Here are 100 books that Theory of Harmony fans have personally recommended if you like
Theory of Harmony.
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I’ve been singing since before I could speak, and I found myself drawn to music even though there were no musicians in my family. From church choir to the SF Boys Chorus, through every choir and musical I could join, then onto the New England Conservatory of Music and the Tufts Beelzebubs, I hungrily digested every bit of music knowledge I could find, with a deep desire to become a musician upon graduation. These books are the best I have come across in more than 50 years, and I hope you’ll find great knowledge and insight in their pages.
I wanted to learn how to write melodies and countermelodies from the best, and Fux is the legend who taught the greats. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all carefully studied these sage lessons.
Even though it was written in 1725, the book is enormously approachable, written in a series of conversations between a teacher and student. And yes, you don’t have to read it in Latin; it’s been translated into modern English.
The most celebrated book on counterpoint is Fux's great theoretical work Gradus ad Parnassum. Since its appearance in 1725, it has been used by and has directly influenced the work of many of the greatest composers. J.S. Bach held it in high esteem, Leopold Mozart trained his famous son from its pages, Haydn worked out every lesson with meticulous care, and Beethoven condensed it into an abstract for ready reference. An impressive list of nineteenth-century composers subscribed to its second edition, and in more recent times Paul Hindemith said, "Perhaps the craft of composition would really have fallen into decline…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve been singing since before I could speak, and I found myself drawn to music even though there were no musicians in my family. From church choir to the SF Boys Chorus, through every choir and musical I could join, then onto the New England Conservatory of Music and the Tufts Beelzebubs, I hungrily digested every bit of music knowledge I could find, with a deep desire to become a musician upon graduation. These books are the best I have come across in more than 50 years, and I hope you’ll find great knowledge and insight in their pages.
After filling my head with theories and practices, it was time for me to break everything down, which this book does brilliantly, and start writing my own melodies and harmonies.
Designed almost like a workbook, these very thoughtful and insightful steps helped me understand the fundamental process of writing. They started with exercises such as creating a simple five-note melody and built until I was crafting entire songs.
Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student's musical grammar. "This is a wonderful book for anyone who is developing improvising skills or who would like a fun way to explore music."--Jim Stockford, Co-Evolution Quarterly
I’ve been singing since before I could speak, and I found myself drawn to music even though there were no musicians in my family. From church choir to the SF Boys Chorus, through every choir and musical I could join, then onto the New England Conservatory of Music and the Tufts Beelzebubs, I hungrily digested every bit of music knowledge I could find, with a deep desire to become a musician upon graduation. These books are the best I have come across in more than 50 years, and I hope you’ll find great knowledge and insight in their pages.
Something I didn’t realize as a young musician but quickly learned is that it’s called the business of music, and you need to spend as much time on the business side as the music side.
They call this book the music industry bible, and I agree—in its 11th edition, it’s up to date with the latest opportunities and challenges in music (streaming, various platforms). Great music can’t just live on your desk or computer; it needs to get out into the world to fulfill its function: emotionally connecting people.
Dubbed "the industry bible" by the Los Angeles Times, All You Need to Know About the Music Business by veteran music lawyer Donald Passman is the go-to guide for everyone in the music business through ten editions, over thirty years, and over a half a million copies sold. Now with updates explaining why musicians have more power today than ever in history; discussion of the mega-million-dollar sales of artists' songs and record catalogs; how artist access to streaming media, and particularly TikTok, has completely reshaped the music business; the latest on music created by AI; and a full update of…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I’ve been singing since before I could speak, and I found myself drawn to music even though there were no musicians in my family. From church choir to the SF Boys Chorus, through every choir and musical I could join, then onto the New England Conservatory of Music and the Tufts Beelzebubs, I hungrily digested every bit of music knowledge I could find, with a deep desire to become a musician upon graduation. These books are the best I have come across in more than 50 years, and I hope you’ll find great knowledge and insight in their pages.
I found that once my brain was filled with enough information, I didn’t need more theories. I needed to dive headfirst into the greatest songs ever written and learn from them. A fake book doesn’t have any arrangements; it’s just the melody and chords, but that’s what a song is at its core. Along with recordings, I had everything I needed, and so will you. Feel free to swap in the Ultimate Jazz Fake Book or a classical fake book if you prefer.
(Fake Book). One of the bestselling fake books of all time has just been updated to include an even better assortment of 1001 essential songs from all genres that every musician should have in their library! Includes the melody lines, lyrics, and chords for: ABC * Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive * After the Love Has Gone * Aguas De Marco (Waters of March) * Ain't No Mountain High Enough * Another Brick in the Wall * Another One Bites the Dust * We Will Rock You * Autumn Leaves * Baby, It's Cold Outside * Begin the Beguine * Big Yellow…
As a poet, my main gift is related to my first ambition, to be a musician. I like to talk, I like to listen, I like the sounds of words and I like to hear(for example) what Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats have to say.
When Brooks says “ballade” or “blues” she speaks with the authority of one who can hear—can allude to music without needing to copy it.
Composing the sounds beforethe record-keeping act of merely writing the words. She doesn’t need the added music of actual song: she embodies the music in the sentence-sounds. (And the harmonies and discords and rhythms of speech.)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Whilst not strictly a book about popular music, but rather two separate but related essays on the modern composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno’s study has been utterly formative for how I understand music and its relationship to its social conditions.
