Baroque Music (3rd edition) - C.Palisca - 1990

The problem with teaching a survey course that introduces a topic a broad and deep as the Baroque era of music (roughly 1600 - 1740) is that there is never enough time to do more than touch on the most important points. If you dive deeply into one area, say, the concerto, that's it. You are done for the term and maybe more. This text does a good job in supporting such a course. It allows the student to get a quick overview and use all those nice new terms they are learning. It is not comprehensive; no single volume book could be.There are many good music examples and the writing is clear and to the point. A professor using this text will likely provide his or her own supplementary material and focus in on certain areas more than another. Some chapters are likely to be assigned reading, but not discussed much in class.

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) - R.Monelle - 2006

The Musical Topic is an invaluable study that discusses three topics prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study for each musical topic. He carefully considers each musical topic's origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning and how each topic is in itself its own expressive figure.
Musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic, or rhythmic formulae -- sometimes reflect whole social and cultural worlds, and may be related to social history and to the other arts, especially literature. After a general introduction in which the theory of topics is formalized and rationalized, three of these are studied in depth. The topic of the hunt is shown to be only obliquely related to the hunting of the 17th to 19th centuries, but connected to older ideas of hunting. The military topic, similarly, is ambiguously related to the military life of the period, though indicative of a heroic myth of soldiering. The pastoral topic is described in relation to the long cultural tradition of the pastoral. Each topic is illustrated from the music of all periods.

Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance - Cambridge - 2002

Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this challenging study, John Butt sums up recent debates on the nature of the early music movement, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He develops the critical views of both supporters and detractors, claiming ultimately that it has more intellectual and artistic potential than its detractors may have assumed.

The Concerto - TTC Video & Audio lectures (Professor Robert Greenberg)

      In this series of 24, 45-minute lectures, Professor Robert Greenberg gives you a guided tour of the concerto from its conception as a child of Renaissance ideals, through its maturation in the Classical age, its metamorphosis in the Romantic era, and its radical transformation in the 20th century. The course closes with a look into the future at concerto composers who are now in mid-career and poised to carry this vibrant musical tradition well into the 21st century.
      These lectures are musically rich, including selections from nearly 100 concerti representing more than 60 composers—from Gabrieli to Gershwin, from Schumann to Shostakovich.
      Along with the bedrock of the repertoire, represented by Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Rachmaninoff, Bartok, and many others, you will be introduced to superb concerti by Hummel, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Moszkowski, Paderewski, Ginastera, and other less-familiar masters.

Silvio Scionti: Remembering a Master Pianist and Teacher - J.Guerry - 1991

"Scionti’s arrival at the School of Music, University of North Texas in the early ’40s . . . ushered in . . . a golden age . . . in the musical life in the area . . . By the late ’40s his students were beginning to rival those of the Juillard School’s Rosina Lhevinne in the number of prizes taken on a national level, and by the early 1950s they were competing successfully in the international arena . . . A handsomely produced biography covering the life and career of the teacher."—Dallas Morning News
         Silvio Scionti was a zestful, colorful figure, as well as a master pianist and teacher. Stories about him, particularly about his more than ten-year career at the University of NorthTexas, are legion, and author Jack Guerry—a former Scionti student—has collected many of them in this remembrance and biography.
Scionti firmly established his reputation as a compelling pianist, whose playing has been described as powerful, vital, and full of eloquence, during his twenty-six years at the American Conservatory in Chicago. Known especially throughout the United States and Europe for his duo-piano playing, Scionti’s career flourished when he married Texan Isabel Laughlin, and the ‘irreproachable and irrepressible Sciontis' impressed critics wherever they played.
         Lured to North Texas in 1942, the Sciontis were instrumental in the growth of the School of Music to the stature it still claims today. Scionti’s "buoyant spirit," enthusiasm, talent, and reputation brought students to Denton from around the country. Many members of Scionti’s "student family"—themselves now professionals and teachers—have contributed their recollections to this volume including tales of Scionti’s proverbial Italian spaghetti dinners, exhausting hikes up Mount Etna, and high-speed sight-seeing along Italian mountain lanes with Scionti at the wheel of his "magnificent red Buick."
          The "indefatigable" Scionti never stopped: When he was seventy and near the end of his North Texas career, he organized a ten-day tour of five states for his eight-piano emsemble—taking the eight pianos along and assembling them at each of the thirteen cities visited. Even through his "retirement" years, Scionti still was busy teaching and opening professional doors for students who continued to seek him out.

French pianism. A historical perspective - C.Timbrell - 1999

The undisputed preeminence of Paris as a center of the piano world dates from the early 19th century, and the rigorous professors of the Paris Conservatoire transmitted the characteristic French piano style faithfully to each new generation for some 150 years. First published to critical acclaim in 1992, this landmark study, now considerably expanded and revised, surveys the historical development, performance practices and pedagogical philosophies of this vital school.

Oxford History of Western Music (Five-Volumes Set) - R.Taruskin - 2009

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin. Now in paperback, the set has been reconstructed to be available for the first time as individual books, each one taking on a critical time period in the history of western music. All five books are also being offered in a shrink wrapped set for a discounted price. Each book in this magnificent set illuminates - through a representative sampling of masterworks - those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. The five titles cover Western music from its earliest days to the sixteenth century, the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and the late twentieth century. Taking a critical perspective, Taruskin sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. He combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. He also describes how the context of each stylistic period - key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events - influenced and directed compositional choices. Moreover, the five books are filled with helpful illustrations that enhance the historical context of musical composition, as well as musical examples, black-and-white pictures throughout, suggestions for further reading, and indexes. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, these books will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse tradition.