Hi! Are there any good books or texts you would recommend to someone who want to deepen their musical analysis abilities?
(I love your blog and the descriptions accompanying the pieces! I find them incredibly interesting and of great help to get a better understanding of what lies behind a composition. They add plenty to the listening experience so... Thank you for sharing your knowledge on here! š)
Thanks for reading my posts! :D I was thinking about how I miss updating this blog more often...work has been taking up most of my energy.
A lot of my musical reading was either library books, or more often reading up about music online or watching video essays/lectures/listening to podcasts. I have a stack of books in my personal library, here are my favorites that helped me understand more about music:
Alex Ross - The Rest is Noise. This is a popular choice, Ross is a music critic for The New Yorker, and this book is a set of essays covering music through the 20th century. He focuses on the political, cultural, and technological events that inspired composers. It's a broad overview of styles. I remember reading it in college when it introduced me to Steve Reich
Alex Ross - Listen to This. Also has essays on popular music, but here are the classical topics he covers: The descending bass-line, chaconnes, and 'lameno' style voice writing. Mozart's Don Giovanni. Schubert. John Luther Adams. Verdi and Opera in our culture. John Cage. Late Brahms.
Prentice Hall History of Music Series - Various. I bought these at a library sale; Baroque Music (Claude V. Palisca), Music in the Classic Period (Reinhard G. Pauly), Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music (Rey M. Longyear), and Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (Eric Salzman). Downside is that this set is older, so the 20th century book only covers up to early 1960s. But each volume is pretty short so it is a helpful overview
Manyard Solomon - Mozart, A Life. I'm still reading this because it's very long, but it is an extensive biography on Mozart that also helps to explain the cultural, political, and philosophic world that Mozart was living in. It also has a great defense against the claim that Mozart put no effort into his music.
Charles Rosen - The Classical Style. Talked about music of the late 18th century, most emphasis going on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. It can be dense and academic at times, but helped me learn more about aesthetics
Charles Rosen - The Romantic Generation. Even longer and more academic than the Classical Style, this book focuses on the major Romantic composers of the 1830s; Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Romantic Opera. Probably my favorite book because of how much history is in it. Talks about a new view of history that developed after new theories in geology changed our perspective on time, which in turn changed how the Romantics thought of musical time. It talked about these composers styles, how they used the sounds of instruments as being what drives the music, how Bach influenced them all growing up, how Romantic Opera is simultaneously the greatest art genre and kitschy garbage, how post-Enlightenment religion was hyper-personalized to the point of making art that tries to create a spiritual atmosphere without being 'religious', and Schumann's illusions of musical eternity
Paul Roberts - Images, The Piano Music of Claude Debussy - Another favorite, talks about the cultural world of turn of the century Paris, and all the musical and artistic influences that went into Debussy's piano works; Impressionism, Symbolism, Japanese visual art, Baudelaire's poetry, Watteau's paintings, Javanese gamelan music, and others
Haruki Murakami - Absolutely on Music, Conversations with Seiji Ozawa. A lot of great insight from both Murakami and Ozawa, they talk about composers, artists, specific performances (like Glenn Gould's radically slow tempo for Brahms' concerto), some industry talk, and attitudes on being Japanese while performing Western art.
Richard Taruskin - Music in the Late 20th Century - I've been warned that this author has a negative bias toward some of the composers and styles he talks about, but it helped me understand Webern inspired Serialism a lot better.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson - Music After the Fall. Currently reading this one, it's also academic and somewhat dense at times, but it's about contemporary music since 1989 (published in 2017) which I'll admit I don't know a lot about contemporary classical music. Trying to rectify that. So far I'm very fascinated by the way the recording industry, and the shift toward music listening as a personal and mobile activity, as changed how we think of music in a way so so so different from pre-industrial humans.
Nicolas Slominsky - Lexicon of Musical Invective, Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven's Time. Ending with a fun book, it is a collection of negative press from music-criticism history. The edition I have has an intro from Peter Schickele (PDQ Bach) which is an enlightening essay on how we react to new art. I think it's interesting to see the minority opinion of a lot of the greats. And sometimes it is funny to see how other cultures perceived music that we love today. Here is a quote with the composer's name cut out:
"In search of ear-rending dissonances, torturous transitions, sharp modulations, repugnant contortions of melody and rhythm, [X] is altogether indefatigable. All that one can chance upon, is here brought forward to produce the effect of bizarre originality, especially the strangest tonalities, the most unnatural chord positions, the most preposterous combinations in regard to fingering..."
This is a criticism of Chopin by the way. "Bizarre", "strange" tonality, "unnatural" chord positions...
