The Return of Phineas McBoof - Doctor Noize

Artist:  Doctor Noize

Album:  The Return of Phineas McBoof

Age Range: 5 through 9

Description:  As one might surmise from the title, this is the second album from Doctor Noize (AKA Colorado-based Cory Cullinan) featuring the titular music savant who throws it all away at the height of his fame... wait, that's actually kind of the plot of the whole album.  The late 2011 album tells the story of how Doctor Noize joined the International Band of Misunderstood Geniuses through a variety of musical genres (hip-hop, soul, opera).  It's a fun story and there's a lot of thought and care put into the production.  (Also, I kinda want to make "For The Children" required listening for anyone thinking of making music for kids.)  You can stream the 63-minute album here; there's also an accompanying book that tells the story in rhyming form.  Those of you who are familiar with Doctor Noize's work on Grammaropolis or the first Phineas McBoof album know that the albums throw in everything including  the kitchen sink to entertain with the ulterior motive being to educate.  The new album is no different -- an amusing story well-told and -sung.  Recommended.

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.]