The Music of Life
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Full of joy and discovery, Louis Thomas' The Music of Life is a simple, melodious picture book about finding big inspiration and beauty in the smallest of details.
At night when everyone else is asleep, one artist sits awake--pencil in hand, stuck. Lenny is a composer, but this evening, no music floats from his head.
Then as night breaks into dawn, Lenny's cat, Pipo, begins lapping milk. Lick lick lick. Birds yawn awake, singing in the trees. Tweet tweet! A bike bell tings on the street below. Suddenly, Lenny notices a rhythm to the world around him. He pulls on his coat and walks through the city to write down every sound he can find. Lenny listens to a gardener, a jogger, a dogwalker, and more neighborhood characters.
Finally, the morning's sounds culminate in a sun-dappled symphony that Lenny conducts in the center of the park.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the middle of the night, Lenny the composer is stuck trying to write a symphony: "he'd been sitting at his desk for hours, and not a single note of music had come to mind." As his frustration crescendos, inspiration arrives from an unlikely place: Pipo, his cat. The "Lick, Lick, Lick," sound of Pipo lapping up milk triggers a flow of inspiration as Lenny begins to hear ideas for music in the world around him: " Oho! What is this?' The leaking sink gave Lenny another idea. It's not a symphony, but it feels like music!' " Ambient sounds the tinkle of a bicycle bell, the laughter of a baby lead to creation. Drawing loose inspiration from the work of Leonard Bernstein, Thomas shows one way that composers find ideas, and loose, color-washed illustrations of Lenny's Parisian world have something of the charm of Ludwig Bemelmans about them. A symphonic ode to the act of creation. Ages 3 6.
