My Favorite Music Books

what is up good people of the world so today I thought I would make a video showing my favorite music books that's something that I get asked a lot what are your favorite compositional resources and there are lots of different places that one can gather information but of course you know there isn't any method of gathering information as timeless as reading books as you can see I have emptied my library and I kind of picked and selected my favorite selections this video is going to be in kind of three segments first I'm going to show looks that are related to music composition and also some that are related to music history and some kind of more things that aren't necessarily books technically related to music composition but I think relevant and one that a composer should would be would benefit from reading in the second part of the video I'm gonna go through my favorite scores that I own and then in the third part of the video there'll just be a small segment where I just show a couple of completely non musical books just for fun in case anyone's interested that are some of my favorite books both fiction and nonfiction so in any case let's get started I don't really have a particular order that I'm gonna go in and so I'll just let's get into it so first thing the essential dictionary of orchestration this isn't uh you know this is a tiny little tome it's not a place where you would necessarily learn orchestration from the ground up but it's a great small little tome that I always keep right and this shelf by my computer that way if I ever need to look anything up I can just look it up right in this it's by alfred and it's just a great little lookup David Baker is how to play beat Bob this is the first book in a huge series of books and it's really really fascinating it isn't he doesn't necessarily explain things pedagogically he doesn't try to create a system which some you know people might not like but he just gives tons and tons of examples like if you are going from you know 5-7 to 1 or going from 2 to 5 or if you have like a tritone substitution any of those jazz harmonic conventions here is a way here's a convincing way that you can get you know from the 5th of this chord to the root of this core and he shows you a billion ways and then I'll show you little fragments you know like bebop like lick and then he'll give an example of a soul that uses all of them together and it's just a it's just a really it's really it's a really great book to just you know pull out your instrument and just play these things that are in the book and it's a great series and they're really cheap too so if you're ever interested in jazz and pretty much no matter what no matter what style of jazz you venture into you know whether it's like fusion or beat bop pretty much every chaste musician like at some point you know internalize the bebop language even if they aren't a beat bop player cuz there's just you know the bebop musicians really figure it out all of them melodically convincing ways to move through you know essentially tonal harmonic progressions I've got a couple of reference guides you know again these aren't necessarily like serious books but they're very well written not all reference guides are well written but this one is a the general editor for this is John Burroughs but the thing that I like about this book is that it literally is just a list of composers organized historically and under each composer there's there's a little biography where it tells you some relevant information and then it gives you a list of some of their milestone compositions and obviously there's so much music out there that you can't listen to all of it you know ever and so I found this book you know whenever I'm just searching for any music I'll just open up a random page in this book find a composer I've never heard of read a little bio and just listen to the milestone pieces that it lists and and more often than not I found some masterpieces that I don't think I would have discovered at least not for a while without the aid of this book so that's the use that I get out of this book there's also this encyclopedia of music which is similar to that one except it isn't just organized by composers what it is organized by is a kind of historical synthesis of the implications of composers in their music and so we'll talk about when it'll you know it'll talk about a particular period in history when certain instruments were invented how composers use those instruments what the socio-political climate was at the time how that influenced the music that was composed when people broke new ground and so it lists a lot of the same composer the other one does but in a less serialized format it's more chronological and through the lens of what's historically relevant I'll probably just painstakingly make a list of these in the description with you know the offers and stuff so this is the berkeley complete guide to film scoring i'm not always the greatest fan of Berkeley's curriculums they're all written by different faculty and edited by different people and so some of them are better than others some of them are kind of pedagogically well Berkeley is such a idiosyncratic institution they have their own way of doing things they have all their own curriculum and sometimes you know you'll get really original interesting insight from them that's that's great and then other times I feel like it's not even necessarily that they missed the mark it's more that they're just because they're so in a bubble of in and of themselves that they if they took like a curriculum like that and then published it for the general wide public to use and for other institutions people would choose other books because there are a little Eric look they'll make like a definition they'll define like a paja Torah or something or you know like I'm a double neighbor tone or they'll they'll often for not really a good well I am definitely a fan of redefining terms and inventing new terms when necessary I don't think you should be completely confined by the historical you know kind of academic conventions of music theory and pedagogy but sometimes they need lessly invent a new word to describe what has already been coined by music theorists for hundreds of years and so you know you if you learn using their book then you go to other places and you're like wait a second like the other people are using different terminology and sometimes they'll try to create a strict theoretical definition you know kind of like a mathematically music theorists like to think of themselves as mathematicians although they really aren't not to cast aspersions on music you know theorists but they like to make almost like philosophers they like to make very very specific definitions and then discover what the implications of those definitions are and then analyze music and try and fit existing conventions inside of the definitions which the Berkeley books also do but sometimes they make the definitions but then they're not really serious about them but anyway I digress but this book that's totally irrelevant to this book this book is is great the complete guide to film scoring the art business of writing music for movies and TV this is a lot of technical information that isn't necessarily relevant to music composition this is not going to tell you how to compose a good film score but it's going to tell you are the various positions that exist in the construction of a film you know the producers the directors the music editor and how the those roles and the kind of political hierarchy of who has the most power and what the roles are changed from television to film and this one is pretty it's the second edition so it's pretty recently updated it talks about you know like temp tracks and there are a lot of great interviews in here there's some fantastic interviews by some by some really really um you know like Elmer Bernstein Danny Elfman Harry gregson-williams mark mancina's David Newman William Ross Alan Silvestri Marc Shaiman you know there are great interviews in this book that you know I would buy this book just for the interviews honestly there's a lot of useful information but my favorite book on film scoring is on the track a guide to contemporary film scoring this book is fantastic it is excellent the examples that it gives all of the I mean just everything it talks about how to sync music to a picture it gives you score examples with you know audio to go along it talks about compositional it talks about compositional techniques it talks about you know I mean anything you possibly could want about about cue sheets it gives all kinds of interesting anecdotes about specific composers working with directors and how working with one director might be different than another director you know when you compose the music first when the music is at you know when the editor edits to an existing tip track how do you do it like everything you could possibly run into in film scoring and if it has a foreword by John - so that's just a great bug it's pretty expensive but it's worth it it's a fantastic book this is kind of old book but it's really interesting the art of sound and introduction to music it's not a particularly classically oriented book there's a lot of folk music in here which is one of the reasons why I like it it's just it's it's it's a kind of over flyover of the history of music similarly to the other one but if from a kind of different perspective you can tell that the person who wrote this or the people who wrote this James satrom James sorry Jack Sacher and James ever saw that they had a kind of a different Canon and conception of history than the other so it's good to get a kind of different perspective has that kind of you know almost poetic prose style to it that's kind of nice this is a relevant economic pianist but Walter geesa and Carl lemurs piano technique book any time you want to learn about like fingering or you know finger legato any kind of technical you know that's a great little book very concisely written and then of course you've seen me recommend this book before behind bars by Elaine Gould there's also I think Martin Gardner's not Martin Gardner he's a math puzzle creator I can't wrote the other notation bug there's another famous notation book that it was the one before this one but I like this one the best and so I'm gonna recommend this one it's just I mean you know it's it's it's fantastic it's it's so clearly written it's as concise as possible at the same time as comprehensive as possible you know Elaine Gould who wrote it was I'm you know like the principal rivers at favorite music firfer you know dozens of years decades and any possible notation question you have about any case is not only clearly explicate adhere but she also gives oh she's great because she doesn't have her own I mean she does have her own opinion but she'll be like okay here are four ways that you could notate this that are generally accepted right she'll be like this isn't accepted this is not really accepted this is unacceptable but these four ways are accepted but here's the order of how they're most commonly used this is what most people like this is not quite as good this is not blah blah and then she'll tell you which one of the four she prefers and so she gives you viable options she tells you what's not acceptable and then of the viable option she gives your opinion but at the same time you as you're you know just some extent aesthetics are involved which is subjective and so she'll give you she'll allow you to make your own aesthetic judgments it's also very well organized by topic and so it's very easy to find a particular section it's not necessarily a book where you just read it there's so much information in it but you know if you have a particular notational question like you know if I have Cross staff beaming and I want to notes to coincide should one be on the right side or should be on the left side is there a better way to notate that that's the type of book that you would use that for okay game sound this book is by Karen Collins and it's not my favorite book and the reason is because I mean it's it's fairly recent but video games this is one of those things where like it's evolving and changing so quickly that a lot of information in this book is I don't want to say outdated but it leaves out information that's important for monitor games like for example like do not dynamic music implementation with and you know software integration for music elements like you know stems and things like that because the technology really wasn't available at the time for those things to have been possible but at the same time it gives you a really really good sense of like the beginning of video game music all the way up until like you know the early 2000s and so it's it's a great book to read in any case it just doesn't give you all of the information that you would need if you were interested in getting into video game music composition the Leonard Bernstein Letters enough said these were fascinating say what you want about Linda Bernstein I mean he you know obviously he had a massive ego he was such a contentious figure he said things which I totally agree with he said things which I completely disagree with but he is just a man who lived life to its fullest and I mean he he had so many so many interesting life experiences and knew so many famous people when he was a conductor and a composer and an educator and and also you know for better or worse avidly involved himself in politics and in any case he's just