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My other area of autodidacticism. Many people assume that I was a music major in college. Actually I never took a single college-level music class in my life (in fact, the only music class I ever took was orchestra in high school). But I read a lot, and eventually after enough books have been read, it coalesces into something approaching knowledge.
| What I've been read in the past - Music |
| Date | Author | Title |
|---|
[Finished 11 September 2008] A collection of essays I stumbled upon while looking for a biography of Dvorak. I really had no sense of critical perspectives on Dvorak before reading this, and found that there was a whole universe of which I was unaware.
[Finished 7 June 2003] A good history of how music developed in the twentieth century. It’s written for non-musicians so the details on the music are often absent, but it does give a good big picture sense of the relationships between different composers (and also brings in jazz and rock as key elements of the development of serious music).
The Acoustic Guitar Answer Book by Sharon Isbin
[Finished 17 May 2003] One to avoid. I had hoped for some good insights into acoustic guitar playing from one of the masters of the craft. Instead I got a disjoint collection of magazine articles she’d written. Some interesting, some dull, and not worth the price of admission as a whole
[Finished 27 April 2002] If you only read one book on harmony, this is the one. Written from the perspective of providing the information that the composer needs to know to be able to fully employ the harmonic tools at her disposal, I found this book enormously helpful in understanding concepts which had previously remianed a bit elusive. I haven’t seen the workbook, but I assume it is equally helpful.
[Finished 22 January 2002] Deciding to take amazon’s advice, I picked up another book on Counterpoint (beyond the Jeppeson). It was definitely a more lucid discussion of the topic although I’m not sure how much of that to credit to the fact that this was the second book I’ve read on counterpoint and how much credit belogs to Piston himself.
[Finished 8 January 2002] An odd mix of materials, some seemingly geared towards the person considering playing the bass, and others towards the advanced student. Inspirational, and worth keeping near the music stand, but not all that practical in the end.
[Finished 25 April 2001] The first practical book I’ve read on orchestration. It’s a bit outdated in places and at times charmingly un-PC, but a handy guide regardless. While it doesn’t talk as much about combinations of instruments as Rimsky-Korsakoff’s book, it provides detailed and practical information on each of the instruments it covers.
[Finished December 2000] Both a manifesto and a textbook, the opening sentence sets the tone:
Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones.I love this book, and I love Persichetti’s compositions. Clearly an essential work for students of music theory.
[Finished November 2000] As part of my program of musical autodidacticism, I decided that I needed to learn about counterpoint (partly because I found myself wanting to write a piece in the style of classical counterpoint). A bit of research revealed this to be the generally acclaimed best book on the subject, and I found that it did suit my needs quite well, although less so than actually performing Palestrina pieces with the Holy Name Choir.
[Finished 5 January 2000] An excellent introduction to harmonic analysis. Some sections were a bit unclear, but a large part of that was more because I read 2/3 of it away from a keyboard so I was relying on my musical imagination to tell me what the examples sounded like. Reading it has certainly done a lot to broaden my own compositional skills. Reviews at Amazon.com indicate that the current edition is not as good as the older edition which I read. Pity.
[Finished 16 November 1999] A bit frustrating as many of the principles are still left unillustrated even with the copious score extracts, and much is left unexplained. The introduction explains how the text came to be (compiled from fragments of a planned work left unfinished at Rimsky-Korsakov’s death), but fails to explain why the work was published in its present state. It has influenced me somewhat in my playing and arranging, but was of little direct use to me.
[Finished 9 November 1999] When I started teaching myself the flute, I put this book aside as being a bit impractical for my interests. I was right to do so, but as I progressed, I decided to pick it up again and see if it was interesting. Very much so. It was occasionally confusing as some of Boehm’s terminology clashed with my own (e.g., what he called the C# key, I called the C key, his reasoning being that the hole beneath the key sounded C# while mine was that closing the key caused the flute to sound C), but it was fascinating reading the description of how the modern flute came to be. I’ve read some autobiographies of flute techs who said that they used this book to disassemble and reassemble a flute for the first time. Maybe so, I don’t see that, but still worth the few bucks it’d cost any flute player to pick this one up.
[Finished 21 June 1999] Perhaps the only book that has inspired me to be a better musician.