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Music Books - A Quick Reference

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#1 · (Edited)
Recommended books- Listed by Category!

With gratitude to vertciel, thanks for a key concept to Kurkikohtaus, and special appreciation to all who have recommended music books, a listing of such books will be preserved on the opening page of the thread. Almost without exception, listed books also have a link-back to the post where they were recommended. We will update this list periodically. Furthermore, if anyone is aware of book recommendations in other threads that ought to merit mention in this collation, you may contact us (preferably via Private Message) so that we may perform the necessary edits, if desired.

1. Music Appreciation & Survey Texts:

History of Western Music/Grout david johnson
Listen/Kermin-Tomlinson
The Enjoyment of Music/Machlis & Forney
Classical Music A New Way of Listening/Waugh
Music/Grunfeld
The Continuity of Music/Kolodin Hexameron
The Joy of Music/Bernstein Hexameron/groovesandwich
What to Listen for in Music/Copland Hexameron/kxgfxg/Hazel
101 Masterpieces of Music & Their Composers/Bookspan BuddhaBandit
Concise History of Western Music/Griffiths bartleby
Classical Music (Eyewitness Companions)/Burrows Rachovsky
The Encyclopedia of Music/Wade-Matthews opus67
Classical Music 50 Greatest composers-1000 Greatest Works/Goulding StlukesguildOhio/lou/Vesteralen
Essays in Musical Analysis (6 vols.)/Tovey Private recommendation- anonymous contributor
Oxford History of Western Music/Taruskin emiellucifuge
The Language of Music/Cooke jalex

2. Composer-specific Tomes:

Sibelius/Barnett
Sibelius (in four volumes)/Tawaststjerna
Symphonic Unity The development of formal thinking in the symphonies of Sibelius/Murtomaki Kurkikohtaus
The Essence of Bruckner/Simpson Gustav
Beethoven- Impressions by his Contemporaries/Sonneck
Evening in the Palace of Reason Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment/Gaines
Schumann on Music: A selection from his writings Hexameron
Johannes Brahms: A Biography/Swafford World Violist/kg4fxg/Hausmusik
Beethoven/Sullivan bartleby
Aspects of Wagner/Macgee
The New Grove Wagner/Millington
Wagner's Ring A listener's companion & concordance/Holman
I Saw the World End A study of Wagner's Ring/Cooke
The Wagner Operas/E. Newman Chi_townPhilly
Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation/Powell
Edward Elgar: Record of a Friendship/Burley
Elgar in Love/Hockman & Allen Elgarian
Mahler: His Life, Work, and World/Blaukopf
Chopin's Funeral/Eisler Isola
Robert Schumann Herald of a new poetic age/Daverio Artemis
A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas/Tovey Private recommendation- anonymous contributor
Mozart in Vienna 1781-1791/Braunbehrens Elgarian
Mozart & His Operas/Cairns Kieran
Beethoven/Solomon quartetfore
BBC Music Guide- Schumann's Piano Music Vesteralen
Charles Ives Remembered- An Oral History/Perlis, ed.
Testimony (Shostakovich)/Volkov RandallPeterListens
Dvořák Romantic Music's Most Versatile Genius/Hurwitz Truckload
Beethoven The Music & the Life/Lockwood GGlueck
Berlioz- Memoirs jalex
Cambridge Companion to Schubert/Gibbs, ed.
The Beethoven Quartet Companion/Winter & Martin Hausmusik

3. Historical & Stylistic Periods:

Medieval Music/Hoppin
Music in the Renaissance/Reese
Baroque Music/Palisca
Music in the Baroque Era/Bukofzer
Music in the Classical Era/Pauly
Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music/Longyear
Romantic Music/Plantinga
Twentieth-Century Music An Introduction/Salzman
Music in the 20th Century/Austin
The Sonata in the Baroque Era/W. Newman
The Sonata in the Classical Era/W. Newman
The Sonata Since Beethoven/W. Newman Hexameron
The Rest is Noise Listening to the 20th Century bartleby/al2henry
The Classical Style/Rosen Artemis/Edward Elgar
Composers Voices from Ives to Ellington/Perlis-Van Cleve Barger
Modern Music/Griffiths Edward Elgar
Music Here and Now/Krenek hemidemisemiquaver
Quasi una Fantasia Essays on Modern Music/Adorno
Nineteenth-Century Music/Dalhaus Hausmusik

4. Instrument-specific Books:

The Composer-Pianists- Hamelin and the Eight/Rimm
The Art of the Piano/Dubal
Five Centuries of Keyboard Music/Gillespie
The Great Piano Virtuosos of our Time- ...Account of Studies w/Liszt, Chopin, Tausig and Henselt/von Lenz Hexameron
The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present/Schonberg Hexameron/Air/andruini
Piano Playing with Piano Questions Answered/Hofmann
Piano Technique/Gieseking & Leimer CML
After the Golden Age Romantic Pianism & Modern Performance/Hamilton Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet/Stowell, ed. Hausmusik
The String Quartet/Griffiths carlmichaels

5. Theory & Composition:

Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory/Miller verticiel
Principles of Orchestration/Rimsky-Korsakov anmarwis/Barger
A Guide to Orchestration/Adler Edward Elgar
Counterpoint in Composition/Salzer & Schlachter
Counterpoint/Kennan
A Practical Approach to Sixteenth-Century Counterpoint/Galdin
A Practical Approach to Eighteenth-Century Counterpoint/Galdin
Forms in Tonal Music: An Introduction to Analysis/Green
Classical Form: theory of formal function for instrumental music/Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven/Capin Herzeleide
Harmony and Voice Leading/Aldwell & Schlacter Herzeleide/bigham45
Tonal Harmony/Kostka & Payne bigham45
Counterpoint/Piston Jeremy Marchant
Foundation Studies in Fugue/Hugo
Technique of Canon/Hugo chee_zee
Treatise on Orchestration/Berlioz jalex

6. Other Music Interest

The Symphony/Steinberg Chi_townPhilly/kg4fxg
From Paris to Peoria How European Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland/Lott
The Virtuosi/Schonberg
The Book of Musical Anecdotes/Lebrecht
Lexicon of Musical Invective/Slominsky
Letters of Composers/Norman & Shrifte Hexameron
Conversations with Karajan/Osborne
Karl Böhm- A Life Remembered (Memoirs) Gustav
Collins Dictionary of Music/Kennedy Cyclops
1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die/M. Rye, ed. Sanctus493
The Lives of the Great Composers/Schonberg World Violist/Species Motrix/kx4fxg
Elementary Training for Musicians/Hindemith CML
Wondrous Strange- the Life and Art of Glenn Gould/Bazzana
Glenn Gould Reader/Page Isola
NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music/Libbey kg4fxg/Mirror Image
Musicophilia: Tales of Music & the Brain/Sacks Barger
NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection/Libbey Sam Guss
The Music Instinct how music works & why we can't live without it/Ball 52paul/Lunasong
The Great Conductors/Schonberg
The Compleat Conductor/Schuller superhorn
Music & Society Since 1815/Raynor quartetfore
The Composer's Advocate/Leinsdorf GGlueck
Evenings with the Orchestra/Berlioz jalex
Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music/Debussy-Ives-Busoni jalex
Conversations with Menuhin/Dubal
Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations/Watson, ed.
Dictionary of Musical Quotations/Crofton & Fraser, ed. goldie08
The Great Transformation of Musical Taste Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms/Weber Hausmusik
 
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#293 ·
Does anyone have any of the Groves editions? I'm looking at a set, 20-volumes, for a dang reasonable price, but I don't want to get it if it doesn't make interesting reading. I can Google stuff for reference. What I'd like it to be is medi depth, interesting articles that may not turn up with an online search. How close am I to it's reality?

Thanks
 
#300 · (Edited)
Coat Book Publication Collar Suit

I have this, I enjoy both musicological and musico-historiological texts, as long as they are talking about music it will be more than just fine for me. Mr Gardiner calls JS Bach a learned musician, I beg to differ, JS Bach is a musical nirvana, which means any definitive term is an insult to him.
 
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#303 ·
Schubert Songs - A Biographical Study by the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has been my favorite sketch of the composer and his most returned-to form. The works that are considered minor by Dieskau don't receive much attention, unless their back story warrants the attention. But as long as one trusts the author/interpretor and his value on each song, you'll stay consistently interested. Fischer-Dieskau gives notes on performance, places specific songs in context of the time they were written, as well as their place in posterity. He compares Schubert's settings to those of other composers and gives a plenty of anecdotes of both larger, historical interest, as well as the impact they had in Schubert's own circle. An invaluable and eternally interesting read. I found much quiet entertainment listening to the singer's interpretation while reading his impetus behind it.
 
#305 ·
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Just wanted to alert people to the fact that amazon.co.uk is currently offering the Tippett biography in hardback for considerably less than a tenner. I paid £8.77 postage-paid for next-day delivery of a brand-new copy, but it's available for even less than that from other sellers (but with postage costs, so it's all a bit of a wash). Seems cheap to me, though, given it's normal list price of £25 or more.
 
#309 ·
After years of resisting streaming services, I recently subscribed to Spotify. In these modern times, despite all my reservations, it looks like a great resource. Despite reading books, forums, blogs, and magazines—online and print—I was missing a lot it seems.