a fascinating guy and this is a compilation of all of the letters he's written he's also a very poetic kind of you know guy and so you know the the led the way in which he writes these letters it's just it all it gives you this sense of the the what kind of past age where people would write letters to each other and but at the same time you know he's writing letters for like Aaron Copland and ku Savitsky and it's just like unbearably fascinating and then on the Leonard Burt son Trey we have the unanswered question and this book didn't come first the lectures came first which should still be able to be found on YouTube which are great lectures you know they're six Norton Harvard lectures basically every certain period of time I don't know what the period of time is Harvard invites a speaker to give talk to give a talk about art and Leonard Bernstein came and and he he gave a very very interesting and controversial and contention contentious talk about he basically just created this massive analogy between language and music and gave his own personal view of the history of music all the way from you know all the way from antiquity and medieval music and you know early polyphony all the way up to modern conventions like a tonality and and then he draws analogous analogies between arts visual arts and poetry and it's just absolutely fascinating give there's a lot of subjective stuff in here this isn't like a scientific talk by any stretch of the imagination but a lot of my thoughts about music have been informed by these lectures which I've probably watched all six lectures probably like at least five times just to fully digest it but in any case the book writes it all down and gives sheet music examples of everything that he plays and so the way that I like to use this book is just to listen to the lectures and then when he gives a particular example if I need to check out you know an illustration I can look at this because I like to listen to the lectures in podcast format so in any case very very very interesting my favorite orchestration book has got to be the study of orchestration by Samuel Adler it seems that no orchestration book is bereft of errors there's some error there's an error in here about like what color on the strings of the harp is denoted to what note little things like that but overall it's pretty accurate it's the fourth edition and the nice thing about this version is that it's annoying because it's renewable but if you kind of like focus on learning for a year and then you could ditch it you know that's fine it comes with an online link to listen to all kinds of audio examples and one of my issues with the principles of orchestration by rimsky-korsakov is that it's not useful unless you're intimately familiar with his music if you're intimately familiar with from ski Korsakov music then you can look at the scores and be like oh yeah that's from ssin Arizona I know that it's oh he's talking about that oh that's what that right but if you don't you know it's really hard to take a little score excerpt and then go to youtube and like find that specific moment it's just excruciating ly inefficient in any case this they had the Eastman Symphony Orchestra record excerpt from this book and they did a really interesting thing where they they took they like for example Brahms I think it's the Third Symphony or there's this beautiful cello melody and they said what would it sound like if the melody was being played on the violas instead or on the violins instead and then they recorded with those differences just to give you a sense of what would it sound like what would it have sound like if Brahmas did something different right is it just interesting is it worse is it better obviously you know those things are subjective but in any case this is my favorite orchestration both today while we're on the topic for orchestration though I should mention that I'm a huge fan of Tomas Casas orchestration online channel if you haven't if you haven't followed that channel follow it watch every video on that channel and there's a Facebook group called the orchestration online which is fantastic and there are lots of professional composers and great orchestrators on there who are very active and so if you post a small excerpt of something you're working on you know there's it's invaluable to get the kind of feedback that they that they give you but in any case he also wrote a book called 100 orchestration tips which is an online ebook I think it's in 16:9 aspect ratio and so it's easy to read on your computer screen but it just gives lots of little like practical tidbits that Thomas Goss has learned from you know you know being a professional Orchestrator just from his experience there are lots of little fascinating little tips and tricks that you know you're not going to find in an orchestration book but that are very very useful and they're organized according to instrument section and so since each tip is only like one or two pages long it's a great thing to be like you know I'm gonna just take a hundred days and I'm just gonna read one tip a day you know it's it's it's very now we have the dictionary of musical themes this is rather hard to find I don't know how I find it found it I don't know if I found it out if it was on like a library giving books away thing or a garage sale but I don't think it's available online now it might be but in any case this is very interesting so there there's a crap-ton of melodies in here from like all kinds of composers it's pretty old so you know it's not I don't think it like goes past the 80s or 90s excuse me but um but the interesting thing is that there is a solfege index and so if you have a melody doom da da da T if you want to figure out all the melodies that go sold or AMI then you can look it up in the solfege index and find all the melodies that start in that way and so it's just uh I can't say it's the most practical thing in the world but it's also one of those things where you know what does Stravinsky say great artists steal although it's debatable whether or not he said that but in any case if you if you want if you ever want you know melodic inspiration just open yourself up to a random page in this book play through some of these melodies and if you find some little motives and maybe you can adapt them and create your own melody out of it okay continuing forward 16th century counterpoint by Robert gall and this is by far the best book written on 16th century counterpoint I mean he goes over everything the Claudio Lovera he gives specific examples of the idiosyncrasies between different composers like what Palestrina would do that's different from what the tour would do give us all kinds of specific examples it talks about all the technical you know all the suspensions and it