Recommend some Atonal Music

[calebprime]

The next chapter is, as far as I can tell, a bad or arbitrary idea which can act as a kind of control or generator, but which has no validity as far as harmony.

You can sum the values of pitches, to produce "heights". This bears a distant resemblance to the idea of symmetrical harmony with sums ("0-sum dyads") that George Perle developed, perhaps, except Perle was interested in systems of systems of sum-chords, and, as far as I know, only interested in the totality of the system as a source of pitches, freely composed.

George Perle's __Twelve-Tone Tonality__ -- one of the most disappointing books I've ever read, have to single it out for scorn. Why? Because it generated crap. You can compose with anything, including crap.

This is just irrelevant. Who cares what a particular chords' literal sums are? That, of all things, is in no way determinative of the sound, descriptive of it, etc.

This is a novel idea because it's stupid.

There are lots of things you can do. The question is whether they mean anything musically.

I think I understand this man's problem. He was a Morton Feldman student. Pretty as his very quiet pieces are, I'd wager that absolutely anything can work in that kind of texture -- it's really the oppposite of a harmonically tight situation. Feldman was an irrationalist. Johnson wants to be some kind of methodical irrationalist, which I have trouble sympathizing with. Another one was Cage -- scrupulous use of the I Ching. It is to be underwhelmed. Feh. Meh. Bleh. Geh.

I'm going to attempt to prove myself wrong: I'm going to have a little Morton Feldman festival right now. Work is done for today. I'll donate $100 to my least favorite institution -- The American Rifle Association -- if I come away admiring Feldman's "harmonies".

There are many composers who don't really want to understand what they're doing -- perhaps if they looked down, they might fall precipitously. Johnson clearly doesn't want to understand, or he wouldn't be making all the mistakes I've been pointing out so laboriously.

 

[calebprime]

.... He was a Morton Feldman student. Pretty as his very quiet pieces are, I'd wager that absolutely anything can work in that kind of texture -- it's really the oppposite of a harmonically tight situation. Feldman was an irrationalist. ...

I'm going to attempt to prove myself wrong: I'm going to have a little Morton Feldman festival right now. Work is done for today. I'll donate $100 to my least favorite institution -- The American Rifle Association -- if I come away admiring Feldman's "harmonies".

....

I'm going to have to retract this immediately. Feldman does write a nice chord!
I wouldn't want some stupid opinion of mine to contribute to the mayhem.

Still. Repeat notes, spread them out, repeat them, play them softly, orchestrate, etc. and it's not that hard to get this sound. Especially: No bass. Drones, clusters. Chorale effects. That always works.

Rothko Chapel is a tonal piece. It's not Other. Tonal. Drones.

You want to know a real man who could play some harmony that actually moved?

Art Tatum. Not this halting decadent mysterioso crap.

 

[calebprime]

I'm just envious because I want to be Morton Feldman. Or Art Tatum. Either one. Art Feldman-Tyson.

 

[calebprime]

I have criticized __Other Harmony__ for sloppy errors, and for inadequately or unfairly or sketchily covering other theorists.

He could write a second edition where those particular many errors are corrected, and the book was brought up to some minimal standard.

Then I would still criticize him for a kind of theoretical complacency. Whether because he is a mellow fellow, or because this book is for beginners, he doesn't seem to reconcile one theoretical area with another, nor examine the consequences enough, nor reject nonsense.

Theory can start in playful wonder, then you need to get it right.

I'm not proposing some kind of theoretical monoculture, but I do think that there are essential things that every composer needs to know if he wants to understand the world. There might be simpler and more complex versions of this: The simple theory is just a summary of the common consensual objects, and the more complex gets into the less-obvious, deeper levels of explanation, such as the study of the relation of ratios to tuning, and tuning to music, and ratios in harmony.

The simpler theory: A complete list of the common simple one-octave scales.
More complex: Add in the Indian raga-structures, and understand how they're different. Understand how some scales work to create harmonies, and some don't.
More complex still: Understand the ratios involved in making these scales. Understand low-interval limits concept.

