The Good Music Book Guide!

[Bassoonery]

Have you read any good music books lately? have you read any bad ones?

How about recommending (or not) them here...

I just read "Forever Music" by Edith Schaeffer. It's out of print but available on Amazon. An elderly member of our last church gave it to me and it's a charming mixture of autobiography, Christian philosophy (very gentle!) and musical philosophy, all revolving round one Steinway baby grand. Beautifully and sincerely written, not very meaty, but it put a smile on my face!

[Boneman]

What about the Henry Mancini book of orchestration?

[Whataguy!]

Do you mean Sounds and Scores, Boneman? I liked that one. Henry did some pretty interesting things with woodwinds (flutes in particular) and percussion and a lot of his voicings for brass could have come out of the Stan Kenton book. I read Mancini's book in high school and even now, I'll remember something from it and think: "So that was what he meant . . ."

[kenm]

Good books:

"Orchestrally Speaking", by Robert Russell Bennett, orchestrator of many Broadway musicals, including "Showboat", "Oklahoma", South Pacific", "Kiss me Kate", "O, Kay", many others.

"Instrumentation and Orchestration", by Alfred Blatter. The first chapter is "Basics: Preparing Scores and Parts"; the main body of the book contains comprehensive descriptions of the orchestral instruments and how to use them, individually and in combination; the appendices are:

1 Transpositions of Instruments
2 Electronic Sound Modifications
3 MIDI
4 String Fingerings
5 Guitar Fingerings
6 Guitar Chord Diagrams
7 The Harmonic Series
8 Woodwind Fingerings
9 Brass Fingerings
10 Trombone Glissandos
11 The International Phonetic Alphabet
12 Historic Notation Oddities and Practices

Bad books:

"Harmony" and "Free Composition", by Heinrich Schenker, because of his bigotry (in his view, only German composers wrote great music), dishonesty (he has a theory that he supports by careful sampling of works that support it and neglect of those that don't) and ignorance (he argues from acoustics, but fails to understand it). See http://www.mooremusic.org.uk/schenk/index.htm for detailed argument.

[sneekymum]

I'm currently working through Melody - How to write great tunes by Rikky Rooksby (including a 90 track CD) in an effort to wean muself off chord progressions. As with most things I read I find I know most of it anyway - but there are soem interesting ideas. It's popular music though...

[bassistah]

Testimony, the book transcribed by Shostakovich to Solomon Volkov. Incredible reading about how he was in and out of favour with the soviet government, his personal hatred of Prokofiev, his love of Mahler, his habit of keeping a packed suitcase under his bed at all times... amazing reading. In fact the Boss still might have it along with my Schoenberg theory!

http://www.amazon.com/Testimony-Memo.../dp/087910998X