(Part 2) Best books about classical music according to redditors
We found 395 Reddit comments discussing the best books about classical music. We ranked the 164 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
There are a lot of courses. Any specific topics you're interested in?
Edit: I'll just list a few anyway that I've used in classes (this may not reflect all professors' choices for the same subjects).
Tonal Harmony: Kostka-Payne - Tonal Harmony
Counterpoint 1: A Berklee book by the late professor Rick Applin. Some also use this Fux translation/adaptation
Counterpoint 2: Bach Inventions & Sinfonias (any edition, really)
"Advanced" Counterpoint: The Well-Tempered Clavier (again, any edition)
Early Twentieth-Century Harmony: Persichetti - Twentieth-Century Harmony
Post-Tonal Theory/Analysis: Straus - Intro to Post-Tonal Theory
Instrumentation/Orchestration: Adler - The Study of Orchestration &
Casella/Mortari - The Technique of Contemporary Orchestration
Western Music History - Burkholder/Paiisca - A History of Western Music (8th or 9th edition)
Conducting 1 - Notion Conducting
Conducting 2 Notion + Stravinsky's Petrushka
Berklee's own (jazz-based) core harmony and ear-training curricula use Berklee textbooks written by professors which, as someone else mentioned, come unbound and shrink-wrapped at the bookstore. You can find older (PDF) versions of the Berklee harmony textbooks here. Of course this list only represents explicit book choices - there are a lot of excerpt-readings, and there's a lot of instruction that isn't found in these books even in the associated courses.
Fryderyk Chopin: a Life and Times
I am assuming you already know how to read sheet music and are already experienced with some pieces under your belt. So this book will be great for you: Piano Masterworks -- Early Intermediate Level. It's a great book and comes with easy beginner songs to some songs that will introduce you to more intermediate pieces. Though if this is too easy for you then this book is also part of a series that gets progressively harder.
Damn.
https://www.amazon.com/Elevator-Music-Easy-Listening-Moodsong-Expanded/dp/0472089420
It's an actual book. Impressive
As music education major, here are a few tips that I have found useful.
Well that's about all I can think of at the moment, feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions, or if you need some music I have plenty of music/etudes/warm-ups for beginners that I can send you if your are interested.
Edit: grammar
I can't speak to its quality, but this fits your criteria: https://www.amazon.com/Music-Minus-One-Piano-Rachmaninov/dp/159615005X
Chopin's Etudes are robust compositions whose focus is more on development of a particular style or character than any one specific skill. Op. 10 No. 3 emphasizes maintaining an expressive, legato style while exploring a handful of complexities. It is much more strongly focused on tone and phrasing than the other etudes in this set.
The 'A' section layers several melodic lines on top of one another, which presents a few challenges. The left hand's voices, while simple technically, provide a texture that is both internally disparate and independent from the right hand, while the right hand must use the weaker 3-4-5 fingers to project the primary melody over the accompaniment in the lower ones. All four of these lines then must be balanced against each other and the rise and fall of the dynamics in the melody must be executed without affecting the underlying voices. Several passages require the portamento technique to maintain the legato style without overuse of the pedal.
The 'B' section that follows introduces a melody that consists of sequences of chords played with one hand; finding a fingering that works for you can be difficult. While I don't believe the left hand in the section's opening bars was intended to be truly staccato, it should certainly be more disconnected than the right. The bars that follow, again, present several melodic lines that must be balanced against each other. Fingering is definitely a challenge in the diverging chromatic tri-tones that come next. Make sure you find a fingering that allows you to practice in a relaxed fashion without tensing up and placing undue stress on your wrists.
Use of the pedal is an interesting component throughout, as well. Chopin avoided placing pedal marks in his scores, preferring instead that his students figure out what works best for them. Take a look at a few different editions to get some ideas, and make sure to avoid leaning on the pedal to accomplish the legato style that characterizes this piece.
I'd highly recommend picking up the Cortot edition of these etudes. He includes an extensive introduction to each etude, providing context (much more thorough than what I've written here), technical direction and exercises for studying the more difficult passages. The introduction for this etude is as long as the etude itself and I found it to be an invaluable resource.
TL;DR: Legato, voicing, pedal, rubato and expressiveness
Hey, I’m kind of a book junkie when it comes to common practice stuff, so I’m gonna throw a bunch of em at ya. The common practice era of composition can be broken down into 3 major fields of study: Form/Composition, Harmony and Orchestration. Form/composition is about how music develops over time harmonically and melodically. Harmony is about how vertical sonorities interact with one another, this is one of the most fleshed out aspects of music theory. Orchestration, usually the capstone discipline, dives into how groups of instruments interact with one another on a harmonic level and a melodic one. Harmony+composition can be studied simultaneously considering there is so much overlap, orchestration usually comes after you have a middling understanding of the other two subjects.
There are a bunch of free online materials on these subjects, but here is my personal favorite:
http://openmusictheory.com/contents.html
There are also a few free books on harmony, orchestration and composition, but most of them were published a very long time ago. As a consequence, you may run into outdated or poorly explained concepts.
Harmony:
Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony
Orchestration:
Principles of Orchestration
Composition:
Fundamentals of music Composition
Exercises in Melody Writing
Most of the stuff with comprehensive+up to date information on these subjects is going to be something you pay for. Here are my favorite textbooks. One thing I value in a textbook is an accompanying workbook and/or some sort of exercise based learning, so I’ll be listing the workbooks (if applicable) as well.
Melody in Songwriting
Craft of Musical Composition Parts One and Two
Models For Beginners in Composition
Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music
Workbook for Harm Practice
The Study of Orchestration
Workbook for The Study of Orchestration
This isn’t an exhaustive list but it’s pretty solid.
Recording orchestras is out of reach for most, so you’ll probably need some good VSTs to use and some knowledge of how to make them sound ‘real’. Building an orchestra template is key to making music quickly and efficiently. It’s a massive headache to have to wait for Kontakt to load and instrument every time you want to add a flute or violin to your score. Here are the basics of what you’ll need:
Woodwinds:
Flutes
Clarinets
Saxophones
Oboes
Bassoons
Brass:
French horns
Trumpets
Trombones
Tubas
“Low brass”
Strings:
1st Violins
2nd Violins
Violas
Cellos
Bass
First chairs of each
Others:
PIANOS
Harps
Choirs
Guitars
Vibraphones
Glockenspiels
Etc
Orchestral percussion
Concert Toms
Taikos
Snares
Concert bass drums
Here are some places to get all of that:
Audio Bro (the ARC system is awesome)
Spitfire
8Dio
Orchestral Tools (my favorite)
CineSamples
EastWest Sounds
Heres a resource to make all of that stuff sound ‘real’. It’s a lot more difficult then you may think.
The Guide to MIDI Orchestration 4e
An easier Bach arrangement would fit perfectly. I'm a fan of this book for easily sightreadable arrangements.
https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Band-Notes-Eddie-Green/dp/1423498844
The author was actually my methods teacher in college, this is a wonderful combination on the man who made Texas bands what they are, and the notes for how to teach all of the most important subjects in band are phenomenal. Enjoy!!!
A collection of thoughts
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As has been said
> Don’t be afraid to build up a giant stack of half formed ideas on top of your piano.
Beethoven is notorious for his sketch books, and for playing with and developing ideas for years and years and years after the initial thought.
The original ideas for the 5th symphony are junk, for example. but he kept playing with it
get this book for more on this
https://www.amazon.com/Beethovens-Sketches-Analysis-Style-Sketch-Books/dp/0486230422/
part of music is the actual musical architecture and structure of the music. This is covered in the subject of "musical form" but this goes deeper
see this short video by whitacre on the subject
"Discovering the Golden Brick"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjqptQ5R-w
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for more general instruction on the basics and the bigger issues of music composition, see this YT channel by Alan Belkin
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQ0TcIbY_VEk_KC406pRpg
for a more popular music perspective, see Rick Beato and related channels
https://www.youtube.com/user/pegzch
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One of the longest traditions in music education is the making of arrangements and transcriptions of other people's music. This seems to far more effective if you do it by hand, and copy out all the parts yourself (again by hand)
Bach arranged Vivaldi, Mozart arranged Bach, Beethoven arranged Handel, etc.
