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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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#152 · (Edited)
Is anybody reading Sanford Friedman's novel Conversations with Beethoven, just out from NYRB Classics? It is an epistolary novel told mainly through Beethoven 's conversation books. An ingenious gimmick.

Beethoven is very effectively characterized--his irascible nature is the basis for a lot of comedy, but the tone is basically serious, dealing with Karl and the composition of the final masterpieces. I recommend it.

(Friedman died in 2010 leaving the manuscript behind; I believe this is its first appearance in print.)

EDIT: Here's a link: http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/conversations-with-beethoven/
 
#154 ·
This is a great book about Wagner, but it's only in French.


Francis Pagnon, En Évoquant Wagner. La musique comme mensonge et comme vérité. (In English : "By Evoking Wagner: Music as Lie and as Truth").

Francis Pagnon is the author of an important study of Richard
Wagner and the history music titled En Évoquant Wagner: La musique
comme mensonge et comme vérité
, which was published by Editions
Champ Libre in December 1981. This essay showed the living
movement of history at work in music in general and in the music of
Wagner, more specifically. It undertook a political critique "of mass[-
produced] music as totalitarian ideology." For the author, musical
evolution has been liquidated and enslaved to the necessities of a
retrograde organization of society. Due to its return to a pre-individual
state, modern mass[-produced] music satisfies the need for annihilation
and is only the hallucinatory submission to the violence inflicted by a
society whose maintenance is only possible through coercion extended
to all aspects of life.
Pagnon's book gives an historical perspective on the contradictions
of music in contemporary class society. The subtitle of the book, "music
as lie and as truth," refers to the lie that is mass[-produced] music and to
the revolutionary truth expressed by great music, which the author
considers to be the only real form of music, notably that [composed] by
Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy and, of course, Wagner.
For the author, Wagnerian music condemns capitalist society in which
history is rendered impossible by a form of production that is enslaved
to a perpetual cycle of exchange-value. Combat against this market
vacuity develops beyond music, which becomes false when it denies the
necessity of this combat by posing an aesthetic ideal in which the
horrors of the world are offset.

In its ultimate essence, Wagner's music refuses this false role: it
unreservedly confronts its enemy, that is to say, the musical tradition
that is alienated from a social state of affairs that only exists through the
crushing and irrational suffering of the subject. Wagner's hatred of
bourgeois society and its culture is part of his compositions. His music is
a music of destruction: it reveals the chaos on which civilized barbarity
is founded and calls for the destruction of an abhorred world.

Wagnerian music breaks the circle of non-life with the violence of
a potential life that it demands to see become real. All of its grandeur
incites the listener to the surpassing of music, to its realization. At the
moment at which market society is crumbling, art reveals its critical
content, which had always been its truth in itself, rendered clear by the
movement of history. The privilege of this crepuscular epoch is that it
divulged the enigma of ancient art. Wagner's music can, finally, show
what it wants and to what it is dedicated.

http://www.notbored.org/pagnon.pdf
 
#156 ·
I truly must be the Philistine of the group with only a number of years of Gramophone and Opera News subscriptions here, as well as Third Ear's, "Classical Music," the Rough Guide's "Opera," and "The Gramophone Classical Guide 2011," on my shelf.

...sure, Mozart's "...Letters...," a number of volumes on Wagner, and even some current philosophical discourse on the genre in general.

...but, you all are clearly masters in the field (I bow)!
 
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#158 ·
For the Opera Lovers library

The Grand Tradition by John Steane as matter of fact any of Steane's books.

Alan Blyth's Opera on Record there are three of them, published in the 80s, but still essential.

P.G. Hurst's The Golden Age Recorded for those interested in pioneers of the Gramophone.
 
#160 ·
I just scored an almost mint used copy of "The New Grove Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Webern, Berg" by Oliver Neighbor for $4.

Font Poster Publication Suit Formal wear


Looks like an interesting read.

The reviews on the jacket are positive.
 
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#161 ·
A couple of years ago I found an 8 volume set of "The International Library of Music" Pianoforte Compositions, it looked like it had never been opened. I estimated 1150 pieces from prior to 1934, so it covered the period I was most interested in. At $15.00 I think I got a bargain, and I have been able to get several pieces from it that I want to learn to play.
 
