Orchestra

Orchestra is a long book with lots of words. Definitely more suitable as a reference than as a read-aloud. It includes three sections: The Orchestra, The Music and Its Makers, and Beyond the Concert Hall. The Orchestra gives detailed information about each instrument and its family, with a special emphasis on one from each section (violin, clarinet, and trumpet), a two-page spread about different types of wood used to make wooden instruments, an explanation of acoustics, and a nod to the Wiener Musikverein in Vienna, lauded by acoustics experts as “the concert hall with the greatest sound quality in the world” (makes me want to go listen to a concert there!). The Music and Its Makers gives readers a crash course in music notation and highlights a handful of musicians and their famous works. The selections seem random and disconnected (Hildegard von Bingen, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Amy Beach, Holst’s The Planets, Duke Ellington, etc.), so I’d be curious to know what was behind the choices. Beyond the Concert Hall covers topics as disparate as mythology of music, opera, cinematic music, technology, and more. The book concludes with a call to readers to get involved, ending with the suggestion to try creating your own orchestra. Illustrations by David Doran give the book a vintage poster feel, and indeed many of the sections and pages could stand alone as a poster or infographic. An interesting, albeit scattered, book that music students might enjoy perusing in small chunks of time.