Baby Einstein - Meet the Orchestra - First Instruments
by Jim Janicek
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DVD details
Actor: Baby EinsteinDirector: Jim Janicek
Brand: Baby Einstein
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 41 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-03-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Disney
Product features:
- From the moment babies are born, they're discovering new sights and sounds in their world. At 12 months, they can clearly identify specific sounds and musical notes, and they're also beginning to match the sounds they hear with the objects that make them. BABY EINSTEIN?: MEET THE ORCHESTRA -- FIRST INSTRUMENTS introduces your baby to the musical instruments found in an orchestra and t
DVD Reviews of Baby Einstein - Meet the Orchestra - First Instruments
DVD Review: An Insult to Musicians and My Child's Intelligence
Summary: 1 Stars
I am a professional composer with a Ph.D. in composition and have taught orchestration for many years at the college level. Not that any of this necessarily means anything, but I do take music-related DVDs that are supposed to educate my child very seriously.
You would think that a DVD entitled "Baby Einstein - Meet the Orchestra," would introduce REAL instruments to our children, right? WRONG. This is entirely (or almost entirely) synthesized and FAKE from beginning to end, and the sounds are 1980s quality (i.e., primitive), at best. This is not only infuriating and insulting to classical musicians and orchestras, but is also insulting to our collective intelligence. It sends the message that Disney and Buena Vista are lazy companies and their corporate bottom line is more important than our children's education. The composers they quote badly (Mozart, Bach, et al) and even Einstein himself (who played a real violin in his free time, by the way) would roll in their graves if they heard this.
Here are some of the flaws I find most annoying, in no particular order:
- When they show live instruments being played by real people, you hear synthesizers, not the people actually playing the instruments. They even do this at the beginning with an entire orchestra! Was this really necessary? They couldn't find young musicians who could play fairly well and tape them live? There are probably loads of kids who would have done it for free, or very little, not that Disney needs to skimp, which is all the more insulting.
- As mentioned by others, the animation is absolutely awful. The puppets are also utterly simplistic, like hand puppets I remember making in grade school. Maybe that's the point, I'm not sure. Jim Henson's Muppets, they are not. Even the puppets in Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem from the Muppet Show look more realistic than this.
- They introduce the woodwind section with a saxophone. What's up with that? Saxophones are not standard in most orchestras. They also show a drumset right at the beginning of the DVD. Is that to make the orchestra look cool?
- They include a recorder, another instrument almost NEVER found in orchestras, and follow the artificial recorder recording with a hurdy-gurdy sounding synth track that sounds nothing like recorders. And why is there no oboe? Very strange. Maybe they figure they'll leave out the oboe since that's a difficult instrument for young players to master. Great--teach our children to not strive to do something difficult and to settle for the easy route. Einstein would not be proud.
- Their representation of the percussion section is a joke. At one point, they show a cartoon playing a single timpani drum, but you hear two. To illustrate a tambourine, they show a RhythmTech, half-moon, headless tambourine, like the ones you see rock group back-up vocalists use. Sorry, but orchestral percussionists just don't use those. Many times, they show an Orff instrument as the xylophone, with one row of keys. And you also hear synth bells in the recording. The do finally show a marimba player, to their credit, albeit with what I think are extremely carefully synchronized synthesized marimba sounds (maybe the kid hit too many wrong notes?).
- I won't even go into how poorly they represent strings and how bad they sound. It's just plain awful. I'll leave that to the other reviewers here.
- As pointed out in other reviews, most of the performers are using poor technique. Surely, Disney could have teamed up with one of the many schools in this country with excellent music programs and found kids that could actually play well, so that our own children could have good role models.
As parents, you have to ask yourself: is it OK to teach your children to recognize the sounds of an orchestra by playing them artificial sounds, synchronized so they look like they are being played by real people? This is like teaching your child that a strawberry-flavored Jolly Rancher candy is a real strawberry.
As an aside, my wife is a professional violinist who plays on Broadway, and producers are always looking for ways to cut costs so they are gradually replacing live musicians with synthesizers (while charging the same or more for tickets, by the way). This may sound paranoid, but since many musicals and films are by Disney these days, I think this DVD is one of many efforts by Disney--whether overtly intentional or not--to brainwash our children into accepting artificial sounds as real, so that when they grow up, they won't know the difference, and so that children will also learn to like the Baby Einstein recordings that are synthesized. In one word, yuck!
To my mind, the only redeeming quality is the bright colors, which are very attractive to young children. Even with the bright colors and copious corporate branding, my two-year-old son, who normally sits through live classical performances and loves them, was bored after a few minutes and left the room to go read a book! I think that just about says it all right there.
If you love your children and want to give them the best education possible, stay away from this DVD. It is an insult to parents, children and classical musicians.
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