The children’s book “Sounds good” – Munich
If you had to assign an instrument to the Lion King, it would be a big, wild and sublime sounding one. Like a majestic cello. Or the double bass. But not a triangle. According to the Duden, the man who can say that or that. And on which you can only play a single note. For the king. Never. Or is it?
This is exactly the case in Ole and Hans Könnecke’s new picture book “Sounds good”. A lion with a wild mane and tails makes the small, fine triangle sound – and is blown away. These curious mixtures, these contrasts, these unexpected connections run through the whole book, in which 50, 52 to be exact, instruments by the Hamburg author and illustrator Ole Könnecke are presented in friendly, humorous words and large-format, comic-like pictures. And his son Hans Könnecke – film and theater composer and student at the University of Music and Theater in Munich – lets all the compositions sound in small, maximum one-minute compositions that can be called up via QR code. Sometimes humorous, sometimes electronic, sometimes virtuosic.
Both don’t care about clichés, classic classifications and national borders. The book is sorted by mood, from drums to human voices. “The children should be able to discover the instruments freely. We ourselves got to know music unsystematically. For example the harp. It’s just not played by an angel and can also sound wild,” says Könnecke.
Kazoo and kalimba stand next to violin and double bass. And the snake can try out the carillon – with two clapper in its mouth and on the tip of its tail. Why not? The flamingo plays the electric bass, the eagle the harp and the little cat the big organ. The cow, spreading farm romance with a cowboy hat and guitar, is more to be expected. Or the elephant blasting the trumpet. And what instrument can you use to go from beginner to virtuoso in 30 seconds? Featuring the squawking kazoo of the crocodile – “a tube, mostly metal, open at both ends”.
It’s easy to imagine what great fun father and son had when they wrote their book together, always throwing the ball between Hamburg and Munich. “We wrote parallel to each other. Sometimes the sketch came first, then my first musical draft, then there were changes in both directions. The animals were also swapped back and forth, trying out a lot. The penguins played the banjo first, then the castanets.” , reveals Hans Könnecke.
He recorded all the instruments together with fellow musicians from Munich and the surrounding area, but many of them alone. He acquired the jaw harp himself for the book project, as did the kalimba. The 25-year-old knows his craft, can be heard live as a theater musician in Munich’s Residenztheater and has recently been awarded laurels as a film composer. Könnecke made the music for “Almost Home”, the film with the recent director Nils Keller from the University of Television and Film, which won the student Oscar.
Now he has also helped to create a witty, surprising book on instruments from which by far not only children can learn something. Well, sometimes the explanatory texts for five-year-olds, according to the initial target group, need a little more explanation. Sometimes the animals only want to match the instrument at second glance. And the lion? Ultimately, he does well on the, the, the triangle. Incidentally, only a single tone sounds here via the QR code. “One triangle, one tone,” says the book. Well roared lion!
Ole Könnecke, Hans Könnecke: Sounds good. 50 instruments and how they sound. Hanser 2022, 112 pages. 20 Euros. From 5 years.