Brainy Baby Music Board Book

It is a nice board book that shows pictures and names most musical instruments. This book is more of a reference book than a story book. It kind of goes off on a tangent on dance on the last pages.

This book is a board book, with glossy pages and lots of pictures. It seems well bound, although I haven't had it for long. It comprises seven two-page spreads focusing on different aspects of music, and especially Western musical instruments. The seven spreads are:

Percussion Instruments

Wind Instruments

String Instruments

Instruments from Different Lands

Pitch

Music Symbols

Dance

The first five of these consist of arrays of photos of instruments, mainly disembodied, although five (the trumpet, violin, cello, [electric] guitar and triangle) are pictured being played by (exclusively white) children. These photos are high quality, and are probably the best feature of the book. If all you want are some nice pictures of some musical instruments, then the book does meet that threshold.

The balance of photos is odd though. The violin is pictured twice (under String Instruments and again on the Pitch page, where it is grouped with the high pitched instruments.) Three separate saxophones are pictured: a tenor sax on the cover, an alto sax (with the cap on) on the Wind Instruments page, and a Baritone Sax on the Pitch page (grouped with the low pitched instruments). And room is found for an ocarina. To my dismay, there are no pictures of a bassoon (my own instrument), but more shockingly, there are no keyboard instruments at all. No piano, no organ. There is also no mention at all of singing!

The Percussion Instruments page is focused on instruments that children might play; for example, the xylophone depicted is a children's instrument, and there is no sign of a tympani or bass drum (except in the picture of the drum kit), but the other pages don't seem to share this tendency (the harp shown, for example, is a full sized seven pedal orchestral harp).

But where the book really fails (rather than just being a bit lazy) is the page on Musical Symbols. There is collection of symbols described as "notes"; these symbols are indeed mainly notes grouped and ungrouped eighth notes, a half note, etc but sitting among them is an accidental, a "flat". This is downright wrong. On the same page is an except from some written music (Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, I think), which contains two errors, one smallish (a missing accidental), and one egregious (a note that is missing entirely, leaving behind a disembodied ledger line!).

On the facing page is a depiction of notes on a staff, but they are just random dots one note seems to be missing a ledger line, and they make no rhythmic sense. Adding insult to injury is the caption, which is of (at best) questionable accuracy: "A treble clef tells the musician to play high notes".

With sloppy errors like these, it is hard to get too upset about the other minor quibbles one might have: for example, the identification of the West African djembe with all of Africa, or the exclusive identification of gongs with Japan, or bagpipes with Scotland (although the text is careful here "Some gongs come from Japan" and "Scotland is famous for its bagpipes" the fact remains that the picture of the gong is juxtaposed with a silhouette of Japan).

So, all in all, the pictures are good, the binding is good, the selection of the pictures is questionable, and the page on musical notation is awful. The omission of keyboard instruments and of singing is shocking!

And there is no bassoon.

This book's publisher, The Brainy Company, has not lived up to its name with this product.

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