Come and Meet the Instruments of the Orchestra with Evelyn Glennie, one of the world's most groundbreaking and eclectic musicians, and the first person ever to sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist!

“There is nothing so rich and dramatic as all the instruments coming together.” --Evelyn Glennie.

How can the orchestra make so many different sounds? It is quiet and gentle, loud and piercing, funny, powerful, beautiful, frightening – and many other things besides. Composers for hundreds of years have used the same instruments in a whole variety of ways.

Which instrument belongs in which section of the orchestra? Does a violin really have a belly? What exactly is an ondes martenot? And what do these instruments do when they venture outside the orchestra?

With your guiding star, Evelyn Glennie, you too can become an expert. You’ll even know your heckelphone from your sackbut and your tom-tom from your tam-tam – all by spending hours of fun with words, pictures and music, in the book and on the interactive CD-ROM.

"This expressively colourful large format book is ideal for the curious - even slightly curious - youngster between the ages of say eight and fifteen. It generously straddles the gap between pre-teen and teen. Vivid, unstuffy, practical, fun, accurate and reflective, it also embraces multimedia. A CD-ROM comes with it – inserted into the inside hard cover of the book. This introduces you to the sound of some fifty instruments and families of instruments." -- Music Web International