also is or it's he's very much a guy who went and like studied every single solitary piece of Renaissance counterpoint and so he'll tell you like you know this thing happens all the time but this thing is not common so for example like upper neighbors upper neighbors were very very uncommon and so he says there isn't technically anything wrong with it because sometimes Palestinian would use upper neighbors but they're very very rare and so if you're just writing modern counterpoint you separate a bruise but if you want to be really really accurate to the style that's a piece of information where you can be like okay I'm I'm not gonna use more than maybe one upper neighbor apiece little things like that and then gives all kinds of examples of two three four and five part counterpoint talks about forums like the motet and you know even goes into like eight part counterpoint and stuff anyways just a great great look if you're interested in Renaissance 16th century counterpoint Berkeley press contemporary counterpoint another one of the Berkeley books that I like I think it's pretty clear I think it's pretty pedagogically straightforward and consistent and it's good because it divest itself from some of the rules that I think are a bit antiquated you know like perfect fourths being dissonance --is in the sense that you know second version chords always have to resolve you know to a chord that contains that note and the tonic like the fourth OSS resolved as if it is a dissonance unless it's part of a triad or between upper voices all kinds of things like that but it's still good you know talks about you know crab cannons and retrogrades and inversions and fuse sequences imitation all the essential rules of counterpoint you know gives you definitions of cadence it goes over figured base a little bit and so it's a it's kind of a it does have some of those classical conventions that you'd learn if you took a you know eighteenth-century counterpoint class but but then it has some modern examples and it's you know recently written and it also has audio access so not at all a bad book to get question of balance this is really interesting this is um I forgot the name this author Taylor it can Greer and it was written on Charles segars philosophy of music very famous philosopher of music and and it's just really really interesting his philosophy of music is very very technical it's very much like analytical philosophy as opposed to continental philosophy he doesn't try to give you broad rules that apply over vast majority of the vast majority of cases but he tries to analyze specific pieces and then abstract across all of them principles and it's just very interesting I have of course you know as anyone any any good philosopher with disagreements with him but but there's any case there's a lot of interesting stuff in there two other Workstation books for cites orchestration and rimsky-korsakov's orchestration I like this one better this one's uh nicely written but it's kind of antiquated it's not bad but it's just like you know the Adler kind of renders this from just merely at novelty to read to get a different person's perspective but I don't think you need to get that if you're getting the Adler and again the the Korsakov is most useful if you are familiar with his music another two more piano boats keyboard interpretation this is really interesting if you're in the Baroque period there were and even in classical pure there all kinds of interesting little you know like trills if you perform a trill in the Baroque period it's slightly different than if you're performing a trill in the Classical period where you'd start on the the the top note and so it basically just takes all kinds of of those various little mordant's and cymbals and it shows you how different players over time would articulate them well the different options are and then it also talks about if you were to take like a fugue or something where you could add organ imitations that would be tasteful like a Bach fugue like you know like the C minor few from the wall tempered cloudy air and it'll show like an example of adding some ornaments and so anyway it's kind of very esoteric specific book but if you're just in that sort of thing it's interesting Joseph Hoffman piano playing Joseph Hoffman was a phenomenal concert pianist he didn't live very long and had a tragic rather tragic death but um this is pretty concisely written but it it's written in a Q&A format and so it's just a massive QA of anything you could think about piano playing and so if you don't play the piano this would still be valuable to you in order for you to get an idea of what the technical limitations of the piano are and write well for the piano which I think it's important to be able to write well for the piano I think too many composers and orchestrators don't really talk about piano writing because they assume that all composers are pianists but that's not always the case how to write for percussion fantastic Samuel Solomon was the principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic I don't know if he still is but he was for a while I mean everything you need to know about how to write for percussion and it comes with online access to audio files and yeah I don't even need to say more about that I mean it's it's just you wanna learn how to percussion this is fantastic everything from the technical details of the individual instruments to help percussionist build instruments to thinking about the setups I'm thinking about switching back and forth between different percussionists and doubling and timpani and I mean anything you could possibly think this isn't the most comprehensive book on music theory and it's not one that a lot of colleges use but it's very concisely written it's very okay so like there's the old well harmony and voice leading book which I don't have a physical copy but I have a digital copy of and it's extremely thorough and that's the book that I would recommend the serious composer really digest every page of in order to get a complete sense of all of the conventions of music 18 century before music this is not as comprehensive and sometimes in goofs every now and then with some of those descriptions but but it's if you if you've never if you are not a super heady person and you don't like reading dense stuff and you don't have a lot of experience with music theory this is a book that I recommend to get and it just it's you know short chapters gives you little exercises it tries to be as clear as possible it doesn't talk about you know it leaves out all of the historical stuff that would be interesting to the nerd but not really interesting to someone who just wants to get the western music theory down this is a great book musical composition by Alan Belkin who has a great