Suggest some music books

Cafe Society
1

I’m looking for suggestions for books about music.

  1. A good book on the history of music. I’m looking for something college level here as I already know all the main composers. I took two music history courses in college. One class covered music from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras, the other course covered the Romantic era up until the 20th century.

  2. A good book on music theory. I played trumpet and piano in high school and I can read music. So, perhaps a introductory college text?

  3. Biographies of famous composers. I’m looking for works that are more focused on the composer’s music as opposed to their cheating on their wives or other trivia.

2

Grout - A History of Western Music would be my first recommendation for a one book overview. There’s also the Joseph Machlis The Enjoyment of Music, but it’s more of a ‘music appreciation’ course sort of book, and it’s sounding like you want a little more depth… Beyond these, most books tend to focus on a specific period, composer, instrument, ensemble or style.

The ideal book of music theory hasn’t been written yet. While we wait for Godot, I have enjoyed using the Aldwell and Schachter Harmony and Voice Leading in two volumes. There is also the Walter Piston Mark DeVoto Harmony, but enjoy is not even remotely the word I would choose to describe working with it. He knows what he’s talking about, he just comes up with some of the most Proustian utterances to try to convey his meaning. If you want that sort of thing, there is absolutely nothing more thorough than the Arnold Schönberg Theory of Harmony. It, too, is very rough going.

For biographies of composers that focus on the composer’s style and composition, you might be best to go through something like the “Cambridge Companion to…” series, and follow up on their suggested reading. I’ve been following a series that does the exact opposite, that is to say, focuses on the biographic aspect and less on the composers’ music - the Illustrated Lives of Great Composers series published by Quantum Press. Groves has published some of their longer and more commonly searched articles as separate books - I remember ‘Piano’, ‘Beethoven’, ‘The Second Vienna School’, etc. being around the Toronto Public Library not that long ago.

Oh, while I’m thinking of that, you can subscribe to The Grove Online Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and it’s fantastic. This has reminded me - when I first got Sibelius 2, the music writing software, there was a free subscription for a year attached to it. Now that I’ve upgraded to Sib 5.x, I should check if that offer ever got repeated. It was great, it was just that the renewal came up at a time when I couldn’t afford it. It was great to be able to access Grove’s at the click of a mouse…

Hope that helps for a start.

3

My wife is a music history professor at UCLA. She says you also might want to take a look at Music: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Cook. It’s a framework for thinking about ALL music that sheds some light on why it’s difficult to write general histories of music and music theory. She also says if you are interested in a particular composer or century she’d be happy to recommend specific works.

4

I’d love to read books on Brahms, Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn. Thanks!

5

I don’t know if this will interest you but I just loved Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise which is a kind of social history of music in the 20th century. It’s not technical at all (and that was fine with me) but I thought it was wonderfully written and it’s filled with information and interesting perspectives. If this guy wrote a similar book about any other period I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

6

For Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert, she suggests The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen.

7

OK, I just borrowed A History of Western Music by Grout and The Romantic Generation by Rosen. Any opinions on the Norton Anthology of Western Music? I think that might be next on my list.
Harmony and Voice Leading isn’t available at my local library.

8

I studied the Norton Scores along with the Machlis mentioned above. For theory, try Tonal Harmony by Stefan Kostka and Anthony Palisca. The Grout is the standard music history book. There are many editions – I think up to eighth by now. There are also abridged and unabridged versions.

9

My wife says (and I quote) “It’s perfectly fine and a good starting place.”

10

I’ve worked with Allen Forte, Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice and the Piston standard college text for brushing up on a few unclear ideas a while back. Both seemed completely appropriate for a beginning student. The Forte has a nice set of keyboard exercises at the end of each chapter to be transposed to all keys IIRC which are extremely nice to have, IMO.

The Schoenberg is one of the most fascinating books imaginable, especially about the historical development of harmony into the twentieth century, but I wouldn’t even consider using it as a textbook at all – it could be appropriate reading for someone while they are learning the bog-standard basics of roman numeral analysis, and probably for years after, though.

Interestingly, it seems that some people have been using Felix Salzer’s Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music as a core college textbook, judging from the blurbs inside my copy, but I don’t see how that’s even possible without (a) a good teacher and (b) a basic knowledge of major/minor harmony, counterpoint, and so forth. I am reading it slowly and it requires pretty much every ounce of concentration I can muster, and that’s with a pretty good amount of experience with various kinds of music.

As long as Le Ministre was bringing up some of the rough texts, I thought that one seemed more than appropriate to throw in there. :wink: