Browse By Course

• Composer Biographies & Studies
• Instrumental Music
• Jazz, Pop & Rock
• Music Appreciation
• Music Education
• Music History & Musicology
• Music Theory
• Vocal & Choral Music
• World Music & Ethnomusicology

Composer Biographies & Studies

1. Louis Armstrong's New Orleans

   Thomas Brothers

   "The best book ever produced about Louis Armstrong by anyone other than the man himself."—Terry Teachout, CommentaryMore

2. Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life

   Robert Spaethling

   "A wonderful collection that gives Mozart a voice as a son, husband, brother and friend." —New York Times Book ReviewMore

3. Mozart: The Early Years, 1756–1781

   Stanley Sadie

   The first comprehensive life and works of the composer in over sixty years, by a leading Mozart specialist.More

4. Beethoven: The Music and the Life

   Lewis Lockwood

   An authoritative work offering a fresh look at Beethoven’s life, career, and milieu. “Magisterial” —New York Review of Books.More

5. New Worlds of Dvoŕák: Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life

   Michael Beckerman

   CD-ROM included

   A forceful reinterpretation of the composer's personality and work.More

6. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician

   Christoph Wolff

   Finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. A landmark biography of Bach on the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, written by the leading Bach scholar of our age.More

7. Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time

   Nicolas Slonimsky

   "A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."—From the new foreword by Peter Schickele.More

8. The New Bach Reader

   Hans T. David, Arthur Mendel, Christoph Wolff

   Revised and enlarged

   "Just reading these documents brings this great composer to life in a most exciting and vivid way. I love this book!" —Yo-Yo MaMore

9. The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes Brahms

   Leon Botstein

   The 1997 centennial of Brahms's death has intensified interest among concertgoers and music lovers in the composer's prodigious body of work.More

10. Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings

    Charles Ives

    Ives's second piano sonata, Concord, Mass., 1845, stands among the masterpieces of American music.More

11. An Autobiography

    Igor Stravinsky

    While many hundred thousands of pages have been written about Stravinsky, in this book—the composer's first—we hear from the man himself.
    More

12. Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius

    Peter Ostwald

    "[Glenn Gould] marks a major advance in our understanding of one of the 20th century's most significant performing artists.... Ostwald is as engrossing a writer as any who has tried his hand at biography."—Ted Libbey, Washington Post Book WorldMore

13. Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music

    Leonie Rosenstiel

    A detailed, authoritative portrait of a commanding figure in twentieth-century music.More

14. Charles Ives: A Life with Music

    Jan Swafford

    An illuminating portrait of a man whose innovative works profoundly influenced the course of twentieth-century American classical music.More

15. The New Grove Bach Family

    Ellwood S. Derr, Walter Emery, Eugene Helm, Et Al.