Reddit reviews Oxford History of Western Music: 5-vol. set

Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is brilliant (apart from the last volume which is only OK). It is readable and fascinating.

> a book

Taruskin. Long but exactly what you're looking for. We're talking about several centuries of history here, so any survey book has to be fairly long, or it would be superficial. The same goes for most documentaries. Bernstein's Norton Lectures might be some use, but they cover a lot of other things which might not be relevant to your interests, and they only cover certain periods of history. You can find them on youtube very easily. And for 20th century music, you can't really go wrong with Alex Ross.

These Yale Lectures are also pretty good.

Dude, Richard Taruskin has this amazing set called "The Oxford History of Western Music" it covers EVERYTHING.


It's informative, a fun read, and packed into 5 volumes with musical analysis and a historical perspective hardly rivaled.


If you've got the money, I can assure you this is worth every penny.



http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Western-Music-5-vol/dp/0195386302/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

> Wait, what free drink? I totally missed this.

If you're in London hmu on reddit. I buy first drink for anyone whose name I recognise from reddit, as a general rule.

>(I'm sure there is more theory out there, of course, I just don't know what it is or how to find it.)

Once you've got the basics, you're starting to get into specialist areas. It's a bit like saying "I want to learn some science". Music theory becomes musicology, and that's literally a degree topic.

You could look for the following books:

On the topic of analysing music, try Nicolas Cook. A Guide to Musical Analysis, 1994. I'm not a fan of a lot of what Nicolas Cook writes and says but I can't deny that as an entry level for people that haven't read deeply, he has some of the seminal texts.

On the topic of harmony and form, you could try either Aldwell and Schachter or the much cheaper, but much less thorough [Pratt](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynamics-Harmony-Principles-Practice.

On the topic of music history, you probably want to start with a general overview of classical music. Nicolas Cook wrote A Very Short Introduction. A textbook like Burkholder, Grout and Palisca covers most of the areas first year undergrads are expected to learn in the UK. Alternately, something like that Taruskin is also very thorough.

When you then want to focus down, you can use bibliographies from any of those books to find your favourite area.

Ethnomusicology might be worth considering. Look at the Very Short Introductions to Ethnomusicology, World Music and Folk Music.

If you have an interest in film music and how that functions, then you could start by looking at a book like Music and Mythmaking which is quite a nice introduction. There's another Very Short Introduction which is also useful. Kalinak is someone I find generally on target. There's also the Mervyn Cooke introduction to the history of film music which I found slightly inaccurate as it got more modern, but that's often the case in these books written contemporarily.

A subsection of this is ludomusicology (my field!) which you probably want to get into by reading either Collins or Summers depending on whether you want to read an established author, or read something written by one of my potential supervisors. You might struggle to find either of these depending on where you are. You could also try Ludomusicology.

There's also composition, but this might be a good start?

Jazz I'm not as sure about off the top of my head, alas.

E: It's worth noting that a lot of this steps away from purely mathematical relationships though. The mathematical relationships just get weird as you push further and as mentioned elsewhere in this AMA, the people that study them are the kind of people that nerds avoid at parties because they might want to talk about mathemusic.