Just finished the Morton Feldman book. Got it after watching this. Loved it. Thanks!

I'm currently reading Thomas Mann's modern rendering of Doctor Faustus. It is fiction, of course, but nonetheless absolutely brilliant and essential for music lovers.

@Hist_da_Musica

2 жыл бұрын

The philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, who was also exiled in California when Mann was working on this novel, was his consultant on music theory. Some lines from the Devil are taken from Adorno's Philosophy of New Music

"The Rest is Noise" Alex Ross extremely readable, fun, informative, mind opening, Pulitzer winning book on 20th/21st Cent. Music. It's why I watch this channel.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Yes, I'm a fan of Alex Ross' writing. My list could have been 10 times longer and this was a somewhat arbitrary selection..

its always a good day when samuel uploads a video :)

Thank you so much for this. I have loved Webern since the 1960s while a composition major @ Boston Conservatory. I also got to attend master classes with Stockhausen while there.

Excellent video! I'm putting these books on my list, and your new CD. I've been intrigued by Xenakis in particular for as long as I can remember but never got around to reading about him much, so thank you for that recommendation.

Definitely passed on that songwriting book once and now I’m going to find it, that Morton Feldman book is on my radar now as well

So much thanks for this.

Thank you Samuel very much for your words about my book. I greatly appreciate it. There is a sequel I did last year called More Songwriters On Songwriting. My favorite music books that I did not write are Sondheim's Finishing The Hat - i love the Alec Wilder as well - and Jimmy Webb's Tunesmith. Also for Beatles lovers - their engineer Geoff Emerick's book on them is about as good as it gets.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Dear Paul, great to hear from you. Your book has been a valuable companion to me over the years, and I look very much forward to discovering the follow-up. Thanks for all you have done to increase appreciation of this great art form.

@paulzollo9710

5 жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev thanks very much for your support - and discernment!

@paulzollo9710

3 жыл бұрын

@Jeff Sylvester Hey Jeff - thank you very much.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Great video, gonna read a couple of these

Another great vid! Also good reads : The Agony of Modern music by Henry Pleasants. Through Music to the Self by Peter Michael Hamel.

Thank you for your recommandations.

I love your videos, brother! Here are six stupendous technical books on music: Adler Sight singing Gjerdingen Music in the galant style Gould Behind bars Holst Tune Nelson Solkattu manual Persichetti Twentieth-century harmony And an excellent non-technical one: The Blackwell guide to recorded country music

I'm new to music theory appreciation and composition. A very late awakening. I've only heard of one of these books, although I now have a few music literacy books in my library. So this is very enlightening to see what the well informed and educated musicians appreciate. The suggestions in the comments are a gold mine too. Thank you for doing this video. I'll need a very long life to explore the surface of what is fast becoming a fascination.

@samuel_andreyev

3 жыл бұрын

Really happy to hear that. Happy New Year.

Thank you Samuel

Man, this is rich... but we want the technical reading list also. After all, you are the reference on classical vanguard on youtube. And this is dense material, we need to start reading now, life goes fast, it takes long to become a composer.

just found this channel and enjoying it thoroughly. would love to see analysis of elliott carter's music!

Great video as always! I tried reading Xenakis' Formalized Music a few months ago and even as a civil engineer with a working knowledge of statistics and stochastic processes, I found the mathematical notation exceedingly difficult to follow. I should check out that biography though!

Definitely checking some of these out, starting with Music of the 20th Century. My two favourites are both very similar John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings Ezekiel Honig's Bumping Into a Chair While Humming What I've read from Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music gives a lot of insight to his philosophy of music, but it's a very dense tome that's full of complicated math so it's not very accessible.

Hi Samuel, thank you for great channel! Could you please do same types of videos dedicated to separate classical pieces? It would be particularly interesting to know about certain operas, what do they mean, what importance do they have, background. Thank you once again for the great job you are doing

Those are great recommendations. Thank you! Three of them went straight to my Christmas wish list. I'll also suggest The Music Instinct by Philip Ball. In my humble opinion he is one of the finest and most versatile science writers of our time.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Never heard of it. Will investigate. Thank you.