YouTube channel by the way you should check out his he's got a great series on modern harmony and a great series on counterpoint and he's a good composer as well but in any case this book is interesting because it it's very psychologically oriented it's non stylistic and so the advice that he gives in here is very much formally oriented he talks about phrases he talks about the psychological effects of building up tension and release and then he gives you lots of little exercises at the end of each chapter and so it's just a very it's a book that is in some sense timeless it's a book that isn't that doesn't give you specific particularity of how to write you know accurately in a given style the way that you know other theory books would teach you about you know the Western music but the the types of things that he talks about in here again it's it's like kind of I think of it as a psychological book the psychology of music and how to compose music from a psychological perspective and anyway it's a it's a great book I would highly recommend it and very very recently published a history of film music bourbon cook this is a fantastically written book and it's absolutely fascinating if you want to be a phone composer this is a must read I mean it talks about everything all the way up from the invention of talkies you know to before that the how I'm people what I mean people used to have these books I came over what they called them but there were these books with lots of little excerpts from you know like tchaikovsky's pathétique and Beethoven's fifth organized according to emotion and these piano would look at what was happening on screen and perform specific little excerpts and then try to transition them together before music was actually written on screen and then how the conventions change over time you know there are lots of interviews with various composers and it's just uh it's a great great book on the history of film music and on the phone music train this is also a fantastic book John Williams film music Amelio uh DC now ah DC no I don't that's how you pronounce but I don't know this is the most comprehensive book written on John Williams music I've ever seen it goes through the music theory it goes through the history it goes through the the how how it from a film scoring perspective how does the music match the film the spot in comparison to other composers and the guy who wrote this originally wrote his PhD dissertation on John Williams music and then he eventually expanded it into a book but yeah if you're a John Williams fan this is a must-read fantastic this is another one of those old books which I think it's just kind of a novelty not necessarily a staple of your library I mean look at it it starts out with a dime silver silver Burdette's music and it's got all these it's goggle it's almost written like a kind of children's book but it goes through like just some simple fundamentals of music theory and then talks about phrase structure and the reason that I like it is because again it's very folk music oriented and so you know it's not particularly heady or classical or esoteric but it gives examples of folk music from African traditions and Indian traditions and the commonalities between them and it's lots of little fun little exercise it's just a nice little fun book to read um Jenny Bernstein Linda Bernstein's daughter wrote this book famous father girl this is probably my favorite book in my library it's just absolutely fantastic it is her personal tale of growing up as Leonard Bernstein's daughter and so there's so many fantastic anecdotes and she's a great writer - she's a probably partly from growing up with Leonard under Leonard Bernstein but she's a marvelous writer her prose as a Mac and both in the sense that is poetic and it's clearly written and she's just a wonderful soul and it's just it's just if you are a person who doesn't like Leonard Bernstein if you think that he was this egotistical you know kind of kind of figure if you're one of those people I would highly recommend you read this book and I think it'll I think it'll change I think it'll change your mind and realize that Bernstein was a more complex person that then I'm and it's great because it's like her life but also her father shadow looming over her but the way in which she deals with it it's just it's an again also gives you through a specific experience an idea of what it was like growing up in the 60s and 70s and it's just a fantastic book really another fascinating book is my adventures in the golden age of music this was written by some guy that never heard of Henry Fink but this guy just had all kinds of fascinating experiences I'm seeing different concerts meeting different composers and it's just a wonderful perspective of someone who grew up in an era far before people of my age and it's just a very subjective kind of historical from his own personal perspective look at you know the music written and composed during that time period okay cool so now I guess we're getting into the next section which are my scores so first thing the real book you need the real book and if the first page has not been ripped out and if you don't have stars next to all of the tunes then it means you're not a real jazz musician no I'm just kidding but in any case if you're at all interested in jazz you need a real book in case I don't need to explain what the real book is because there plenty of you can know what it is so if you're just you could just look up the real book if you know there are different editions too uh we'll save those for later so one more I forgot about this one Alex North wonderful film composer who again what is very underrated I feel and was a one of the one of the favorite composers of John Williams and the foreword is actually by John Williams in this book and this is a great look at his music if you're unfamiliar with its music I would highly recommend you read this book if you're interested in film music um alright well we've got another one here arranging for large jazz ensemble this is another one of my favorites from Berklee press and it's great because it comes with a CD with examples of the Berklee jazz band performing all of these various examples in here I talks about everything it talks about like all the different drop voicings it talks about different combinations what the common doublings are what the standard instruments a lineup is what the kinds of harmonic substitutions are I mean it talks just as much about the orchestration part of it as the kind of harmonic conventions and voice leading side of it and again you know every time it talks about a concept there is a written score example with an audio file of their great jazz band performing it to show you exactly what it sounds like to have a trumpet doubling