Recommend Some Books!

I know people like you, they were the ones that said that it is pointless to go to college and major in composition. You pride you self on being self taught and claim that books and teacher teach you only how to mimic. But that is not the case.

What you just described is actually the complete opposite of what really happens.

You can't possibly perfect something you know nothing about nor can you evolve from no where. Your musical ignorance keeps people like you in a box of self-fulfillment. You get better don't get me wrong, but you go no where.

As for me, just the three years of formal training in college has improved my body of work by leaps and bounds by applying what I know and growing from there.

You know people like me? How much more will you show your poor conditioning of people? It looks like to me that you feel better when people including yourself show gratitude toward your arrangements, thus by manifesting who you are. You can be the spitting image of someone before you, and somehow that would matter to a lot of people. What is wrong with this picture us that there is actually no success. You don't progress yourself. You learn as much of history as you can and you run it around continuously.

It is apparent that nobody who wants to say something agrees with me. You can stop trying to prove the significance of music as a "subject that needs to be learned" again. I'm taking what you say with a grain of salt, but I don't predict anything will follow from your words.

You know people like me? How much more will you show your poor conditioning of people? It looks like to me that you feel better when people including yourself show gratitude toward your arrangements, thus by manifesting who you are. You can be the spitting image of someone before you, and somehow that would matter to a lot of people. What is wrong with this picture us that there is actually no success. You don't progress yourself. You learn as much of history as you can and you run it around continuously.

But my style is nothing like anyone else because I learned from them and with that knowledge I pull myself in another direction.

People who are voluntarily blind themselves to other musical ideas are the same people who think they are completely original, when in actuality they are just a copy of what they heard. Its because they don't fully understand or understand that what they are doing is not original.

But my style is nothing like anyone else because I learned from them and with that knowledge I pull myself in another direction.

People who are voluntarily blind themselves to other musical ideas are the same people who think they are completely original, when in actuality they are just a copy of what they heard. Its because they don't fully understand or understand that what they are doing is not original.

You're talking about something completely different. If anyone is blind to other musical ideas, then they don't write unoriginal music. That doesn't mean they are going to always write original music. If they are talented then their music will be quite good and the originality will come in time. Trying to force originality upon yourself is plain idiotic. Bogus.

Its pointless to talk you. You obviously have judged something you no nothing about nor do you have plans to learn anything outside your bubble.

Any ways back to the topic at hand

If you really want to do film music, which a lot of composer here seem interested in, you have to pick up Jack Smalley's book Composing Music for Film. This book will teach you close to everything you need to know about film music and how to go about scoring a movie or television show. It has all the technical terms you need to know when it comes to the movie business. If you dont know who Jack Smalley is check him out.

This is just some of his credits:

Movie Orchestration

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

The Mothman Prophecies

Last of the Mohicans

Curley Sue

The Gladiator

The Peacemaker

Red Dawn

Conan the Barbarian

Steel Magnolias

The Pickup Artist

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Popeye

Oh God

Episodic Television Composition

Charlie's Angels

Murder She Wrote

The Love Boat

Law and Harry McGraw

Streets of San Francisco

Knightrider

Twilight Zone

Cartoons

Captain Planet

Tom and Jerry Kids

Where in the World is Carmen Santiago

The Wizard of Oz

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Other Books that are good:

Modern Music

A concise History (revised edition)

by Paul Griffiths

Books on Specific composers and their works;

Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire

By Johathan Dunsby

Olivier Messiaen's System of Signs

By Andrew Shenton

In quest of Spirit, Thoughts on Music

by the composer Johnathan Harvey

Just a few for light reading :P

About Stravinsky? Do you actually believe that he covered a majority of techniques aside from writing a majority of brilliant pieces?

yes

Go tell an engineer that he's "stealing theories" when studying his thermodynamics books, Schumann. Then we'll talk.

I guess he should go out and discover his own laws of physics.

yes

Then it makes no sense not to agree with my previous statement.

Go tell an engineer that he's "stealing theories" when studying his thermodynamics books, Schumann. Then we'll talk.

Comparing music to engineering: Do you know how essential music is?

Find ONE SINGLE composer who didn't take any ideas from his predecessors, who didn't use some of other peoples' rules as replacement for making his own. Come back when you've got one.

Do you know how essential music is?

It's not, really.

"Auditory cheesecake" it is, according to Stephen Pinker and the most well-supported theories.

Find ONE SINGLE composer who didn't take any ideas from his predecessors, who didn't use some of other peoples' rules as replacement for making his own. Come back when you've got one.

It's not, really.

"Auditory cheesecake" it is.

Your a man of facts not answers. Why would I play a stupid game like that when I have more important things to do and think about?

Well, there don't appear to be many facts in your argument, eh?

People who think they're being completely original often just end up producing copies.

(To address the topic - I don't know many books, but the Persichetti sounds really cool. Can anybody give me some more information about it? Like the general contents, I mean.)

Well, there don't appear to be many facts in your argument, eh?

There are very few solid facts regarding people.

Please, the thread is getting/has gotten off topic. Phantom of the opera kindly requested for some book recommendations and your discussion has nothing to do with the OP.

I would recommend a book I recently bought and teaches you how to play from a figured bass as well as how to improvise a fugue.

Alexandros

From a visual arts perspective, Henri is a fountain of wisdom and enlightenment for ANY and ALL artists...

Full of such relevant charms as:

“Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.” ~ R. Henri

"A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods. " ~ R. Henri

"To paint is to know how to put nothing on the canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back" ~ R. Henri....

@Schumann: You have your views, and other people have theirs. But please don't burst into a topic and accuse anyone who uses music books as "stealing". If you feel so strongly about it, argue elsewhere (maybe make a new topic). My personal point of view is that reading a book is no different from learning from a teacher. Yes, there is the danger of imitation, but it's no use trying a thousand different things that don't work when people know what does work. Music does have rules and forms. Also, it's just as easy to say that someone who only listens to music is copying if they write something similar, as they may have learned it subconsiously. A fundamental understanding of how your instrument works is far more important than books, it's true, but books also have their place. Just look at Ivan Galamian's masterful "Principles of Violin Playing & Teaching". It would take one person hundreds of years to accumulate the vast amounts of knowledge contained in that small volume. Also, lutiers (violin makers) do their work with hundreds of years of knowledge and tradition behind them. Stradivarius would not have been who he was were it not for the wisdom of his teacher.

@Robin: That last quote is awesome.

Books:

Principles of Violin Playing & Teaching (if you want to learn how to play the violin :thumbsup:)

Measure for Measure (a fascinating blend of conventional and musical history)

Don't read books.

:O

Orchestration

-Walter Piston

Interesting reading.

The American Symphony Orchestra: John Henry Mueller. Fascinating sociological study on how the Orchestra operates in America and which composers dominate the repertoire and why. Also, the final chapter on aethetics is amazing!

The Holy Bible: God.

New King James Version if you got it.

Nah, I feel Schumann to a degree. Write your music the way you want to, regardless of what book/famous composer says what.

I really don't like getting marked down because I orchestrated something "wrong," even though it makes sense to me (like breaking up a melody over different parts or something that's what I wanted, but isn't of the style)

But, the OP referred to non-theory, non-instructional books, and I think music philosophy is something that you CAN learn a lot about your own philosophy by reading others. I always harp on it, but reading Noise was seriously life-changing for my music and attitude, even though i don't buy every word (his understanding of jazz is atrocious, for example...)

I need to get that one, Noise.

Knowing things about music doesn't hurt. You can believe in whatever you want, as if music is a religion, but that doesn't change the fact that other people in your same position, and with equal "talent" can know these things and read certain books and potentially have a leg over someone else. Instructional books aren't as instruactional as they are informing. That's why I would say read any day, and as much as you can. To know is not a bad thing.

I've been reading a book recently, and it is fairly interesting. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, written by Steven Milthen is about exactly what the title says. The book looks at music from biological and cultural perspectives while it stays true the purpose of discussing origin. Everything is taken from a professional historians knowledge and explained by him in layman's terms. The author, not being a musician, does make some incorrect assumptions about what music is and what it does (dealing with the concepts of melody and emotion), but that does not negate the worth of this book.

Here is a review of the book that goes into some of the problems I found, but also constures with more detail the topics of the book.

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep03375380.pdf

...and here is a link to amazon, for those interested:

Amazon.com: The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body: Steven Mithen: Books

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/recommend-books-involving-music-here-16969.html

Doopid.

I just have to say that Schumman does not make any sense to me. People have learned from past as far back as the human kind exists. The point you are trying to make would grow out to be "don't learn anything from others, learn all by yourself and your mistakes". And if that was the case the human race would not get down the tree in the first place.

You are suggesting that written knowledge is somehow bad for your own intuitive developing knowledge that you acquire trough trial and error. And you are forgetting that written knowledge is the replacement for ancient ways of passing knowledge, and that thing is exactly why humans are dominant on this planet. It is our language, our ability to communicate and to share ideas that brought us to where we are today. If we don't use that we are nothing more than animals.

Reading from a book is in my opinion just as same as listening to a piece of music, except that from a book you might understand certain things more easily than by just by listening to a piece again and again.

And as much talent as you may have, you are not going to get anywhere with it, without the proper tools to hone your skill.

Our capacity for creativity and art comes from both learned and intrinsic qualities (nature and nurture); both qualities we have had since childhood, such as our personality, our values, our emotional canvases, so to speak, and qualities given to us by experience, such as conceptions and preconceptions, abstract ideas, attitudes and emotions towards issues, and our accumulated knowledge about the world. Music is but one way of expressing our creativity. You may laugh, but their is creative expression in engineering, mathematics and the sciences as much as there is in music; these are simply the media through which we express ourselves.

By reading literature, listening to music, studying equations, we are expanding our knowledge of the world, gaining experiences, and thus increasing the size of our creative palettes, and allowing us to express ourselves more effectively. The question of whether books are more or less effective in this regard is moot simply because the book is merely the medium, and it is not the medium, but the original content of the medium that will affect you. It also depends on you, and your approach to learning. Firstly, it depends on what you intend to take from the book. If you refuse to acknowledge its significance to you, or deny it the opportunity to influence you, you will gain less than somebody who seeks to use the book as a conduit to understanding and learning about the creativity of others. Secondly, it depends on the book, and whether the author has anything of relevance to impart to you. In the vast majority of cases, you will not be able to absorb the entire range of ideas presented by the author, but equally, it is extremely unlikely that there is nothing at all to learn. By approaching this kind of broadening of your intellectual scope openly, you will be able to optimize what you draw from it. In essence, anything you learn can only have a positive affect on your creativity. We are all melded from a different mold, and even if we are influenced by similar sources, there is the possibility for huge diversity in our output, because of the host of different things that affect it.

Sorry for the rant...

Personally, I recommend Piano Notes by Charles Rosen and the Alfred Brendel essays, which have already been mentioned.