If these masters did this as part of their own musical studies, maybe you could so this for your own education, using the music you admire most.
Even if it is arranging the music to a new key or mode (major to minor, etc)
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As a general thing I recommend books by Charles Rosen for music of the Classical era
https://www.amazon.com/Sonata-Forms-Revised-Charles-Rosen/dp/0393302199
https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Style-Mozart-Beethoven-Expanded/dp/0393317129/
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Probably the best place to start is by writing "etudes" which basically means "Studies" You could also call them "Experiments".
These would be shortish pieces where you try out different things. Thus if you do not know which way to go with something, you try them all or most of them, and flesh them out into separate things. Each is an experiment.
one idea might give a dozen experiments (major vs minor, slow vs fast, 3/4 vs 4/4 vs 5/4 = 12 combinations)
As experiments, not everything has to work. (but you might come back to it later)
Nothing has to be perfect, They are experiments
Later own, you experiment with ways to make it better. (see the Beethoven sketches again)
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part of the musical problem of form is to how to continue something in order to maintain interest, without it getting boring for a variety of factors. Traditional forms are solid solutions to the problem but you can come up with your own.
As an example, check out the old popular songs of John Denver (!) many of which do not follow a conventional common practice song format. What is he doing there?
Can we get some book recommendations?
I just finished Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong and greatly enjoyed it.
I am also in the middle of reading A Beautiful Noise: A History of Contemporary Worship Music in Modern America
I'd love to read a book on Ehtiopian music (espcially one covering ethiojazz, and the Ethiopian 'Divas" such as Hirut Bekele), Library Music.
I saw a book about unsung Illinois bands from the 60's which mentioned my hometown heroes The Lemon Drops, but I didn't end up purchasing it.
I am SURE there are plenty of books out there that would be of interest to us.
Side note: I have this ambition to write a book that profiles the records and cassettes that I find and post here. As a start, I am in contact with B.T. Kimbrough, who is a blind organist (and incredible man) that released a pretty obscure record back in the 70's.
I'd love to compile say, 2 dozen songs by different unsung musicians, release a V0 Compilation through a cool record label (Light In The Attic, for example), do some research and conduct interviews with the musicians in order to tell their story.
I've been trying to get a hold of the guys from The Lemon Drops for years, too. Legend has it, they (or some of them?) were still in High School when they got their record deal. When the record was finished, they convinced their school to play "I Live In The Springtime" over the PA system during school hours. This was at the school my mom and her siblings attended, but they missed it by a few years.
Anyway, wouldn't it be cool to have a compilation by various Vintage Obscura artists with an accompanying book? I'd even settle for writing some lengthy liner notes.
Source: Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times
Just in case you don't already know, you can find pretty much any classical piano music for free at imslp.org/wiki. It is nice though to give music as a gift. One possibility you might consider is a "Music Minus One" type CD/Score - they are recordings of just the orchestra parts of concertos that allow pianists to be accompanied by an orchestra. This would be my choice - it's just about the most "romantic" of all the piano concerto repertoire. It's pretty difficult, but I reckon with 10 years of lessons under her belt she'll be able to roll up her sleeves and have a go - it would be a nice challenge for her. Alternatively you could try to find out surreptitiously what her favorite piano concerto is and get the Music Minus One CD for that instead (if it exists).
You want the Polish National Editions of most of Chopin’s works; I’ve found them to be the best.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nocturnes-National-Published-Chopins-Lifetime/dp/1480390763
Sure! Here are the following book's I've used for exercises:
Brahms 51 Exercises: link
Cortot Chopin Studies: link
The Cortot ones definitely are a little more advanced, but he has a LOT of comments written along with in his book to help you guide in how you're supposed to perform the exercises. These exercises would help you eventually lead into playing some of the chopin etudes. As you said, this is based off Chopin, but quite honestly, Chopin was one of the first composers to really implement pretty much every kind of hand movement/technique at the piano into his pieces. If you study chopin and his exercises/etudes, you cannot go wrong, and you will enjoy being able to do more technical things as well. It's a struggle, I know, but that's the point!