John Szwed's "Space is the Place" -- a biography of Sun Ra. I've read it twice, and serendipitously met John Szwed at Downtown Music Gallery in Manhattan. He liked my Ra tattoo. :^)

Ben johnstons maximum clarity completely changed my life. An astoundingly lucid perspective on western musics history and its spiritual underpinning. As well as complicated just intonation mathematics.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Sounds like something I should read.

@fryingwiththeantidote2486

5 жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev oh yes, you most definitely should. i would've thought you had already and just didnt put it here due to its technical stuff. Johnston has become my musical and religious obsession the past few weeks.

A few others I've found enlightening: Modus Novus (atonal/non-tonal ear-training), Soundpieces 1 & 2 (interviews with interesting American composers), Kyle Gann's American Music In The 20th Century (excellent exposition of many "forgotten" composers), Xenakis's Musique Formelles, Persichetti's 20th Century Harmony (a bit sprawling but terrifically useful), Rosen's Sonata Forms... too many others to list. Alas, so many fine music books are either out of print or priced so high that they may as well be OOP.

Charles Rosen's book certainly requires technical knowledge. I didn't like the film Amadeus at all. But thanks for your suggestions. I am particulaarly interested in the book on Mozart. Adorno is the best writer on music and poetry I have come across,. I don't mean his large books like The Philosophy of Modern Music but his shorter essays especially on works tthat he loved.But he is difficult to read. When I first attempted to read him I understood nothing but then one day I was in a bookshop and picked up a book of essays on literature. I saw essays on poets I love, read a pasaage and felt something like the language of Schumann's Kreisleriana. in the texture of his prose. From then on I had no difficulty reading him.. I need a libidinal relationship to philosophic texts. Later I heard that a piece from Kreisleriana was played at his funeral.He wrote a wonderful book on Alban Berg who was a close friend.

I’m absolutely obsessed with Xenakis and I thought I knew of every book about or by him, and then I find this. It wasn’t in the bookshop at the Xenakis exhibition in Paris in 2022, and they had an LP! On the other hand the time when I spent the entire day from opening to closing of that exhibition was the last day. I was initially interested in Xenakis only because of my three joint interests of contemporary music, music in general and mathematics. Then my mother brought back a CD of what I think was the only recording of Pleiades at the time, and I was spellbound and lifelong addicted. Hearing Nuits for the first time in a church in Paris of musique contemporaine was and is one of the most powerful moments of my life, I have not been able to interest many other people in his music, I don’t understand why. One friend even sneered at him as pretentious, which I didn’t understand. He is a hero of mine really. Many of my heroes in art seem to be people who met a bitter fate fighting on right side of history, and then turning their revolutionary adroit to the art world. This list is extremely useful. Maybe the book about popular music will give me an inkling into a domain I have a tin rat for with rare exceptions except for all of it used in the films I love. Alas I never met Xrnakis. I prefer to meet my heroes if I can but with him I never managed it,

@coritaylorsverson

19 күн бұрын

Is the book formalized music possible to understand? I’m a musician not a mathematician.

Great recommendations - I actually haven't read the Xenakis (I've had a sporadic and superficial relationship with Formalised Music, but I'm not a good mathematician, so it's not an accessible read for me). "Sound In Z" by Andrey Smirnov is also an interesting if esoteric read, and is also another book which doesn't really require any musical training. It focuses on developments in 20th Century Russian electronic music and covers some activities and composers/sound artists that don't often get mentioned. (available for free as a pdf on Smirnov's website, I think. It may be out of print) The Real Frank Zappa book is also a highly accessible and highly idiosyncratic insight into an unusual musician's ideas and attitudes (it sheds some insight into Zappa's process, but doesn't focus very much on the technical details of composition) - it reads like a big interview, and Zappa maintains an amusing wry sardonicism throughout (and it's interesting to see Zappa make similar claims to Kierkegaard re. music's relationship to the written score - not to mention to read the acerbic and almost dramatic speech he gave to ASUC)

@jwc3o2

4 жыл бұрын

agreed: the Zappa book is an accessibly intriguing take on being involved in music (& there're lotsa other sources for some excellent discussions of music itself by him). for an accompaniment, how about Nicolas Slonimski's "Perfect Pitch"? also autobiographical but with some great dense sections on the mechanics of music (baffled the hell outta me when i first read it but has since resolved into sense) & an astonishing tale of his intense involvements with modern music. [his "Lexicon of Musical Invective" is a fun one, too!]

John Luther Adams WINTER MUSIC

can you make a video where you just drop names of relevant composers? I am hella uninformed about classical music but if only I knew more of what to search for I could figure it out better. some of Xenakis' stuff (which I only looked up due to your mentioning his name here) I really liked.

Thank you for your amazing videos. I am a beginner composer and it would be great if you made a video with best technical books for composers, anything that could help me and other musicians subscribing your channel to improve our knowledge and craft.

I can't remember if I cited it but I used Zollo's interview of Walter Becker in my paper on him that I published recently. Great book, best of its kind.

I would add: "A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers" by Will Friedwald (2010)... very readable, endlessly fascinating prose covering the biographical, historical, technical and discographies of a plethora of the 20th Centuries (and 21Century) figures...

Hello. I found your channel very interesting and unique and informative. I,ve come here directly from the J.B Podcast. and my favorite books so for, are the Rest is all noise, musicophila, perfecting sound forever and I,m definitely gonna search some books you mentioned in your video if I manage to find them in my country, which I doubt very much. Thanks for posting this video and I appreciate what you are doing.

@samuel_andreyev

2 жыл бұрын

I appreciate your message, glad you found my channel. What is your country? Greetings from France

@NirajPoudyal

2 жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev thanks . I am from Nepal 🙏

I seem to be more interested in musical literature that does not go deeply into theoretical and analytical contexts. I love therefore Boulez' writings in 'Orientations: Collected Writings'. He offers some lovely insights on pedagogy/the 'art' (or artisanry) of teaching and it's full of his strong opinions and statements.

Stellar recommendations. Morton Feldman's other books are worth considering too. John Cage's Silence is a good match with any book by Feldman. Finally Scoenberg has a collection of writings, but his Theory of Harmony changed my musical life.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Schoenberg's harmony book is a great text, but I wouldn't recommend it to a general readership.

@artemisshaffer8654

5 жыл бұрын

Samuel Andreyev I was meaning to recommend his "Style and Idea". Most of his other books, I agree, wouldn't be appropriate to a general audience.

Thanks for your recommendations Samuel ! I recently bought "Histoire de la musique occidentale". It's a good book, and it's huge, with lots of information. Off course, it's impossible to include every subject with detail in a history book, but I was disappointed when I found only four pages concerning XXth century music in all Latin America ! Its very "Eurocentric".

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Hi Daniel! Yes, it certainly is Eurocentric, and it's far from being a balanced or objective survey, either. However, despite these flaws, it remains a valuable resource.

Nice, could you also talk about your favorite technical composition books?

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

sure, I'll do a follow-up video about that.

I picked up a Boulez bio at the county library book sale the other day...should be interesting 1 dollar investment haha

Do you have any familiarity with the latter works of the English group Talk Talk? I'd love to hear your analysis of largely improvised pieces in the future.

Samuel, are you familiar with Victor Wooten? He wrote a great book called "The music lesson." Its about life, philosophy and music. Mostly music. I highly recommend it. Thanks! - Tyler

I would also add Alan Walker’s three volume biography on Franz Liszt - read it while I was studying in Hungary. The man was a giant (which matches the size of his statue outside the Liszt Academy in Budapest).

@KitKat-lp8gn

4 жыл бұрын

The fact that he was tall was what stood out for you?

Sidney Finkelstein: Jazz A People's Music. BTW Maynard Solomon passed away in September, 2020, at age 90. Maynard hired Sidney in the early 1950s to write the liner notes for Vanguard classical albums.

what about the Morrissey autobiography? just kidding. great suggestions and thanks as always.

Give my regards to eighth street my beloved 💖

What do you think of Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music? Thanks for your vids btw :)

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Roger Scruton is an intelligent and cultivated man, but I disagree with much of what he says about modern music. He seems to make a lot of vague generalizations about great swathes of 20th century repertoire, simply because it is not to his taste, or does not understand it, or both.

Twentieth Century Harmony - Vincent Persichetti

not sure if you've mentioned them elsewhere, but what are your favorite pop records?

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Captain Beefheart, Kate Bush, Bow Wow Wow, Van Dyke Parks, Kinks, Leonard Cohen, etc.

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Alec Wilder, Oxford University Press

How about "American Popular Song" by Alec Wilder"?

удивительно было, когда нашел у петерсона в подписках человека с русской фамилией. Неожиданенько

Thanks for the video. Several books I did not know and I will start looking for them. Samuel, Is there some book that you can recommend me about signs and everything that has to do with semiotics (¿extended techniques maybe?) in 21st century orchestral writing? Thank you in advance.

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

The semiotics of 21st century orchestral writing? I'm not sure such a book exists :)

Gardner's book is definitely more appropriate for those familiar with Bach and his works at an advanced level. He emphasizes the liturgical works which Bach churned out weekly during his peak years. At this time in my life I found the book rather dry...

The rest is noise by Alex Ross

Surely a part two is in order, for both my musical education and for the YT algorithm wink wink.

Please recommend one Xenakis CD for my Xmas list

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

This is the one to get: www.amazon.com/Xenakis-I-Orchestral-Jonchaies-Antikhthon/dp/B00BV109PI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543520735&sr=8-1&keywords=xenakis+jonchaies+tamayo

@petthemama

5 жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev Just listened to Jonchaies for the first time based on your suggestion... Woah.

Can somebody recommend me a book about the evolution of music? Like from the stone age till now kind of book:))

I would love to support you via patreon, but I have no money to do so. Is there a non monetary way that I can be more supportive?

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Spread the word and engage by commenting on the videos -- that would be a big help. And thank you.

@rolandmeyer3729

3 ай бұрын

Phoebe, you could pray for him.

Silence by John Cage???

@samuel_andreyev

5 жыл бұрын

Yes -- that too.

Thanks Samuel. 'How Music Works' by David Byrne might be worth mentioning here... For a fiction read threaded with music, dance and theater please check out my new young adult fiction fantasy novel 'The Music Of The Spheres' by David Dangerfield . Features Australian indigenous, musical, political, ecological and metaphysical themes... Paperback and eBook now available worldwide online/in store.... Story synopsis : The world of the not-too distant future is plagued with ecological disaster, economic collapse and ruled by a tyrannical corporation called Omni. A 12-year old Afghan named Orpheus, cast among millions of ecological and political victims within a mass detention center in central Australia, can bend reality with their singing voice... Careful to evade Omni's brutal oppression and obsessive control over emerging new dimensional possibilities known as the 'The Spheres', Orpheus teaches their gifts there to a growing counter culture of 'Orphics'. With the help of a blind Australian indigenous elder named Yunuringa and the arrival of the comet causing the dimensional anomalies, prophesied to be an anancient artificial intelligence arc known as The Argus, Orpheus leads the Orphics at mass Corroboree's in The Spheres... With collective voice, they heal the sick, empower the poor and mend the Earth's ecology... Evolving the hearts and minds of all who can hear... The Music of the Spheres..

What is the picture on the wall?

@samuel_andreyev

Жыл бұрын

It's a lithograph by my friend, the superb French painter Morgan Bancon.

@markmiller3713

Жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev Thanks!

Has anyone here read Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise"? I will soon want to read either Ton de Leeuw's "Music in the Twentieth Century" OR Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise" - I will not have enough time to read both books deeply and attentively. Anyone here willing and able to compare the two books? I fear that Alex Ross' book is too anecdotal and "journalistic" in the worst sense of the word. I'm more interested in the music than in anecdotes about conservative audiences reacting with anger to Stravinsky, etc.

@samuel_andreyev

4 жыл бұрын

Haven't read the Ross book, but I understand it is more narrative-driven, whereas the de Leeuw is more oriented towards aesthetic and technical considerations.

@boschblue

4 жыл бұрын

@@samuel_andreyev Thank you very much! Yes, I am more interested in a book offering analysis, so ... de Leeuw it is then. And your videos, of course. ; )

@notimetostop7823

Жыл бұрын

i did like “the rest is noise” i think the anecdotes and some speculation about the scene and characters makes it entertaining, yet there is analytical parts in relation to music, as composition and also more like a characteristic of the music in time. It is interesting and entertaining.

Why do you blink like that jesus

@samuel_andreyev

4 жыл бұрын

My eyes were dry because I was staring into the camera while wearing contacts. I've since addressed the problem. Thank you for your feedback.

Can somebody recommend me a book about the evolution of music? Like from the stone age till now kind of book:))