I went to Spotify to hear Mozart's K.356, Adagio for Glass Harmonica in C Major, and it puts me down in the middle of a multi-CD album, The Life and Works of Mozart, by Jeremy Siepmann, on Naxos. It seems Siepmann did a whole series of these audiobooks released about 2001 to 2005.

I have listened to "Mozart" and am now part way into "Beethoven". I am really impressed. Most of my previous experience with this sort of thing has been Robert Greenberg's Great Courses, formerly The Teaching Company, lectures. The Siepmann series are quite different. He is not a composer like Greenberg but his knowledge and perspectives are spot on. There is more of a tendency to present complete movements and Siepmann is witty and entertaining. He has the big broadcaster's voice and has found outstanding actors to read the composers' quotes.

I am very surprised I never heard of this series and it has received so little mention on talkclassical. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about a composer and their works. I haven't listened to any of his series beyond "The Life and Works" sets but I see "Classics Explained" albums dedicated to individual works like Beethoven's Sixth, and Brahmns' Piano Concerto No. 2.

A begrudged thank you to Spotify, I guess.
 
#315 ·
After years of resisting streaming services, I recently subscribed to Spotify. In these modern times, despite all my reservations, it looks like a great resource. Despite reading books, forums, blogs, and magazines-online and print-I was missing a lot it seems.

I went to Spotify to hear Mozart's K.356, Adagio for Glass Harmonica in C Major, and it puts me down in the middle of a multi-CD album, The Life and Works of Mozart, by Jeremy Siepmann, on Naxos. It seems Siepmann did a whole series of these audiobooks released about 2001 to 2005.

I have listened to "Mozart" and am now part way into "Beethoven". I am really impressed. Most of my previous experience with this sort of thing has been Robert Greenberg's Great Courses, formerly The Teaching Company, lectures. The Siepmann series are quite different. He is not a composer like Greenberg but his knowledge and perspectives are spot on. There is more of a tendency to present complete movements and Siepmann is witty and entertaining. He has the big broadcaster's voice and has found outstanding actors to read the composers' quotes.

I am very surprised I never heard of this series and it has received so little mention on talkclassical. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about a composer and their works. I haven't listened to any of his series beyond "The Life and Works" sets but I see "Classics Explained" albums dedicated to individual works like Beethoven's Sixth, and Brahmns' Piano Concerto No. 2.

A begrudged thank you to Spotify, I guess.
I listened to all of the Siepmann Life and Works on Spotify. They were all very good. At home I still listen to go vinyl. I use Spotify when on the road. Lately, however, I've been using Primephonic, which is a streaming app like Spotify, but one that is exclusively for classical music lovers. As such, it is a lot better than Spotify. Its classical library is enormous compared to Spotify. If you mainly use Spotify for classical, I would definitely look into Primephonic. I'm still buying it by the month but I've decided to get a year subscription, I just haven't but the bullet yet.
 
#313 ·
I'm about halfway through Susan McClary's Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, and it's fair to say it's 'blowing my mind'. Her analyses, which are grounded in musicological rigor but not afraid to bring in sociocultural arguments as well, are just so lucid and compelling. Madrigals go so much farther than the cliche 'madrigalisms' that it may even be fair to say that 'madrigalisms' represent a small and insignificant portion of how madrigals work and what they are doing... Has anyone else read this? Does anyone have any other good books on madrigals or earlier modal forms?
 
#314 · (Edited)
Peter Schmelz is an associate prof at Arizona State specializing in the Soviet "Thaw" composers of the '60s and beyond. Such Freedom is the best (only?) overview of the immediate post-Stalin scene, which saw the emergence of an underground that gave rise to Part, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Denisov, et. al. It is very readable for general readers despite the academic pedigree (published by Oxford). Also a book on Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1 (Oxford as well) that is the most insightful account of Schnittke's music I've read. Looking forward to Schmelz's next, which looks at polystylism in Schnittke's and Silvestrov's more mature work.
 
#317 ·
Some more book recommendations:
The Messiaen Companion by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone (biography)
Michael Tippett: The Biography by Oliver Soden (biography)
Behind Bars by Elaine Gould (I guess this would probably go under composition)
Flûtes au Present by Jean-Yves Artaud (under instrument-specific, it's in French but also has a ton of useful multiphonic fingerings and other technical stuff)
The Techniques of Saxophone Playing by Marcus Weiss and Giorgio Netti (instrument specific)
The Contemporary Violin by Patricia Strange and Allen Strange (instrument specific)
Instrumentation and Orchestration by Alfred Blatter (theory and composition)
 
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