I'll add more to the list later but I'm on my phone lol, if you're just looking for 'advanced sight reading', why not just pick up some good sheet music and play it? When I was starting out, I was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy Piano Collections stuff and honestly just played extremely slow through it while sight reading. Where you're at right now, you should be able to read any of Nobuo's stuff. The general strategy for sight reading is to NOT slow down/stop playing when you make a mistake. If you have to, then you need to slow down so you can read what's going on. If you're fumbling through a particular section of a piece while sight-reading, you've hit a gold mine! This is something you have no idea how to handle, so you can just work on that section repeatedly before moving on.
There are honestly hundreds of hand exercises that help you do different things depending on what you're trying to work on. If you're looking for something a little bit more modern, Jordan Rudess has some great exercises floating around, but they're just as good as the classics too. Really playing the piano and sounding great is the product of you working hard and LEARNING TO PRACTICE CORRECTLY. If you learn to practice efficiently, then you can honestly become an amazing player. There's actually quite a good story about how Rubenstein (one of the greater pianists of the last ~100 years) was terrible at practicing in his early years and just had a raw talent. He eventually started to practice in his later years and became the legend that he is today.
I've got a bunch of misc exercises around my study somewhere, I'll have to get them and put them up sometime. PM me if you ever have questions!
EDIT: Forgot to say, definitely pick up a Bach fugue/prelude or two. They are literally written to not give a shit about your hands, so they can be quite the good challenge to figure out how to play well. Also you play them without your pedal, so you learn to not be so dependent upon it. :)
You don't necessarily have to, I used this book: Schirmer's Early Intermediate Level halfway through Alfred 1. It's got a lot of fun pieces, Petzold (Not Bach)'s Minuet in G major, Clementi's sonatinas, Burgmueller's Ava Maria.
You get a variety of different pieces from different periods, which is great.
Motzart became Mason in 1784, he passed in 1791. He joined lodge lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit, which is roughly Beneficence. In 1785 he composed a Masonic funeral March (Maurerische Trauermusik), catalogued as K.477 (alternatively as K. 479a), and wrote and performed several other Masonic pieces.
According to Maynard Solomon, Masonry remained an important aspect of Motzar'ts life.
Despite being wikipedia, this summary is actually decent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_Freemasonry
EDIT: Motzart's lodge(s) seemed to align with the humanism and rationalism of the Strict Observance (I don't know if it was actually in allegiance to von Hund's body), unlike the other big Masonic bloc in Germany during this period, the Gold- und Rosenkreutz, who were of a more occult and alchemical mind.
Hi Owen. What you're looking for is very specific to each piece. But I think a good place to start would be in collections of program notes. Program notes usually have a little bit of history about the composer, a little bit of history about the piece, and if there's a story then they usually include a short synopsis.
So you can often find something close to what you're looking for by just searching for the name of the piece and "program notes." Lots of orchestras put theirs online.
Or if you're interested in some good books, I recommend Michael Steinberg's two collections of program notes,
The Symphony
and
The Concerto
If you happen to have access to the JSTOR online database, I think you'll find it to be the best place to take a deep dive into more detailed analysis.
EDIT -- I'll add that sometimes wikipedia can be a decent resource. But I regularly find major errors in the analysis of various pieces. I often get the feeling that some of the wikipedia entries for orchestral pieces come from class projects where students are instructed to find a piece that doesn't have a wikipedia article about it, and to create one. But the advice I gave to my graduate students was always "go to wikipedia first -- if you see references at the bottom of the wiki entry, go check out those references. They're probably better than the wiki article."
http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Man-Revealed-John-Suchet-ebook/dp/B00CIWZ7LK/
http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Maynard-Solomon-ebook/dp/B007IKKKS2/
I think this is the one I used years ago. Enjoy! Beethoven's Sketches: An Analysis of His Style Based on a Study of His Sketch-Books https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486230422/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_20AbAb5TEY2FP
Norton editions of the scores usually have lots of wonderful things in them
http://www.amazon.com/Symphony-Minor-Norton-Critical-Scores/dp/0393098931
Although the wikipedia article has some interesting points
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I can't really speak this in major detail since I'm sort of still reading this book but, Mozart's flashbacks shows how much financial trouble the historical Mozart had. I'm almost certain the person calling him an "employee" is Leopold Mozart, his father, who I can perhaps safely compare to a Joe Jackson of sorts from what I researched.
