[NewMusic] Essential texts?

[Phillip Greenlief]

-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Joseph Zitt

Subject: [NewMusic] Essential texts?

What would you list among the important/essential texts relating to this

music? A couple that pop to mind for me are the "Arcana" anthology 
edited by John Zorn and Cage's "Silence".

PG:
I was afraid I'd be called on the carpet for this statement. The truth
is, and I felt this before Matt D's response: No one should be able to
tell you what great music is. You should know it for yourself. No one
should tell you what to read or what to listen to, that should come as a
result of your own personal search. The "uniqueness" of your own search
in music is possibly what could make your music unique as a result. The
problem I have with the institutionalization of jazz is precisely this:
that now we have a lot of "educated" jazz players that all sound the
same. I'd hate to see that happen to Improvised Music, or to other forms
of "new" music.

Regardless of intent, here are 25 books that have been valuable to my
development as a musician. The list does not only consider "new" or
improvised music. I would have included Zitt's titles in my list, but
since he already suggested them, I'll leave them out. I would add all of
Cage's writings, not just "Silence", (a lovely "essential" text indeed).
This list is not "complete" by any stretch of the imagination. I think I
am including two or three that Weasel has offered as well...

BTW: We should all be tossing our own "lists" into this discussion -
that would make it much better, right? Come on y'all, throw down
already! And thanks for your list, WW!

1) All the scores in my library: everything from complete Beethoven
symphonies, String Quartets and Piano music with the exception of the
7th Symphony to Haydn, Mozart, Berlioz, J.S. Bach, Messiaen, Berg,
Webern, Bartok, Schoenberg, Oliveros, Xennakis, Stravinsky, Reich,
Gubaidulina, Cage, Feldman, etc.)

2) Genesis of a Music: Harry Partch

3) Testimony - Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (think you've got it hard?
Try being a composer in an era when you could simply disappear if Stalin
didn't like what you wrote)

4) Morning Glory - Biography of Mary Lou Williams

5) Anthony Braxton - Tri-Axium Writings

6) Olivier Messiaen - Music of Time
 
7) Karlheinz Stockhausen - Critical Writings/Essays

8) Anything that George Lewis has written that I have been lucky enough
to get my hands on

9) Schoenberg - any of his books: Style and Idea, Harmonielehre,
Collected Letters, Models for Counterpoint, etc.

10) Ascension - John Coltrane and his Quest 

11) Paul Hindemith - Elementary Training for Musicians

12) Persichetti - 20th Century Harmony

13) Music of the Whole Earth - excellent ethnomusicology text

14) Thesaurus of Scales and Patterns - Nicolas Slominsky

15) Forces in Motion - Graham Locke - on Braxton

16) Findings - Steve Lacy

17) Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns - Yusef Lateef
 
18) Give My Regards to Eighth Street - collected writing of Morton
Feldman
 
19) Poetics of Music in Six Lessons - Igor Stravinsky
 
20) New Harvard Dictionary of Music (sometimes you need a reference)

21) Space is the Place - Graham Locke - on Sun Ra

22) Songs of the Unsung - The Musical and Social Journey of Horace
Tapscott
 
23) Improvisation - Derek Bailey

24) Roland Barthes - Image, Music, Text
 
25) The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs (I learned more about
understanding form from reading this novel than I have from any other
text on music - it should be considered a textbook on
post-structuralism).

26) I'm a huge sucker for biographies, or autobiographies. I have also
enjoyed biographic texts on: Glenn Gould, Alban Berg, Mozart, Billie
Holliday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Franz Joseph
Haydn, Dufay, di Lasso, Monteverdi, Aaron Copeland, Ned Rorem, Sonny
Rollins, Billy Strayhorn, Igor Stravinsky, Proust, Burroughs, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Crazy Horse, Chief
Joseph, Wilma Mankiller, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Nikolai Gogol, William S. Burroughs, Marie de
France, etc.