What Charlie Heard - Hardcover

Gerstein, Mordicai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374382921 ISBN 13: 9780374382926

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2002

Synopsis

The extraordinary story of the composer Charles Ives.

"Sometimes little Charlie lay in his crib just listening. He heard
his mother’s long dress as she moved around his room. He heard big clocks and little clocks. He heard wagons and horse hooves. He heard dogs and crickets and the church bell next door."

Charlie listened all through his boyhood, and as he grew into a man, he found he wanted to re-create in music the sounds that he heard every day. But others couldn’t hear what Charlie heard. They didn’t hear it as music – only as noise. In this daring and original book, Mordicai Gerstein graphically translates the audible into the visible – filling his pictures with noise – to tell the story of Charles Ives (1874–1954), a great musical innovator who let neither criticism nor public scorn keep him from composing music that expressed all that he heard in the world. He was finally recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. What Charlie Heard is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

About this title

About the Author:

Mordicai Gerstein is the author and illustrator of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, winner of the Caldecott Medal, and has had four books named New York Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year. Gerstein was born in Los Angeles in 1935. He remembers being inspired as a child by images of fine art, which his mother cut out of Life magazine, and by children’s books from the library: “I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.”  He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and then got a job in an animated cartoon studio that sent him to New York, where he designed characters and thought up ideas for TV commercials. When a writer named Elizabeth Levy asked him to illustrate a humorous mystery story about two girls and a dog, his book career began, and soon he moved on to writing as well as illustrating. “I’m still surprised to be an author,” he says. “I wonder what I’ll write next?” Gerstein lives in Westhampton, Massachusetts.

From AudioFile:

The Live Oak Media Music Makers series soars to new heights with this audio/picture book biography of innovative composer Charles Ives. From Charlie's first moments--when his father heralded his arrival on a trumpet--to his final efforts to give voice to the universe, WHAT CHARLIE HEARD is a bewitching aural portrait. Live Oak maximizes the rich source material in Ives's music, developing it into its own character within the audiobook. Chamber musicians led by Rory Young ensure the quality of the musical contributions. Mordicai Gerstein's reading strikes the perfect balance--his measured tones are as reassuring as a steady drumbeat. WHAT CHARLIE HEARD is a fitting tribute to a master of sound. E.E.E. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2005 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374382921
• ISBN 13: 9780374382926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 40
• Illustrator: Gerstein Mordicai