#165 ·
Glasses Vision care Eyewear Book Font


http://www.amazon.com/Messiaen-Professor-Peter-Hill/dp/0300109075

The book for that special someone in your life who enjoys 20th century french mystic catholic organists who've transcribed birdsong for various instruments and included them in damn near every composition... or if you just want a good book about Olivier Messiaen and his interesting music. :)
 
#166 · (Edited)
Coming late to this thread, but herewith some books that I have found informative and enjoyable:

Emotion and Meaning in Music, and Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Leonard Meyer. These are older books, 1956 and 1967 respectively, but in them Meyer, head of the Music Department, U. of Chicago, laid out two ideas which have had quite some effect on our understanding of how music works and where it is going. In the earlier book, he presented the idea of music working as a shifting balance of expectations confirmed or thwarted; in the second he proposed that music and the other arts had entered into a period of relative stasis, typified by innumerable small-scale trends that never reach large dimensions--a sort of Brownian motion.

This second thesis is given weight by two other, later books: the final pages of Harold C. Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers, 1997, and in several places in Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, Meyer's notion of contemporary stasis is given firm support though, curiously, Meyer's work is not referenced.

For those who appreciate strong opinions and good writing, there is Brockway and Weinstock's classic Men of Music, 1950. An older book, to be sure, but fun to read even when they are totally off the mark, as witness their curious attitude toward Brahms.

Norman Lebrecht's Who Killed Classical Music pulls no punches either. Fans of von Karajan and Pavarotti, you have been warned!
 
#168 ·
As an aficionado of Sergei Prokofiev, I can recommend Harlow Robinson's Prokofiev: A Biography as a very complete picture of this prolific composer. But Claude Samuel's much briefer Prokofiev offers much information, including many illustrations, in a small package with some chapter titles I find amusing--"I Abhor Imitation", "A Revolution in Chaldean Terms", "Oranges: 43,000 Dollars Each", etc.--and also one of the funniest and yet grotesque retellings of the storyline of Prokofiev's early ballet, Chout. Highly recommended. Prokofiev: utterly self-absorbed, often cruel, quick to give and to take offense--Shostakovich said P "had the soul of a goose"--but what torrents of wonderful music poured out of this very imperfect man.
 
#169 ·
These have been on my to-be-read list, which has enough material to last until about 900 years after my death: can anyone say whether the time invested in
THE FIRST FOUR NOTES by Guerrieri
and
SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD: Shostakovich, etc

might be worth while? I have heard that the latter is for teenagers. I do like to read about the intersections of history and culture. Does anyone have a good source for book reviews? I read the NYT and the NYROB and NPR reviews but I wonder if there is a source with a more regular focus on music.
Thank you.
 
#171 ·
I'm currently reading Daniel Snowman's The Gilded Stage. I can only recommend this book for those wanting an very informative presentation of the social context in which opera emerged and evolved. It doesn't require any musico-technical background.

http://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/The Gilded Stage

World Book Publication Poster Landmark


The Gilded Stage is a comprehensive tour of the world of opera. From its origins in the courts of northern Italy, to its internationally recognised position in modern culture, Snowman explores the social history of opera houses and impresarios, composers and patrons, artists and audiences.
Even the most flamboyant composers could scarcely have imagined the global reach of opera in our own times. More opera is performed, financed, seen, heard, filmed and broadcast than ever before, and the world's leading performers are worshipped and paid like pop stars. Yet the art form is widely derided as 'elitist' and parts of the classical recording business appear close to bankruptcy. Pinpointing the scandals, forgotten history and key revolutions in the form with light erudition and a brilliant anecdotal eye, Daniel Snowman reveals that the world of opera has always known crisis and uncertainty - and the resulting struggles have often proved every bit as dramatic as those portrayed onstage.
 
#172 ·
Just finished a British version of "The Noise of Time" a novel, this is how amazon describes it: A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. The US version will be out in May but the english one is easily available trough amazon if you don't want to wait.
Highly recommended!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/11...h&qid=1454732101&ref_=sr_1_34&s=books&sr=1-34
 
#174 ·
I'm always juggling the Guinness 1000, Third ear, Rough, Penguin 2010, and Gramophone 2010 Guides in my never ending attempt to find canonic perfection. But these, although useful, do not comprise a complete Turkey avoidance unit, or bees-knees revelation machine. Any others I should be looking at?
 
#177 ·
There is an old but excellent biography of Tchaikovsky by Herbert Weinstock. The copy I have was published in the 1940s. I believe the same author also wrote terrific bios of other composers, especially Rossini and Chopin.

Currently reading "Leonard Bernstein" by Humphrey Burton. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this is.


Another current read- "Tales from the Locker Room: An Anecdotal Portrait of George Szell and his Cleveland Orchestra." This one is a treasure especially for fans of conductor stories!! Plenty of Szell stories told by the people who played under him.
 
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