I can’t even fathom how I could think about music without Adorno, and this book is by far his most concerted and concise statement on the subject.
An indispensable key to Adorno's influential oeuvre-now in paperback
In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher's return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it.
Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
Paul Harris is one of the UK’s most influential music educationalists. He studied the clarinet at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won the August Manns Prize for outstanding performance in clarinet playing and where he now teaches. He is in great demand as a teacher, composer, and writer (he has written over 600 books); and his inspirational masterclasses and workshops continue to influence thousands of young musicians and teachers all over the world in both the principles and practice of musical performance and education.
For anyone who is performing at any level really, this book will help them enhance their performance and manage the stress that sometimes seems to appear in the performance situation. The book looks at ways to approach the music that we have decided to perform a variety of practice strategies and some particularly interesting techniques for all-around improvement taking in both the physical side of playing and the musical side. It’s a serious and quite academic book but well worth the effort.
Musical Excellence offers performers, teachers, and researchers, new perspectives and practical guidance for enhancing performance and managing the stress that typically accompanies performance situations. It draws together, for the first time in a single collection, the findings of pioneering initiatives from across the arts and sciences. Specific recommendations are provided alongside comprehensive reviews of existing theory and research, enabling the practitioner to place the strategies and techniques within the broader context of human performance and encouraging novel ways of conceptualizing music making and teaching.
Part I, Prospects and Limits, sets out ground rules for achieving musical excellence. What roles do…
I grew up with the music of the 1960s. Going to packed, pheromone-heavy dances featuring The Lincolns—Nova Scotia’s most popular and most soulful band—were a huge part of my teenage years. Those experiences implanted a deep love of R&B, and somehow or other pointed me in the direction of becoming a writer. It’s a bit of a mystery how it all works. In any case, of all my books, none was as much fun to work on as Kings of Friday Night. It has received lots of love, including from readers who grew up far from the time and place I write about. Long live local bands! And live music everywhere!
Alan Leeds does a wonderful job presenting his eyewitness experiences as part of the James Brown entourage in the 1960s and beyond. The reader can’t wait to find out what happens next in the riveting story he presents of Soul Brother No. 1, the “hardest working man in show business.” It’s a fascinating tale, which presents Brown as an innovative musical force, determined artist, forceful businessman, and unpredictable personality. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the Chitlin’ Circuit when soul music was taking off as a dynamic new genre—as recalled by a young, Jewish kid from Queens who joined James Brown’s team and learned the music business at the hand of the performer who mastered it.
“Alan Leeds was a protegé of James Brown and a true historian of the world that nurtured the great entertainer. Alan was a witness to the vibrant black music scene of the ’60s and ’70s—whose book is both a memoir and a document of a lost world of sound.”—Nelson George, an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker
A behind-the-scenes look at the Chitlin’ Circuit during American’s most vital period of soul music—from the eyes and ears of a young, Jewish kid from Queens who joined the team of…
As an author and educator, my work centers on the history, business, and art of the music industry and film industry. I don’t think my fellow historians use musical evidence enough as a primary document that reveals much about the society and time period one is writing about—just as much as the usual primary and secondary documents historians use. I try to ensure my books are entertaining as well as rigorously researched. I’m also a songwriter, with many years in the music biz, and have done much work in radio, especially crafting music shows. I’m always discovering amazing stuff from various eras, and it’s not much fun if you don’t share it, which is part of why I’m on Twitter.
The story of how Warner Bros Records, perhaps the best, most profitable yet artist-friendly record label in the 1970s and 1980s became heavily damaged when it was bought out in the 1990s and put under corporate auspices and expectations. Goodman communicates the financial details in a clear and accessible way, as well as the music executives’ singular personalities. Also offers a close-up view of how the corporate execs, especially with their short-term focus on quarterly results, failed to deal with the challenges of Napster and downloads at the turn of the century. An insightful view of the changing components of the music business in our time.
In 1999, when Napster made music available free online, the music industry found itself in a fight for its life. A decade later, the most important and misunderstood story-and the one with the greatest implications for both music lovers and media companies-is how the music industry has failed to remake itself. In Fortune's Fool, Fred Goodman, the author of The Mansion on the Hill, shows how this happened by presenting the singular history of Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the controversial heir to Seagram's, who, after dismantling his family's empire and fortune, made a high-stakes gamble to remake both the music…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
I spent 34 years writing for daily papers, most of them at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve also freelanced for numerous magazines, primarily about music, while hosting a podcast and writing the occasional book. Through it all I’ve had a particular fascination for the music business and its peculiar ways, especially record companies. The industry’s darker side was the subject of my first book way back in 2000, the novel Off The Record, which was a notebook dump of thinly fictionalized war stories I’d accumulated over the years. The record business is the subject of my latest book, too, although it’s a much more positive story.
A century ago, the record industry sent representatives all over the country to do field recordings of vernacular artists playing folk, blues, and early country for “hillbilly” and “race” records (the sort that Rounder would start putting out in the 1970s).
One of these scouts was Ralph Peer from the Victor Talking Machine Company, for which he oversaw 1927’s legendary “Bristol Sessions.” It was the first time that Hall of Fame titans the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers recorded, generally cited as the beginning of the country music industry.
As explained in Barry Mazor’s excellent biography, Peer went on to become one of the giants of the recording and publishing industry, laying the groundwork that pretty much every record label including Rounder has followed since.
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the revolutionary A&R man and music publisher who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music, and this book book tracks his role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B,…