Common-practice harmony in the 21st century: The simple consensual theory is very large and not so simple, and has to cover everything from The Who to Bach. A survey. Dispel notions such as: There is "forward" and "backward" harmonic motion. "Forward" is 4th-wise.
More complex: Some Schillinger-like systematic approach that goes beyond simply listing and describing what people have done. Because it is a system, it covers every possibility.
More complex still: Generative theories of tonal music, transformation networks

A Forte-like naming system for naming any pitch-class structure, but edited to removed Forte's particular affectations. An add-9 chord is no more "set 4-22" than my wachine machine is a "9 --156" because that's where the machine was listed in the Sears catalog. An 0247 is an 0247 is an 0247. You want that to cover inversions, too? Say so. End of story.

I'm not going to be as explicit, but this basic theory covers rhythm. Resultant rhythms, ratios, theories of limits to the intelligibility of poly-rhythms.

---------------------------

You don't need this stuff to be a good or even great composer or player.

Rather, if everyone had a good deal of this common knowledge, we could move theory discussions beyond muddling around at square one.

You shouldn't have four or five unrelated names for the same bog-standard thing. A major 7 sharp 11 chord should always be called that, and so should an octotonic scale. This is not monoculture, it's just enough consensus to get past square one, which many theory discussions never seem to do.

It should be clear when theory is about establishing a simple common language and when it's about actually generating something.

G7 #11 is the first kind of theory.
Schillinger and serialism, etc. is the second kind.

When you generate something, you always have to check to see whether it falls under the first kind of theory -- whether you re-invented the wheel, or the octotonic scale.

Otherwise, it's clown-car, every-generation-throws-a-hero-up-the-pop-charts. It's yee-haw, rock n' roll, know-nothingism. It's mimimalists refusing to learn from the maximalists and vice-versa.

It's [shudder] genres. Consumer preferences. It's willful ignorance.

Berklee, as a Schillinger school, sort of attempted to come closer to this catholic ideal. NEC was, frankly, pretty poor for theory. Again, Lewin's book GMIaT was never checked out in the 10 years it was on the shelf at NEC. I know because I was the only one.

---------------------------

Certain half-baked notions such as Modes of Limited Transposition should be laid to rest. These modes are not a unity, and they weren't even a complete list. It's like having Objets métalliques dans mon monde -- the coin, the toaster, the automobile, and the thermometer.

 

[calebprime]

The problem with having big opinions is that you worry maybe you were wrong. You'll see Perle in this little book collection.

All under review. Maybe I wuz so wronk.

My opinions about __Other Harmony__ while still under development, are pretty well-founded. I did the homework that most people simply don't do.

The purpose is to get clear about this stuff. As a composer, what works, and why? Does Perle's system really provide musical coherence, or is it really a generation method that produces a kind of inevitable result, but nothing the listener can hear or would want to hear? In other words, yet another system that makes it easier for the composer but no easier for anyone else?

With a lot of this stuff, by the time you've made the effort to understand it, you already have a kind of emotional commitment. This is to be avoided, which is really the purpose of my searches. Strip away the b.s., and the personal allegiances.

 

[calebprime]

...
A rare semantic quibble from me that I hope leads somewhere thoughtful:

pg 63: "Though the focus of the book is melody, it also provides insights into harmony".

I hate to redefine simple words with obvious meanings, but "melody" is a problem here. I wouldn't say that there are melodies in the book -- they are scale exercises or arpeggios. They are melodic precursors. An arpeggio is as much a harmony as a melody, and so are chord-scales.

...

The reason this interests me is that some common-sense words like "melody" are really composites of more simple things, more elemental things.

It would be as if you were trying to understand human behavior, and one of the first concepts you were trying to understand is "parties". Parties are complex composite behavior, you'd want to understand it in some simpler terms, if you could. (Let's not get too hung up on that particular analogy.)

"Melody" is a composite of:
-- rhythm, (tempo)
-- sequence,
-- contour,
--register,
-- chord-scale (pitch material),
--directional tones/tension and resolution/starting somewhere, going somewhere else, coming back.
--timbre
--(lyrics, when applicable)
--(singer's other attributes, to get really ridiculous)
--(the attributes of the physical space of the performance -- the acoustics)

Roughly speaking! I haven't completely thought it through, but it seems that each of these elements is logically independent of the others.

We therefore have two ways of speaking. A common-sense way that doesn't try to look under the hood, and a slightly more analytical one that does.

With the one that does, it's as if you were trying to get a machine to generate something like a melody. What are the actual parameters?

