s attention extremely well.

It is split into two sections, the first about composers in the different eras (baroque, classical, romantic and modern) and second about the orchestra instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and keyboard.) It then has facts and information about each topic, e.g., Vivaldi getting a page, followed by Bach, and so on.

It’s not written like the old textbooks that I had as a child, the text is broken up into smaller sections in various text boxes, or in the open space, or in a colored circle, or so on. There are cartoony type drawings and illustrations intermingled throughout the text, sometimes to illustrate a comment in the text, sometimes to just entertain.

If you would like to teach your little one more about music, instruments and the orchestra overall, this book is the best one we’ve found and unofficially endorsed by my little one’s music teacher, someone who has been teaching music theory to little ones for a long time at a highly respected school for music.

Cautions

The only caution I can think of is more to set expectations. This isn’t a book you pick up and read like a story. There is no story here. It truly is like a textbook or a reference book, something you can look up a question in or read a page here and then skip to another topic in the book much further in and not lose a beat.