alto stacks as opposed to two alto sax is doubling each other as opposed to trombones you know every possible thing you could think of very very good book if you're interested in writing big-band music alright let's go through my scores this is willows and birches it is John Williams harp concerto Johnny was actually written a lot of concert music mostly Conchata using a violin to chair the cello concerto trumpet concerto tuba concerto and his harp concerto is one of my very favorites in two movements willows is more impressionistic and mysterious and textually oriented not particularly rhythmically oriented and birches is very very rhythmic and anyway he just like I mean if you want to learn how to write well for harp I mean there's every possible extended technique from harmonics all the way to visiting me and oh you know to pedal changes and it's just like it's a great it's a great score have Bock 371 Corral's I've analysed like 80 of these one of my goals in life is to analyze all of them but you know if you want again if you want to learn like 18th century four-part writing nothing is going to teach you the possibility is better than box and box very creative people think of Bach I think who aren't lovers of Bach and are familiar with Bach there's a misconception that he's this kind of like straightforward kind of you know very restrained kind of careful composer no parallel with it you know he's extremely creative Bach is extremely creative with his harmonic progressions with his chromaticism with his you know sometimes he'll do things which he's do something when she's never done before and you're like whoa like why is that okay and then you figure it out and then it sounds good and so it's like wait you know what what why'd you do that and anyway so can't go wrong Bach Beethoven symphony is five through seven which happened to be my favorite I mean the ninth is great and the third is great the first movement of a third but I love five six and seven so you know you can't go wrong from symphonies all I have also that all of this Stravinsky ballets I mean if you want to study orchestration like Stravinsky was one of us creative because you know he was kind of trained by rimsky-korsakov and so he has that technical but-but-but Korsakov is all Korsakov is an immaculate Orchestrator but his registration is very clean and very I don't want to say vanilla because it's not vanilla but it's very careful and conservative conservative is in the world that I'm looking for everything works flawlessly he knows exactly what he's doing and he has a large library of devices but he doesn't like try and invent reinvent the wheel whereas Stravinsky is he's always trying to reinvent the wheel I mean I mean he's a composer who was like three or four different completely different stylistic periods so he's definitely that kind of character but anyway the Firebird I also have the Rite of Spring and true stop Daphna said Chloe if you haven't heard this piece is life-changing it is just absolutely immaculate one of the greatest artistic achievements ever both in terms of its composition and orchestration this this this piece is really what turned me on to French Impressionism which totally changed my compositional style and orchestration Chopin's Nocturne 's nocturnes the complete nocturnes melody writing piano writing I mean you know you have two essential essential stuff Bach's keyboard music the his English meets French sweets partita as the globert variations and then i'm all of the inventions and symphonia x' counterpoint you know if you want to you want to learn counterpoint you know study this stuff do you intervallic analyses play it out on the piano Mahler's 9th symphony oh this is not a piece that I can listen to every day of the week it's such a heart-wrenching symphony I love a lot of more some things over the third I love the fifth I love the sixth I love the second but but the ninth is mine is my absolute favorite it's just who oh this is a great little book 26 Italian songs and arias some of the most beautiful melodies gorgeous melodies have been written for opera you know by Puccini and Rossini and some of the opera composers and so few people are aware of the you know because they don't like the vibrato Laden kind of temporal intensity of opera you know I know some people like I I love all classrooms but I just can't listen to opera it's like you know fine but like you still should study the music because it's it's a massive cannon of beautiful music and it's very melodically oriented especially referred vogner not that vogner is not melodic that's a conversation for another time but as far as like tunes concise package' balloons you know this is a great book that gives some of the best example so mall or something is number one and two I also love the first Mahler's Mahler's first symphony I just I love it I love the the the the the the stark opening the way that it goes into the da-da-da-da-da and some of the material he used and when his war Kestrel song cycle later but and then the the second movement is just this kind of you know intense optimistic kind of almost arrogant waltz his orchestration is always great the third movement is it has like these Jewish kind of dances and things and this kind of frère Jacques I played on an upper high double bass and it's kind of a black dark humor kind of thing and then of the Fourth Movement is just this whopping you know splashing brilliantly orchestrated finale with this glorious love theme in the middle it's just I think Mahler's first symphony is very underrated but in any case the second is also transcendently beautifully La Boheme I mean this is like if you if you're gonna study one opera and you've never studied up or before I would recommend this one so many great tunes I know you opera aficionados we're gonna kill me for Bogner Wagner Wagner Wagner Samuel Barber's piano sonata I love this piece this is one of my absolute favorite pieces it's material it's it's it's chromatic writing it the fugue at the it's just oh my gosh it is a tour de force work of originality of a poetry of emotional expression of modernism it's just oh my gosh I would really recommend you to some that if you have of course the Rite of Spring as I said Khrushchev as I said the planets I don't even need to talk about the planets and through your infinitely I also like this book this is a 150 of the most beautiful songs ever it's just simple songs with the chords melodies and piano accompaniments and everything in here from the Beatles to folk songs - I mean you know Peter Paul and Simon you know Michael Jackson and I mean like just a plethora of a motley assortment of various songs that if you ever want to get into songwriting or even if you just want to get into melody writing or writing for voice you