An example of a theory that looks a step or two deeper than the surface is Schenkerian analysis, where, rightly or wrongly, one is always concerned with showing what is surface motion and what are structural pillars, important points of arrival, essential harmonies.

The feeling I get from reading Johnson is that his mathematical generative bent is more fully developed than his analytic side, but that seems strange in someone who specializes in generating music from mathematical structures.

Maybe it's simply a composer's egotism: He's much better when he's explaining his own pet ideas, rather than covering other people's work. That's the do-it-yourself side.

So, for example, if he'd wanted to know, Robert Morris did a lot of detailed work on chains of cells, and there was even an obscure computer program that you could buy 15 or 20 years ago that did chains of cells. Hence my disappointment in his 0247 chain example -- it seemed so lazy.

Heck, nous sommes tous égoïstes.

 

[calebprime]

...
"Melody" is a composite of:
-- rhythm, (tempo)
-- sequence,
-- contour,
--register,
-- chord-scale (pitch material),
--directional tones/tension and resolution/starting somewhere, going somewhere else, coming back.
--timbre
--(lyrics, when applicable)
--(singer's other attributes, to get really ridiculous)
--(the attributes of the physical space of the performance -- the acoustics)

...
Heck, nous sommes tous égoïstes.

Don't ferget dynamics, there, Chief Always Loud.

Also: breath. phrasing. chunking, inevitability/surprise. novelty/fatigue. gravity.

next up: What is Love?

 

[calebprime]

...
"Melody" is a composite of:
-- rhythm, (tempo)
-- sequence,
-- contour,
--register,
-- chord-scale (pitch material),
--directional tones/tension and resolution/starting somewhere, going somewhere else, coming back.
--timbre

almost unrelated, but these color the experience:
--(lyrics, when applicable)
--(singer's other attributes, to get really ridiculous)
--(the attributes of the physical space of the performance -- the acoustics)
...[/I]

dynamics,
breath.
phrasing. chunking,
inevitability/surprise. (predictability/unpredictability)
novelty/fatigue or familiarity
gravity.

While I'm adding to what's become a brainstorming list, there's one more useful notion: Poetic units, poetic meter.

That is: iambs and dactyls and whatnot, and number of beats per line.

This is useful the way the notion of contour is, because it is an alternative to thinking in mechanical timing units. It's a perhaps looser, more general way of thinking, based on surface sound.

It's in fact possible to have both kinds of rhythmic thinking going on at once in a piece of music -- mechanically-accurate ticking rhythmic background, with a floating melody that can only be defined by overall stress patterns. Ives or Weather Report or Bartok might be examples. eta: Walking and talking at the same time.

For example, the iamb can be thought of as:
unstressed upbeat | stessed downbeat. or: ta|DA.
Which can work over any number of particular rhythmic grids: The "ta" here could last 5 beats and the "DA" could last 14 beats, or anything that preserves the relative relationship of short-long.

You can have a "line" (or bar unit) with 5 poetic "beats" or accents or stresses that is actually counted in 7.



This is a useful way to describe stress-patterns, as long as you survey it for clarity and maybe clean it up a little for its application to music.

This is not intended to be a competent survey of poetic meter, and in any case, it would need to be examined and adapted slightly for music: It's important to not get hung up on historically-correct definitions for this purpose. What you would not want to do is consult with a poet to understand this.

 

[calebprime]

Gary Giddens is a well-known jazz critic and advocate for Cecil Taylor.

I found this interview to be a good source of insight into how Giddens thinks.

http://jerryjazzmusician.com/2003/03/conversations-with-gary-giddins-on-pianist-cecil-taylor/

It's rich with anecdotes about early controversy (Giddens was asked to resign for bringing Taylor to his school) and listener reactions.

My interests, unfortunately, are inconvenient and uncontrollable. I'm interested in this subject now. Otherwise, I'm quite ambivalent about posting at all.

Needless to say, I draw nearly opposite conclusions from every anecdote from Giddens, and my opinion is much, much less favorable.

I did listen to an early performance with bassist Neidlinger, and I heard a so-so evisceration of an actual tune with changes. Taylor could play changes early on, and yes, a little better than I thought, but like a 4th-rate Monk, and that's putting it nicely. I'm speaking as someone who isn't particularly attached to any style or player, but who has put in the necessary 10k hours (and a lot, lot more) in these things.

