Books on Classical Music

🎹 Books on Classical Music in General

🎹 Books on Musical Instruments

🎹 Books about the Piano

🎹 Books on Music History

🎹 Books on Performance

🎹 Books on Analysis

🎹 Books on Form

🎹 Books on Harmony

🎹 Books on Counterpoint

🎹 Books & Music for Kids

📖 "Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once."
Robert Browning

📖 " Art is a microcosm, which passes like the world itself through successive periods of youth, maturity and age ; which never perishes, butcon- tinually renews uself. It is not a closed circle, but a spiral, perpetually ascending and progressing. I intend to make my pupils follow the same movement as the art itself, so that having gone through the transformations to whichmusic has been subjected in the course of centuries, they may emerge from their period ofstudy better equipped for the conflict of these modern days, becausethey will have lived, soto speak, the life of their art, and will have assimi- lated in their natural order the forms which have succeeded each other logically through the various periods in the development of the art."
Vincent d'Indy in inaugural address (delivered on November 2, 1900), quoted in Vincent d'Indy's César Franck

📖 "Attentive listening is for several reasons much more wide-spread today than it was, say, fifty years ago. There is a more general understanding of the fact that great music is not something that has come into being, as it were by magic, through an intermediary known as a composer, but that it is the careful, thoughtful, and largely deliberate creation of men whose aptitude, inclination, studies and labour have all been concentrated on the creation of something which did not exist before. This realisation has led to an increase in the number of listeners who have found pleasure in doing justice to the creators of these new things by giving their work the close attention which it deserves."
Cedric Thorpe Davie Musical Structure and Design (1953)

Books On Classical Music in General

Read and learn about classical music to enhance the presence of music in your life and achieve a deeper understanding of the matter. Music is one of the oldest disciplines and has been written about for thousands of years. This list is a small compilation of modern books but you could go back to as far as Pythagoras to read about the beginnings of musical meanings and then read your way through the ages. Please get in touch if you would like to ask for more specific advice on literature.

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On The Language Of Music

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