Chapter 18

Ten Valuable Music Resources

In This Chapter

Poking around some helpful websites

Checking out other music books

Music theory is about more than just learning how to read notes and keep a steady beat — it’s also about exploring the relationship between man and music, discovering why some things sound really cool and others sound really bad, and finding new ways to communicate with the language of music. This chapter gives you a taste of just a few websites and books to get you started down the path of total music theory immersion. After you get started, you may never come back.

Dolmetsch Online

The Dolmetsch site (www.dolmetsch.com) — named after performer, composer, and music historian Arnold Dolmetsch — is a detailed music theory, instruction, and history site. Just about every musical term and concept you can think of is defined and discussed on this site. Plus you can also find classical composers’ biographies and a rundown of the evolution of classical music. On the site, you can read essays, both speculative and factual, on the effect the invention of the piano and the guitar has had on music theory. You also can review chord charts for guitars, fingering charts for woodwinds, and a breakdown of the evolution of music notation from the ancient Greeks to the present.

If you’re a visual or auditory learner, you’re in luck. The site has dozens of music and video files to go along with the notation charts (the files are playable with a free download of the browser plug-in Scorch). It’s not exactly like having a music teacher at your desk, but it does work well as a supplement to the novice-to-intermediate musician trying to learn more about an instrument.

Open Directory Project

If there’s a Heaven specially made for die-hard music theorists, the Open Directory Project Music Theory site (www.dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Theory) is a glimpse of it. The Open Directory Project Music Theory site, or ODP, is a catalog of editor-monitored links about every subject imaginable.

The ODP links range from basic music tutorial sites to incredibly wild and speculative sites concerning the effect of music on the brain and the very origins of music itself. You can peruse discussion groups full of vigorous arguments on why musicians and composers should toss out the five-lined music staff and rework music notation to fit a six-lined staff instead. You can also visit sites dedicated to composers’ takes on atonal tunings and samples of some of their compositions. Because it’s a catalog of music theory-related links, the list changes on a fairly regular basis. In fact, it’s worth dropping by every few weeks just to see what new sites have joined the list.

ClassicalWorks.com

The ClassicalWorks.com site (www.classicalworks.com) has an excellent global history of music in timetable form, spanning nearly 4,000 years of music history (click the History of Music link to view this info). The entries are pretty short and sweet, but all the dates, events, and names you need are right there on one site. A fair amount of historic artwork accompanies specific groups of entries as well. For example, you can see pictures of Gregorian chants drawn on illuminated manuscripts and excerpts from Egyptian murals commemorating some of the oldest known musical ensembles. The site’s Google search engine allows you to easily find an event or name you specifically need to look up.

Smithsonian Folkways Series

The Smithsonian Folkways music series (www.folkways.si.edu) is an amazing project run by the Smithsonian Institute. Folkways Recordings was founded in 1948 in New York City by Moses Asch and Marian Distler, who sought to record and document the entire world of sound. During the 40 years that Asch owned the label, Folkways’ tiny staff released 2,168 albums, which included traditional, ethnic, and contemporary music from around the world; poetry, spoken word, and instructional recordings in numerous languages; and documentary recordings of individuals, communities, current events, and natural sounds. After Asch’s death in 1987, the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., acquired Folkways Recordings.

As a condition of the acquisition, the Smithsonian agreed that virtually all of Asch’s 2,168 titles would remain in print forever. Whether the Smithsonian sells 8,000 copies each year or only one copy every five years, every Folkways title ever released will forever remain available for purchase. Folkways has also released 300 new titles since the Smithsonian’s acquisition of the label, adding rock, hip-hop, and electronic music recordings. Considering how much music and culture have changed all over the world in the past 60 years, this amazing collection has more significance today than ever.

The Rough Guide to Classical Music

The Rough Guide to Classical Music, edited by Joe Staines and Jonathan Buckley (Rough Guides/Penguin), is a wonderful guide to classical music. Not only does it profile more than 160 classical composers with full biographical sketches, but it also provides coherent and believable reviews of the best (and worst) recordings of those composers’ works. Each entry discusses the types of music the composer delved into, notes where his influence is most felt in later composers’ works, and explains the political pressures that made the composer write the types of music that he did.

This book is fun to read straight through and to jump around in as a reference. It’s an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to learn more about classical music.

The Virgin Directory of World Music

The Virgin Directory of World Music by Philip Sweeney (Owl Books/Henry Holt & Company) is a well-organized summary of traditional music from around the globe. It’s divided into regions of the world: Africa (North, West, Central, South, and East), Europe (North, South, and East), the Middle East and India, and so on. Each division is then broken down into the states and countries of those regions, with descriptions of their traditional music. Each division even has detailed mention of notable performers who have recorded and released albums of the music of their region, from South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Jamaica’s The Jolly Boys.

American Mavericks

American Mavericks, edited by Susan Key and Larry Roethe (University of California Press), is gorgeous enough to be a coffee table book. If you’re as obsessed with music as we are and you have a coffee table, you really should pick up a copy. It’s loaded with fantastic photographs of unique American composers and their equally unique choices of instruments. It features in-depth profiles of composers as varied and dissimilar as John Cage, Aaron Copland, Steve Mackey, and Carl Ruggles. The book also comes with a CD containing 18 tracks of music — one for every composer — many from albums that are just about impossible to find in your local record store.

Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said (Pantheon Books) is a collection of conversation transcripts between Daniel Barenboim, Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, and Edward W. Said, literary critic, political analyst, and all-over expert on Middle Eastern culture.

In these conversations, Barenboim and Said discuss the effect of music on global and national politics (and vice versa) in incredibly minute detail, from the difficulties of conducting Wagner in post-Hitler Germany to the comparisons between Jane Austen and Verdi. The book is full of the type of really brilliant and deep conversations musicians and music lovers dream about having with their peers.

The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart

The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart by Madeline Bruser (Bell Tower/Crown Books) isn’t your average music book. This book’s strength is that it covers something that’s not usually talked about in music instruction books: training your body to learn how to play music.

It’s really not enough to know how to read notes and tap out a rhythm. Learning to endure the many hours of training necessary to truly master an instrument is also important. The book covers all sorts of info related to this topic. It includes breathing exercises to help you relax before practicing, ergonomically correct hand and body positions for playing instruments for an extended period of time, and a variety of stretching exercises for working out all the kinks and knots that form during practice.

The Guitar Chord Bible

The great thing about playing the guitar is that you can put the same chord together in so many different ways. The Guitar Chord Bible, by Phil Capone (Chartwell Books, Inc.), shows you not only all the chords you can find on the neck of a guitar, but at least three different ways you can play each one. The book is further broken up into musical styles, so if you want to know specifically what chords are popularly used in rock, blues, soul, and funk, you can look those sections up for even quicker reference.