I also speak as someone for whom (by now, age 60) most pieces by Schoenberg are at least mostly intelligible, but for whom much of the serial pieces, such as the 3rd and 4th quartets, are quite unpleasant to listen to, and I would say, bad music. That, in a sense, puts a limit on my ears. I'm not a conservative, and I love the Five Pieces for Orchestra, but there is a fairly bright line between music that is intelligible and music that is not, and music that sounds good, and music that doesn't, for me.

I've been doing this too long for the kind of novice peak-experience stories Giddens tells.

Giddens notices that people's faces sag at the 4-minute mark. We interpret this differently. It's not that people ought to learn to listen with more discipline, as Giddens thinks.

I'll leave it there. My world was the world of narcissistic pretentious artists at New England Conservatory, of all shapes and sizes, so it takes one to know one.

 

[varwoche]

Replying to the above, plus your comments about Taylor in the other thread...

I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the line between structure / no structure, art / ********. A long time ago you made a passing comment about Don Pullen playing with his knuckles (that cracked me up). Once upon a time, I didn't know he did that. And I enjoyed his outside playing on record. Then I saw him live (in Mingus' band) and I had a WTF moment right on the spot. I landed in a conundrum that I've yet to mentally resolve.

I find Taylor to be utterly unlistenable. I can listen to Ornette Coleman (I think; it's been a long time) but not Taylor.

 

[calebprime]

Ornette Coleman's music often makes me really want to understand what's going on with it -- his use of microtones and wandering modality is amazing to me. Charlie Haden had that absolute pitch too, so he could follow him in that band, I think.

Plus, some catchy tunes.

 

[calebprime]

I don't do Facebook, but my friend the Berklee prof told me of this post by Allan Chase. He was Dean of Faculty when I taught at NEC, and Chase and I played in the same band for about 3 weeks.

I would be interested in anything Chase has to say about Cecil Taylor

originally posted by Allan Chase April 20, 4:06 pm

I don't want to be negative, but...there's a lot of nonsense and misinformation about Cecil Taylor and his music online these days. It's coming in many forms: laudatory but wrong, dismissive and wrong, and mixed and partly wrong. I know fact-checking isn't what it used to be, but Alex Ross says in the New Yorker, "A graduate of the New England Conservatory, he was rigorously trained in classical composition and performance." Someday, someone might want to look at the curriculum of the NEC Popular Music program Cecil Taylor was enrolled in. It's right there if you want to know. This idea that he "sounds classical," not like a jazz musician: what is it based on? Almost nothing, I think. For about 14 years, I taught a grad course at NEC called "Jazz Styles: Free Jazz and the Avant Garde." Cecil's music was by far the hardest to teach of any unit in that course, and I certainly didn't presume to explain or summarize it, only to introduce some of it, put it in some historical context, knock down the usual lame first impressions, and incentivize careful listening with assignments. (Having Joe Morris as a guest added a lot of insight I couldn't have provided.) How it worked (in different periods), what is essential and structured vs. what is relatively open, how the process and results worked and how he valued them, etc. are not easy to talk about or self-evident on the surface, as anyone who cares to delve into his and his collaborators' words and listen carefully to the music can tell. Instead of presumptuously explaining it based on their limited perceptions, people ought to be asking lots of questions of the people who played with him, and gathering as much information about his process and material as they can, while they can, as Stephen Haynes and others have been saying.

My highlight


I've read the Morris book. It was extraordinarily content-free.

This really is a peculiar situation for me. After all this time, I still don't know exactly what to think, which is why I'm still interested.

 

[calebprime]

You could state matters of artistic taste as hypotheticals. Would it matter if so-and-so were actually classically-trained, or jazz-trained? If he or she ever played any classical repetoire? If he or she actually ever was a master of traditional jazz? Would it matter if so-and-so were actually playing music with certain content, or an approximation of it -- such as polyrhythms like Carter, or polyrhythms like Ives or Mingus? Or with pitch-content that has some inner rigor? The answer to these and a bunch of other related questions might be: no, it doesn't matter.

Because if even if the artist creating this whirlpool of sound is at some level a pure artist manque', he's also pounded the piano and his listeners into submission without hesitation many times.

Or you might feel that as a listener, no one else has brought you this kind of radical experience.

And there are people who have played with him who revere him. And there is skeletal content in his pieces, the ever-elusive "unit structures".

I would like to hear something I can admire just once. I've checked out the articles only to find nothing there. I've listened maybe 20, maybe 40 times over the years. I hear 3 minutes of addititive groping, then torrential b.s., usually. By 3 minutes, his listeners are exhausted, so they don't care any more, they just zone out.

I think he was a ferocious advocate for the worst aspects of modernism, without his music even having the core content that makes modernism great.

All the bad stuff -- the length, the obscurity, the unintelligibility, the lack of harmony, melody, pulse, meter and form as we've known them, or even if some way we haven't.

But I'm still open to being converted by a single passage.

(And I don't mean some first-3-minutes-thing-with-a-pedal-tone, either. )

An artist manque in one and the same person with a performing demon -- unless things are not what they seem.

The combination is not as strange as it might seem, and again, here's where taste comes in. It may not really matter to many people if he was far sketchier and less gifted than the myth suggested.

 

[calebprime]

A man walks down the street
He says why am I short of attention
Got a short little span of attention
And wo my nights are so long
Where's my wife and family
What if I die here
Who'll be my role-model
Now that my role-model is
Gone Gone

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bo...px?n=peter-lyman-row&pid=188850770&fhid=25298

I'm trying to account for some of the reasons that my batteries -- as durable as any composer I know -- seem to be running down. One reason is personal failure. Another set of reasons is cultural.


I think that with the death of Peter Row, all my teachers and role-models have passed away.

It's hard not to feel that the ground is crumbling under my feet.

Last week I went into the Harvard Bookstore -- surely a center of elite civilization -- and found not a single book with music notation in the Music section. We live now in a mostly post-literate musical age. (There's still a local bookstore right across from NEC that sells books with notation in them.)

This means only that notational literacy and related things are not part of mainstream culture any more -- it's not the death of civilization.

My Berklee prof friend speaks of musically clueless students who only specialize in manipulating sound on their laptops -- they have no instrumental skills and no theory. How and what do you teach them? They've never heard of Stravinsky or Keith Jarrett.

It doesn't require that one be a prickly cactus or an ogre to become lonely and isolated as a composer. It only seems to require that one be committed to the same things that one was in youth -- basically that it would be really cool to create some really cool art. And really cool meant, essentially, the shiny space-ship. Something swift, sleek and ultimately intelligible if mysterious at first. My idea of what's cool hasn't really changed since my teens, all that much.

And then it only requires that one have moderate success and moderate failure -- just enough success to keep going in the whole shabby and dubious venture.

My constant focus on computer sequencing since the late 70's has been the key to all my important gigs, but it has also been isolating and it is obviously no longer novel or in vogue.

At some late point, your task shifts from building up a body of work to accepting without resentment that this body of work that seemed so precious is really nothing, even if it was the best you had to offer. And the same is true for all the projects so dear to your parents and mentors. It will all crumble and disappear, at this level -- the music of Tom McKinley, of John Bavicchi. Their huge scores used to fill the library. Now the library, of course, doesn't have room for scores like it used to.

It's like something written by Kazuo Ishiguro. __The Remains of the Scores__.

 

[calebprime]

I've selected my music books and sorted them into 2 piles. This is idiosyncratic and the reasons for inclusion mixed.

The rejected pile gets put up in the attic, never to be read again, and probably eventually put out on the sidewalk.

The other pile is every book that I feel has something to teach me, that I ought to read, now or any moment now.

First the rejects. Next post the must-reads.


calebprime's idiosyncratic Don't Read and Put Back in the Attic list.

Starred items are books that I find some fault with. The rest might be ok, just not what I'm looking for right now.


* Perpetual Frontier -- the Properties of Free Music -- Joe Morris


meh:
* Virgil Thomson -- Music with Words, anything else by V.T.
* Jazz Composition and Orchestration -- William Russo -- kind of a mook.
* Twentieth-Century Music Theory and Practice -- Edward Pearsall
Structural Functions in Music -- Berry
* Other Harmony -- Johnson -- good spirit, sloppy execution
* Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music -- Kostka -- thin and dull
* Modulation Re-Defined -- Norden -- Heh. A local crank.


ok, but:

Basic Forms in Music -- Walton
Form in Tonal Music -- Green
How to Understand Music -- Thompson
Form in Music -- Berry
Guidelines for Style Analysis -- La Rue
Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music

ok, but done with:

