and Peter Nickol, Peter Quantrill, Laura Sandford, Ann Marie Stanley, and Claire Langford

Octave for octave

You scale minor and major

Flowering forte

Help Your Kids With Music: A unique step-by-step visual guide

By Carol Vorderman (AND Peter Nickol, Peter Quantrill, Laura Sandford, Ann Marie Stanley, Sue Sturrock + Claire Langford)

Dorling Kindersley PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2015, ISBN 9780241186121

Carol Vorderman is splashed on the cover as the author of Help Your Kids With Music. While rightly celebrated as Britain's Best Arse and the Alpha Female of TV (indeed the Alpha Female of Reality as the owner of a harem of toyboys) she may be, aside from Hard Maths accomplishments that appear as magic tricks to those of us who are numerically challenged, and making Countdown strangely watchable, I never knew her in connection with music (although inspiring a new Hall & Oates song should they ever click on the Mail Online is certainly no impossibility), and it appears that she only wrote the foreword. Carol, correct me if I err. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being the Milli Vanilli of musical education for 16 and unders – I'm just saying. 

Of course, all translators will know the annoyance of being airbrushed out of creative history like an Old Bolshevik and are rightly sensitive to similar misrepresentations of the actuality. Still, some cases may be better made than others (I can think of one particular book I translated), and in this case you can at least understand the reasoning of making Captain Vorderman the face of music rather than naming the entire squad of co-authors and musical experts and academics Peter Nickol, Peter Quantrill, Laura Sandford, Ann Marie Stanley, Sue Sturrock, and consultant Claire Langford.

Help Your Kids With Music (which comes with a CD if it hasn't disappeared at some point in the library bookcycle) is ostensibly an accessible guide to help parents help their kids with music theory. Now, while I got a LOT out of this book (the only kid in this case being me – you can call me "Traductito"), and while it ranges from the simple to the complexly simple of music theory in a fairly appealing graphic manner, it is rather dense. It's like a nicely, modernly presented encyclopaedia to refer to. Rather than the hulking mass of an encyclopaedia, however, it comes in at a very nice cruiserweight size that fits comfortably on an overburdened desk (a Berliner-sized book? I'm certain there must be a word for it) – at the price of a typeface that borders on too small for those whose eyes have already been strained by not only reading as a professional requirement but also imbibing the entire Wheel of Time.

It has a lot going for it. If I compare specific sections to Wikipedia, this book explains things much better (e.g. semitones). It takes you through how music works physically, the what you might call mathematical underpinnings of music, the basic notes, different aspects and styles of music, how it is described, instruments, chords, scales, and all the variations. There are also some nice sections on popular music and song structures involving As and Bs and breaks and fills, indeed a fairly decent amount that goes beyond classical and theory. It is in fact an awful lot to take in, well-presented with graphics and some brief potted historical explainers as well as some very well-selected quotes. I particularly like being reminded of Mahler's cabin – one step above a hut and two above a shed, I suppose, which clearly leaves the pecking order Composer > Philosopher > Writer. Whether translators occupy a rung above or below I couldn't tell you, but I can tell you I spent at one point a lot of time translating on the No 2 tram. And such quotes as: "Composing is like driving down a foggy road towards a house. Slowly you see details of the house, the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house." – Britten; "For my eyes and ears, the organ is the king of instruments." – Mozart (and what a juicy phrase 'For my eyes and ears' is); "I should be sorry if I only entertained them, I wish to make them better." – Handel.

This also caught my eye: the main vowel sounds for singers, ah, eh, ee, oh, oo being easier to sing on a high note – would that be one reason why many tend to sing in American? To accommodate a physical constraint that matches our Atlantic cousins' speech patterns? Not to mention, in another revealing aside, that I was once sat in what is in fact the rear balcony of the theatre.

What this book doesn't have going for it, however – and I say all this as someone with very limited musical knowledge, so experienced musicians (any musicians whomsoever in fact) would be in a better place to judge technical aspects – is that as a 'step-by-step guide', it's so dense, and again really laid out like an albeit accessible encyclopaedia rather than a revision guide or textbook with a consolidatory mechanism, that if I were trying to 'help a kid' with any given specific of music, I suspect I might struggle to understand and explain it. Certainly, reading and cramming through this book has I'm sure raised my knowledge of music (hopefully to the extent that I would be able to recognise and 'get' some of the concepts at least the next time I come across them), but it certainly is a book for cramming rather than a progressive course. Perhaps spreading it across and accompanying a year or years of school would allow it to stick better, and I am being a little unfair, but I have found myself with my head smoking as if learning a language at an intense rate.

Having said that, while it's not exactly designed for this, I did find myself able to look up a familiar song and read the music well enough to recognisably play the tune. For which I can only remember this book – and the entire team – very fondly.

© Bryn Roberts 2023

Published 12 June 2023