know this is a great compendium of some really well chosen song from rimsky-korsakov's Scheherazade masterwork of thematic development and orchestration this is probably honestly the most cleanly orchestrated piece of music I've ever seen everything is impeccably balanced you could hear everything it's so idiomatic and there's a lot of variety of texture and he's a great mellitus I mean people are like oh Tchaikovsky's a great melodies and you know in Tchaikovsky was a great melodies but Korsakov was also a great bell artist and some of his melodies are I love just as much as Tchaikovsky's melodies like his piano trio and C minor Debussy Ravel string quartets interestingly similar to one another but also very different from one another I love Debussy string quartet and G minor I love them both but I like Davey C's more just for subjective reasons you know the first movement has this Phrygian kind of crazy chromaticism that's just extremely interesting it's beautiful melodies and it's just so just the harmonic machinations that he has going in here are extremely interesting the second movement is this Corky like kind of almost Middle Eastern kind of like you know snake oil salesman kind of movement the third it's just this delicious romance with one of my favorite melodies ever written and then the fourth is just this you know gleam and I crazed kind of you know fascinating piece both of which I think have dissatisfying endings but I'm I'm a nitpick when it comes to ending I'm actually a fan of the ending of the G minor or the rebels F major quartet but rebels is also great you know there's so many interesting similarities between like the second movement of rebels is also Pitts sacado oriented which the second movement of I don't know who wrote which one first but that me interesting paper and academic paper to write to compare the two and see if either one of them stole one another they had a I wouldn't say contentious but an interesting relationship with one another because they were both considered to be like the primary print French composers of French Impressionism during that time and of course you know Debussy ribbond resented being called an impressionist he preferred to be called a symbolist but that's a story for another time um Mozart's Requiem I love this piece Mozart is one of those composers where like any time he writes with a minor key I love his music and anytime he writes in the major key I hate his music and you guys are gonna crucify me for that but um and that's not always true he's got some you know but sometimes he just writes drivel and it's just it's perfectly written it's exquisite but it's just I just doesn't do anything for me emotionally it's - it doesn't take itself seriously enough but like the Requiem the g minor symphony he's written some of my favorite pieces ever at the same time so that's all subjective stuff but in any case the Requiem and also if you want to get a sense for like modulation augmented six chords secondary dominance uh it's just this is a wonderfully written piece of music and I love Mozart for his simplicity - everything is just so elegantly written this is kind of random but Christmas solos for piano the reason that I like this is not for necessarily performing them but there are some really great arrangements in here like so I don't know who if they're all by the same arranger I would assume they're all by different arrangements in halan or just you know selected them and put them all into a single compendium with royalty allocation but in any case there are a lot of great arrangements in here and you can pretty much find them being performed online and so whenever I'm doing whenever I am on a rate studying arranging stick or whenever I want to arrange a Christmas song and want some ideas for like reharmonization 's and stuff this is a very nice of a book of course Beethoven's sonata in C minor the the pet fatigue my favorite I love every movement of this oh my gosh the first I'm not even gonna talk about because I'll start talking about for hours and I have a Skype student 20 minutes but this is great the Rondo of this petite in [Music] I performed this as my audition piece to get into Fuhrman the Rondo very close to me the jazz language this is a very thin book but it just gives you like if you're like wait water there's a minor flat 5 chord is that just a half diminished chord if you mi encounter jazz music theory and suddenly realize that they use all kinds of weird dumping plates your that's totally different whether or not it's better or worse as a story for another time and anyway this is just a great book to get you up to speed with Debbie C's portlet piano one of my favorite piano works of his wonderful piece this is a piece of music which may not be relevant to you more advanced folks out there but I think it's one of the best like bass basic music theory books written it's written for adults and so it's not like you know patronizing the way that a children's music theory book but it literally starts in the very beginning like from you know what are the note names and how do we notate things what is a treble clef all the way up until talking about like triads and 7th chords and different time signatures and compound verses simple and duper meter and all those things very concisely written very clearly written and it comes with two audio CDs and it's not that expensive so this is if someone comes to me they're like I want to learn music to hear from the ground up because they don't know anything this is always the book that I will recommend to them and this is a similar thing with piano scales chords arpeggios and Cadence's from Alfred's library now we have the the jazz harmony book by David Berkman now this is one of those books that is written by a dude who really knows what he's talking about and you there's a lot of great information to be had um if you know where to look but it's just there often these just blocks of text you know where it's just like he's just talking about dominant seventh and if you like can't follow what he's talking about musically then you kind of need to sharpen up community rescales because he doesn't give a lot of score examples and so it's not like the best illustrated or explicate estar as examples are concerned but it does come with a great CD and he does take like you know Haute Lee for example he takes me wish you a Merry Christmas and he harmonizes it in every possible way throughout this book anytime he introduces a concept he he used and he creates a new arrangement if we wish you a Merry Christmas to showcase that example which is which is kind of nice but there's a lot of great info to be had in here but it's not again it's something that you need to have a very strong grasp you need to be able to visualize and understand abstract