Chromatic Harmony
Music and Twentieth-Century Tonality

Rhythm and Tempo -- Sachs
The Rhythmic Structure of Music -- Cooper/Meyer

mere journalism:

Stravinsky, either volume -- Walsh
Music and Imagination -- Copland
The Language of Modern Music
Exploring Music -- Krenek
Odyssey of an American Composer -- Luening
Musical Experience -- Sessions
Breaking the Sound Barrier -- Battcock


Music since 1945 -- Schwartz
A Study of Jazz -- Tanner
Anton Webern -- Kolneder. -- Webern the most overrated (by composers) and underrated (by the average listener) composer of all time during the 50's to maybe 80's, not so sure now.

The Whistling Blackbird -- Robert Morris
An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt -- Mead -- I explicitly dislike his music, and I'm not interested in the aggregate or combinatoriality, so what's gonna interest me there? Mead and Morris are two of the best 12-tone theorists.
Formalized Music -- Xenakis. -- Just review the pages on "sieves" to make scales. See review in other books.

Music and Sentiment -- Charles Rosen
Music and the Cultured Generation -- ? -- I just like the title.

next, a list of recommended music-theory books that I intend to read.

 

[calebprime]

My music-theory reading-list.

on probation:

Twelve-Tone Tonality -- Perle -- certainly an overblown presentation that makes it hard to tell if it's valid or not. I intend to figure out whether I can use this, once and for all.

Music After the Fall -- Rutherford-Johnson. -- issues in music comp after 1989 -- so a lot of silly.


Perspectives of New Music. -- pick up an issue, one never knows, do one, whether there will be a technical nugget or some nonsense.


Trad:

The Quartets of Beethoven -- Mason
The Classical Style -- Rosen
The Romantic Generation -- Rosen
J.S. Bach -- Newman

Tonal Harmony:

Structural Hearing -- Saltzer
Tonal Pitch Space -- Lerdahl
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music -- Lerdahl
Functional Harmony vol. 2 -- Toutant

The Study of Fugue -- Mann
A Companion to the Art of Fugue -- Tovey
Harmony -- Piston
Harmony, its Theory and Practice -- Ebenezer Prout (!!)
Harmony -- Schenker

Favorites:

Ways of the Hand -- Sudnow
Genesis of a Music -- Partch
Sonic Design -- Cogan

Daily Bread:

20th Century Harmony -- Persichetti
Thesaurus of Scales -- Slonimsky
Craft of Comp 1 -- Hindemith
Self-Similar Melodies -- Johnson
Simple Composition -- Wurorinen

Mathematical Theory of Music -- Jedrzejewski
A Geometry of Music -- Tymoczko

The Music of Bela Bartok -- Antokoletz

to be continued...

 

[calebprime]

continued...

Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations -- Lewin
The Schillinger System of Music Composition, 2 vol. -- Schillinger

12-tone:

The Structure of Atonal Music -- Forte
Serial Composition and Atonality -- Perle
Serial Composition -- Brindle
12-Tone Music in America -- Straus
The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola -- Alegant
Composition with Pitch-Classes -- Morris
Norton series books, Perspectives on...American, Scho. and Strav., Contemp Music Theory,
Schoenberg's Twelve-tone Music -- Boss
Serialism- Whittall
Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory -- Straus
The Operas of Alban Berg -- Perle


to be continued

 

[calebprime]

Riemann, transformation:

Audacious Euphony -- Cohn
The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories
Tonality and Transformation -- Rings

math and reference:

Harmonic Materials of Modern Music -- Hanson
Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics -- Grimaldi
Music, a Mathematical Offering -- Benson

 

[calebprime]

music lit and general:

Emotion and Meaning in Music -- Meyer
Music, the Arts, and Ideas -- Meyer
Since Debussy -- Hodeir
Intro to Contemporary Music -- Machlis
Concise History of Western Music
Musical Comp in the Twentieth Century -- Whittall
Music in the Renaissance
Music in India
Twentieth Century Music
Norton Scores, etc.

 

[calebprime]

Composers:

The Writings of Elliott Carter
Orientations -- Boulez
Notes of an Apprenticeship -- Boulez
The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg -- Frisch
The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez -- Goldman
Towards a Cosmic Music -- Stockhausen
Stravinsky -- White
The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi