# Books, Authors or Critics to make composers and their music come alive?



## blakeklondike (Oct 28, 2020)

I am trying to find books, critics, or authors that people particularly like who are able to bring composers and their music to life for an educated but new listener. Works about the composers, periods, Styles, individual pieces, history, and so forth would all be great. Thanks!


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Answers to this one are bound to be personal favourites.
I found this biography of Ravel to be particularly engaging. Might be worth exploring other books in the same series?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

*Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise*









Alex Ross is one of the best for "bringing composers alive" - although his book is only about the music and composers of the 20th century, it is very well written and he will introduce you to a lot of good music.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

This one by Nicolas Slonimsky is unmissable:


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

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## Rmathuln (Mar 21, 2018)

Two J. S Bach favorites


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## Sondersdorf (Aug 5, 2020)

As I posted on another thread, I recently discovered a series of exploratory lectures on the Life and Works of several composers done by Jeremy Siepmann in the early 2000s. The content and production are excellent. There are plenty of full movement examples that track with the biographical and developmental information presented. I found them on Spotify.


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

I can't recommend Susan McClary, particularly "Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal" and "Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music," highly enough. She combines a rigorous grounding in musicological analysis with an embrace of 'new critical' methodologies that take seriously things like social context and extramusical meaning-making, so readers are left with not only a much stronger sense of how the music is working on a purely musical level but also with all kinds of other really compelling connections drawn. It does help, though, that the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque is among my favorite periods in Western music history...


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Michael Steinberg's three books of program notes for the BSO, NYPO, Minn. orch., and SF Symphony are well written, interesting (although technical) about the pieces, but also contain good stuff about the composers. Published by Oxford U. Press.


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

Rmathuln said:


> Two J. S Bach favorites


Gardiner's book is (IMO of course) a little like his performances of Bach - arrogant, brash, pedantic, but quite entertaining and colorful. He has a marvelous, flamboyant way with words and he's not afraid to hold his opinions up as truth, but he's sure got some interesting ones. He clearly has a passion for the composer and I like the amount of time he spends on the cantatas, the great masterworks of Bach's output and pinnacles of Western music which are so often inexplicably ignored.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Julian Shuckburgh's _Harmony and Discord: The Real Life of Johann Sebastian Bach_


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## Haydn70 (Jan 8, 2017)

Excellent bios of two great composers. The Lockwood is a bit technical at times.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

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## Open Book (Aug 14, 2018)

MarkW said:


> Michael Steinberg's three books of program notes for the BSO, NYPO, Minn. orch., and SF Symphony are well written, interesting (although technical) about the pieces, but also contain good stuff about the composers. Published by Oxford U. Press.


I greatly enjoyed Steinberg's program notes for BSO concerts when I attended in the 70's. I looked on Amazon and didn't see any books that obviously consisted of collected program notes, only listening guides. Do you have any further information on those?


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## Bluecrab (Jun 24, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> *Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise*
> 
> View attachment 150027
> 
> ...


I couldn't agree more. He's a brilliant writer. I'm about to finish this book now.


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