Best music encyclopedias according to redditors
We found 5 Reddit comments discussing the best music encyclopedias. We ranked the 2 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 5 Reddit comments discussing the best music encyclopedias. We ranked the 2 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I strongly recommend Aaron Copland's What to Listen For in Music. A classic, for good reason, written by a major American composer.
And I agree with another commenter about searching for "[Name of piece] program notes". I'd be careful about Wikipedia-- I've found its music articles about specific pieces to be relatively poorly written, compared to (say) history and science articles. (Although, to be fair, I just tested this long-held theory by checking out Wikipedia on Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, and it was excellent.)
If you would like to read a book anyway, Aaron Copland's "What to Listen for in Music" is a great read and teaches you both how does your fugue, sonata, canon (and gavotte, minuet, passacaglia, basso ostinato...) work and where it comes from. And also how to listen to it to get the most out of it. It also has a lot of listening recommendations which are now very easy to find e.g. through Google Play. It's quite old, but it doesn't diminish it in any way.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYJE4M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
If you're into a bit of NWOBHM then The NWOBHM Encyclopedia is worth a read.
You might want to look out for a cheaper copy though...
I heartily recommend Malc Macmillan's [NWOBHM Encyclopedia] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/N-W-O-B-H-M-ENCYCLOPEDIA-Malc-MacMillan/dp/3931624161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376054798&sr=8-1&keywords=encyclopedia+of+nwobhm) if, er, you like a bit of NWOBHM.
Deena Weinstein's [Heavy Metal - The music and it's culture] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heavy-Metal-Music-Culture-ebook/dp/B00AHEZGSK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376054934&sr=1-1&keywords=deena+weinstein) is a bit elderly but still worth a read.
If you're unfamiliar with 95-98% of a scene, why fucking bother? In this particular case that's a pretty conservative estimate and six months worth of downloading ain't gonna turn you into someone who knows what's what about it.
You have no idea how deep it goes. People who were there at the time have devoted their lives since to researching it. There's at least one thing along the lines of this in the works. That should be some indication of how far out of your league you'd be on that particular one.