theoretical concepts just by reading them and not seeing them on sheet music in order to be able to digest what's happening okay cool those are all my scores there are lots of others that I have on my computer and they're also bunch of John Williams scores that I have but I wouldn't go through this okay so some non-musical books bonus section Hans Christian Andersen best loved fairy tales any time I'm writing a piece of music and I want a story you know there's some lovely fairy tales and this is just a whole corpus of work that influenced a whole generation of people of the world that so few people know these fairy tales anymore and they're just you're just I would highly recommend I've got two books of poetry pocket book of poetry some very nice selections I've used some of the poems and here as basis I've discovered some of the poems like for example of bronze and blazed by Emily Dickinson isn't here that's how I discovered that poem which I wrote my recent song cycle too so you know enrich your life by reading poetry especially if you're interested in writing music and then of course this i'm a treasury of poems compiled by sara and stewart this has tons of great poems you know by TS eliot modern poets old poets organized by category which is really nice you know for like poems on aging Beauty bereavement betrayal Brotherhood Creed disillusionment eternity facing death compassion faith farewell fun grief and so just from a human perspective if you're ever finding yourself dealing with an issue you know one of the best things you can do is just read some poems that were written by people experiencing the same thing so you can do that I'm sure many of you heard of this year to success by boban it I went through this entire book in a year and it was one of the best things that I ever did so I highly recommend war and peace by Tolstoy I mean Tolstoy like you know too few people have read these great novels the art of war by Sun Tzu some of the advice in here is really funny like he just he has these little one-liners where I hope you like there was a really fun one a wind that rises in the daytime lasts long but a night breeze soon Falls like there does all these little vs. of just like some of them are really wise and you might say like well why is this relevant I'm not a warrior but like there's a lot there's actually a lot of wisdom to be had in here son zu was an interesting character but it's just there's so many great little one-line one-liners in there and I thought of I actually thought of doing a whole song cycle setting some translations of his little adulting 101 lots of practical advice in here the dragon bone chair which is the first book in memory sorrow and Thorin series one of my favorite like the inheritance series a lot doubt a ching by Lao Tzu all these Chinese books are so small they're so concisely written there are many many different translations of the daodejing but I know I wrote my I wrote actually a my final project for a religion in the environment class on environmentalism as it relates to the Dao de Jing so I got this for that reason but there's a lot of interesting wisdom to be that was Lord of the Flies this is a fantastic novel very easy read out of the silent planet not an easy read CS Lewis's fascinating guy even if you're not religious at all he's very very very interesting guy very interesting thinker and his novels are great obviously wrote the kilometers in our series but his out of sight of Planet series are or his space trilogy if you're interested in science fiction and want something a bit more substantive than Chronicles of Narnia not that The Chronicles of Narnia aren't so offensive allegorically speaking then that's a great book three genres of writing poetry fiction and drama I found this to be very very interesting and I found reading this book helps me to get a lot of information out of reading poetry fiction and drama that I wouldn't otherwise get there's also another great book on prose writing I don't think I haven't 1000 words to expand your vocabulary by josef pearcy ordinary men by Christopher browning this is a harrowing book and explains how explains how human beings are capable all human beings are capable of anything and it really questions what you're definitely it's not propaganda it's just a historical account and of course the Gulag Archipelago I don't mean to our conduction Archipelago introduction that's funny mine wise is a great book Nicholas eppley it's it's why we misunderstand what others think believe feeling what it's basically just a clearly written book that talks about the cognitive biases is all that it is and so if you're not familiar with the cognitive biases and you want a book that's written that you know has accurate information but at the same time isn't very technical this is a great book breaking open the head this is a fantastic book it's written by a Daniel Pinchbeck this dude did every drug known to man and like explored every possible you know place where drugs are being done like different like like psychedelics and he just had a fascinating life and so if you um you know want to like without necessarily taking all these drugs yourself if you want to read the life of someone who experienced all these things is just utterly fascinating a great great book the humans of New York there's a whole series of these on Facebook I would really recommend you check them out it's just so restoring your faith to humanity kind of thing so it just it incites incites isn't the right word that's pejorative it it invokes empathy and compassion towards people they're just little pictures taken with the stories of what they said and it's just there's a few things or as wholesome as reading through the humans of New York book and then finally we have Sean Carroll's the big picture which is a wonderful account of a naturalistic conception of the universe from the cosmological inception of the universe all the way up to the emergence of higher levels of abstractions you know such as like human beings and things and it's just very very clearly written in a way that only Sean Carroll is able to write and it's just you know if you're not a physicist and if you don't want to get into all that heady stuff but you just want a kind of sense of what natural ists think about the history of the universe from fundamental particles and singularity all the way up until modern day this is a great book and that's it that video turned out to be much longer than I was expecting anyway so I don't know if you guys enjoyed that at all but I just thought it'd be fun and so enjoy enjoy reading I will see you guys next time

Channel: JJay Berthume

Views: 5,351

Keywords: Music, Library

Id: ugr4VTiK7dM

Length: 56min 8sec (3368 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019