September is Classical Music Month. We have prepared a list of books for you to read, as well as a film to watch. In addition, you can listen to over twenty thousand classical music recordings from Hoopla, read ebooks, emagazines and listen to eaudiobooks. Please click the links below and enjoy.
The Classical Music Book by Dorling Kindersley, Inc.
Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Classic Music in this overview guide to the subject, great for novices looking to find out more and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Classical Music Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in.
A Sound Mind : How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (And Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History) by Paul Morley
A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern music and the love note of a fan, A sound mind rejects the idea that classical music is fusty and old. Instead, this book reveals it to be the most exciting genre in music, its whole sound and history based on the search for “new,” which is so lacking (according to Morley) in modern rock music. This is a memoir of Morley’s shifting musical tastes, but it’s also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre’s rich and often deviant past, and hopefully, future.
Mozart in the Jungle : Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall
In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Gelsey Kirkland’s Dancing on My Grave, Mozart in the Jungle delves into the lives of the musicians and conductors who inhabit the insular world of classical music. In a book that inspired the Amazon Original series starring Gael García Bernal and Malcolm McDowell, oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician—from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, where musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city.
Tár [videorecording (DVD)]
Set in the international world of classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tr̀, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra.
Classical Music : The Listener’s Companion
Ranging from Gregorian chant to Philip Glass, this well-balanced guide to historical and contemporary classical music examines major works by 500 composers worldwide. It focuses on exemplary recordings of symphonies, operas, concertos, choral pieces, chamber music, piano pieces and other works performed by an international spectrum of premier conductors, musicians and vocalists. Incisive, often anecdotal critiques define the distinctive style and interpretation of thousands of selected works and recordings.
Dangerous Melodies : Classical Music in America From the Great War Through the Cold War by Jonathan Rosenberg
A Juilliard-trained musician and professor of history explores the fascinating entanglement of classical music with American foreign relations. Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation’s culture and politics.
The Classical Music Experience : Discover the Music of the World’s Greatest Composers by Julius H Jacobson
A history of classical music discusses the work of forty-two of the world’s most celebrated composers, from Giovanni da Palestrina to Leonard Bernstein.
Chopin Piano Music : 52 Intermediate to Advanced Pieces by Frédéric Chopin
52 newly-engraved intermediate to advanced piano pieces by Chopin printed on eye-pleasing cream-colored paper. Includes: 12 Preludes, 16 Mazurkas, 9 Nocturnes, 5 Polonaises, 9 Waltzes, and the Fantaisie-Impromptu. 228 pages.
Ten Masterpieces of Music by Harvey Sachs
Some pieces of music survive; most fall into oblivion. What gives the ten masterpieces selected for this book their extraordinary vitality? In this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes readers into the heart of ten great works of classical music–works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings.
Classical Music in America : A History of Its Rise and Fall by Joseph Horowitz
An opinionated, stimulating account of how classical music failed to establish fruitful roots in America,” Classical Music in America chronicles “a cultural attitude that has produced many fine artists and striking moments-but no institutional or intellectual support to sustain them” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “An admirable, scholarly volume” (Times Literary Supplement).
Harmony Illustrated Encyclopedia of Classical Music : An Essential Guide to the World’s Finest Music
Relates the history and development of the orchestra and opera, with profiles of outstanding conductors, composers and singers, and includes a look at chamber music and a survey of the instruments used.
Chasing Chopin : A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
The Frédéric Chopin Annik LaFarge presents here is not the melancholy, sickly, romantic figure so often portrayed. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language, an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher, a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution and exile.
Beethoven : A Life by Jan Caeyers
This new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven offers connoisseurs and newcomers alike an unparalleled story of the composer’s life and works, written by a renowned conductor and scholar of Beethoven’s music. With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, Jan Caeyers expertly weaves together a deeply human and complex picture of Beethoven-his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the ‘immortal beloved,’ and the dramatic tale of his deafness.
Mozart : The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford
At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto.
Classical Music to Listen To From Hoopla
—Hongmei, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian