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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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#248 ·
What was Galway doing with the Tokyo SQ?
 
#255 · (Edited)
Good luck on pricing...


Also, see my post #119, Joan Peyser's "The New Music." Get this "old" version, before it was expanded into a book about Boulez.
 
#256 · (Edited)
Detailed commentary on the text of Moneverdi's (and others, but first and foremost M.) madrigals.

In the booklets of some of the Monteverdi madrigal discs that are only a very few notes re/ the meaning and hidden meanings of the words, phrases and the madrigal as a whole.

If you are aware of any text that gives very detailed notes, please let me know the title of the text. Even if the only thing available is commentary on the original poetry without regard to Monteverdi.

Thank you very much.
 
#269 ·
It sounds like what you're looking for is a "history" of CP harmony. That's a hard one. The Harmonielehre is more of a pure theory book, with Schoenberg's Views interspersed.

The closest thing I can think of as a "history" of CP is Dmitri Tymoczko's A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford Studies in Music Theory).

It may go beyond the scope of what you're after, but it does analyse various practices in the Medieval period, The Renaissance, and up through Romanticism to modern times.

https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?as...linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_V8c0DbK7CCNKS
 
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#274 ·
Hello everyone,

Is there a book that covers all the classical music authors, their works and their best recordings? Something like Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1, 000 Greatest Works by Phil G. Goulding but more extensive.

And for those of you interested in Wagner and Philosophy, I recommend the following books:

  • Wagner And Philosophy by Bryan Magee
  • The Philosophies of Richard Wagner by Julian Young
 
#275 ·
Hello everyone,

Is there a book that covers all the classical music authors, their works and their best recordings? Something like Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1, 000 Greatest Works by Phil G. Goulding but more extensive.

[/LIST]
You are searching for some kind of "Impossible to be written" book. Norton and Oxford have their own series of "history of Western music" in several volumes. (Don't forget that many famous composers ((in their own time)) are now forgotten ((Vivaldi's modern popularity is a recent phenomena - he was rediscovered)), so any such book will be pretty subjective.)
 
#282 ·
Just started reading through Lockwood's Beethoven: The Music and the Life. I picked it up in January and saw that it was recommended by several people in this thread. Just finished the first fifth or so, and I can attest to its excellence. Very engaging, very informative!
 
#283 ·
negative review



John E Klapproth

1.0 out of 5 stars Solomon's Disciple
Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2016 The Immortal Beloved Compendium: Everything About The Only Woman Beethoven Ever Loved - And Many He Didn't contains everything about this subject (including what Lockwood dosn' know).
Yet another biography of Beethoven, and yet another sad example of what comes about when German sources are ignored or regurgitated second hand. Lewis Lockwood made it very clear who he was following:
"I favor the hypothesis advanced by Maynard Solomon that the probable recipient of the 'Immortal Beloved' letter was Antonie Brentano. In light of the currently known evidence Solomon's view is by far the most convincing." (p. 499, note 16)
What kind of evidence is "currently known", is shown by the entry "1812" under "Chronology":
"Beethoven presents autograph of song 'An die Geliebte' ('To the Beloved'), WoO 140, to Antonie Brentano … In summer Beethoven … writes a letter to an unnamed woman called the 'Immortal Beloved' (almost certainly identified as Antonie Brentano)." (p. 555)
Beethoven never "presented" this to Antonie, but to the singer Regina Lang; Antonie got it only many months later - on "request".
Under "Relations with Women", Lockwood showed that he did not read carefully Josephine's letters (nor did he learn anything about letters the other members of the Brunsvik family wrote each other):
"Josephine did not reciprocate his feelings and … would not agree to sleep with him." (p. 197 f.)
(You notice that these are two different things!)
In all seriousness, he then presented a part of one of Josephine's letters to Beethoven:
"Even before I knew you, your music made me enthusiastic for you - the goodness of your character, your affection increased it. This preference that you granted me, the pleasure of your acquaintance, would have been the finest jewel of my life if you could have loved me less sensually. That I cannot satisfy this sensual love makes you angry with me, [but] I would have to violate holy bonds if I gave heed to your longing." (p. 198)
He not only gave the wrong date (some time in 1805 - it was in fact at the beginning of 1807), he also carefully omitted the preceding and the following sentences. I give here on the right, for comparison, the complete letter in my translation. The quoted one (from Albrecht 1996, #100) is in parts quite different if not misleading.
Citations out of context can easily achieve the desired effect - if this was: to mislead the reader, or to drive home a point that otherwise would not be there.
And then Lockwood once again perpetuated the myth (as quoted above) that
"Antonie … was, as Solomon discovered, the recipient of the autograph manuscript of his song 'An die Geliebte' ('To the Beloved') WoO 140." (p. 200)
What Lockwood's readers won't discover: To be fair, Antonie was indeed the recipient, not of "the", but of one autograph copy of this song, however, it was not its text (which was not authored by Beethoven), but the music which she obviously desired - to practice her guitar skills.

 
#288 ·
Can someone please tell me how to include a picture with an OP? I need to put up 2 images with a thread I intend to start. Thanks

In response to this thread, I'll add Hector Berlioz's outstanding work if fiction, Evenings with the Orchestra. Has anyone else read this? His autobiography is a good read too. He was an excellent writer. Evenings... is a great, fun read and should be better known.
 
#289 ·
Asking an open ended question here...: thoughts on any great books on Baroque music? Can be about an individual composer, performance practice, something more general about the evolution of music, something more historical about music and its relation to the times, anything. I've been voraciously devouring a lot of Baroque music that I wasn't previously familiar with over these past few weeks, and I would love to read a book to gain a deeper understanding of this brilliant music.

I think the only book on Baroque music that I've read was Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines, which I loved. This would be an example of a musico-historical kind of book about Bach, Frederick the Great, and the times they both lived in.

Any answers would be appreciated!
 
#290 · (Edited)
Asking an open ended question here...: thoughts on any great books on Baroque music? Can be about an individual composer, performance practice, something more general about the evolution of music, something more historical about music and its relation to the times, anything. I've been voraciously devouring a lot of Baroque music that I wasn't previously familiar with over these past few weeks, and I would love to read a book to gain a deeper understanding of this brilliant music.

I think the only book on Baroque music that I've read was Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines, which I loved. This would be an example of a musico-historical kind of book about Bach, Frederick the Great, and the times they both lived in.

Any answers would be appreciated!
Try Handel in London
Yellow Font Book Publication Illustration

I've really struggled to find fun, readable books about the Baroque. Often, they're impenetrable musicology textbooks which mean nothing to me sadly. I'll have another think.
 
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