Chopin national edition is very good. Their editors make it as close to original manuscripts as possible, so I think it’s very authentic. It’s what my teacher insists I use, and I can’t complain.
Here’s a link:
https://www.amazon.com/Nocturnes-National-Published-Chopins-Lifetime/dp/1480390763/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=chopin.+national+edition+nocturnes&qid=1565933179&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Another great Chopin resource is this:
http://Www.chopinonline.ac.uk. They have PDFs of all the original manuscripts as well as first editions of chopins work.
Intelligent Music Teaching by Robert Duke
On Teaching Band by Mary Ellen Cavitt
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users.
I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
Here is link number 1 - Previous text "One"
Here is link number 2 - Previous text "Two"
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^Please ^PM ^/u/eganwall ^with ^issues ^or ^feedback! ^| ^Delete
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Approach-Classical-Guitar-HL00695114/dp/0793570654/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411670652&sr=1-1&keywords=duncan+guitar
The link above is to Charles Duncan's A Modern Approach to Classical Guitar: Book 1. The rep is very accessible to beginners without any sissy tunes. On the other hand, you will not be so frustrated with tunes such as Romanza or advanced studies of Sor's or Giuliani's.
I'm not too familiar with Handel's works, but progressing through Baroque music can be fairly straightforward and programmatic. This is especially true when it comes to Bach, who happens to be excellent for developing hand independence! I would recommend going starting with this book, then his Little Preludes, then his two- and three-part inventions, and then WTC I and II. The progression in difficulty isn't completely linear, as you'll find there will be a couple of pieces here and there (like the WTC I Prelude in C you learned) that are easier than the pieces from the book before. For the most part though, the pieces do get progressively harder. You probably won't find a lot of hand independence exercises until you get to the inventions, but there's plenty of great material to start with from the first two books alone that will prepare you. The inventions require you to voice multiple independent melodies, which can be pretty difficult for any beginner pianist.
I also agree with the other poster, keep practicing your scales! There's a lot of different ways to improve your technique from playing scales alone. Learn all your major and harmonic/melodic minor scales. Learn to play them across multiple octaves, in parallel and contrary motion, starting from any key, in thirds, sixths, and tenths. Mix them up and play different scales in each hand at the same time. Play one scale in one hand at half the speed of the other hand. Play them at different dynamics, play them legato/staccato. The variety of ways you can improve your technique from just scales is staggering, not to mention it will be of immense benefit for improving your music theory and will help you run through scales much more quickly when you encounter them in a piece later on :)
The late period instrument music conductor and Cambridge professor Christopher Hogwood wrote a book on Handel.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0500286817/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1519488598&sr=8-7&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=handel+hogwood&dpPl=1&dpID=51igm6YcITL&ref=plSrch
Hogwood or Lang, both are sound, can't really go wrong with either. I liked that they weren't too music-ky if you know what I mean... that reminds me, I have read books about brahms, britten, and sibelius, but not yet Verdi. I should probably do that.
As /u/65TwinReverbRI says, analysts generally don't focus too much on what individual composers do. That's more of the realm of musicologists/music historians. In general, I'm not sure that much biographical writing is immediately useful for composers and performers. On the one hand, knowing that Beethoven was a slob — had plates of unfinished meals strewn everywhere throughout his home, unemptied chamber pots throughout his room and under his piano (according to the Baron de Trémont's account) — can reassure you that nobody's perfect and that art often comes at a cost to its creator. On the other hand, these are interesting quirks, not models. Pooping in a pot and leaving it under your furniture is not going to magically improve your musicianship.
Performing and composing musicians are often more interested in the nuts and bolts, how you put things together in a musically expressive manner. To this end, theory provides commentaries on specific works, yes, but is typically concerned with general principles. A book like William Caplin's Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, may be based off of a chunk of repertoire specific to three composers, but its usefulness is in the methodology. The same conclusions could have been gleaned from looking at any of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven's contemporaries. If you're really interested in specific analyses, you can look at the Norton Critical Scores for various pieces, and you can probably find a few books.
https://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Life-Maynard-Solomon/dp/0060883448
discussed here at some length
extremely well-respected scholar