Musician’s Bookshelf December 2022

Leonard Slatkin offers personal insights and thoughts about solving the current dilemmas of classical music. As classical music struggles to be relevant today, Slatkin offers solutions and a path forward.

Topics include the impacts of the COVID-19 era, diminishing audiences, the absence of classical music education in the public school system, technology as a live experience replacement, and more. Slatkin proposes that the time for changes in the world of classical music is today.

Author Michael Spitzer shows how music has shaped the history of the human species. From the birth of rhythm to the conception of melody, Homo sapiens created this wonderful thing called music.

Exploring music from Bach to BTS and back, the musicologist Spitzer looks at how music shapes our lives, world history, impact on living organisms, and extensions to the world of artificial intelligence. This book helps the reader understand how music is central to human cognition and even biology.

In a nutshell, this book makes the case that music is the most important thing ever done by humans.

The piano is an amazingly versatile instrument that permits music creation ranging from subtle to complex. It has brought collaborators together over two hundreds years in a variety of musical genres.

In this book, Susan Tomes charts the development of the instrument through the present day. Journey through 100 piano pieces spanning solo works, chamber music, concertos, and jazz. Highlighted composers range from J.S. Bach to Philip Glass. Susan also pays homage to female composers and pianists, including Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach.

In this book, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from the 1700s to the present day. Referencing his editorial work with the Village Voice music section, Weisbard connects American music writing from various source materials spanning memoirs, biographies, magazine essays, and more.

This book tells an alternative history of American music, and the author demonstrates how enduring works pursue questions that remain relevant over time and genres.