The Best Books on Classical Music

Books as yet unmentioned: Michael Steinberg's three volumes of collected concert program notes. Any of the five volumes of music criticism Andrew Porter wrote in The New Yorker in the '70s-'80s. Donald Francis Tovey's "Essays in Musical Anaysis." Probably the best one-volume biography of Beethoven is Lewis Lockwood's. "The Composer's Advocate" is Erich Leinsdorf's fascinating if acerbic treatise about the kinds of things a conductor should think about. If you already know a lot about music, Charles Rosen's works are essential.

I see that Roger Scrutons books The Aesthetics of Music (1997) and Understanding Music (2009) have not been mentioned yet, so let me add these to the list of reccomendations. These two books provide an interesting and very accesible (though not flawless; Scrutons notion of music as a purely acousmatic phenomenon seems especially misguided to me) introduction to the philosophy of music.

One of the most interesting (though quite heady) books on the question of sacred music that I've read in a while was Sander van Maas' The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough to the Beyond (2009):

"We all associate music with religious feeling (at least, being rather fond of hymns, I do). But what does this mean? Can one really associate music with divinity without risking idolatry? This book brings intense philosophical and theological argumentation to bear on this question, interrogating the work of one of the contemporary composers who most specifically claims a religious dimension for his music.

Present-day music studies conspicuously evade the question of religion in contemporary music. Although many composers address the issue in their work, as yet there have been few attempts to think through the structure of religious music as we hear it. On the basis of a careful analysis of Olivier Messiaen's work, this book argues for a renewal of our thinking about religious music.

Addressing his notion of a hyper-religiousmusic of sounds and colors, it aims to show that Messiaen has broken new ground. His reinvention of religious music makes us again aware of the fact that religious music, if taken in its proper radical sense, belongs to the foremost of musical adventures.The work of Olivier Messiaen is well known for its inclusion of religious themes and gestures. These alone, however, do not seem enough to account for the religious status of the work. Arguing for a breakthrough toward the beyond on the basis of the synaesthetic experience of music, Messiaen invites a confrontation with contemporary theologians and post-secular thinkers. How to account for a religious breakthrough that is produced by a work of art?

Starting from an analysis of his 1960s oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jsus-Christ, this book arranges a moderated dialogue between Messiaen and the music theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the phenomenology of revelation of Jean-Luc Marion, the rethinking of religion and technics in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, and the Augustinian ruminations of Sren Kierkegaard and Jean-Franois Lyotard. Ultimately, this confrontation underscores the challenging yet deeply affirmative nature of Messiaen's music."

Also recommended is Kiene Brillenburg Wurth's Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (2009). This is a very thourough and interesting exploration of the notion of the Sublime and the various guises in which it apears throughout musical history:

"Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime feeling, Wurth shows how, from the mid eighteenth century onward, sublime feeling is, instead, constantly rearticulated in a complex interaction with musicality. 

Wurth takes as her point of departure Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-François Lyotard's aesthetic writings of the 1980s and 1990s. Kant framed the sublime narratively as an epic of self-transcendence. By contrast, Lyotard sought to substitute open immanence for Kantian transcendence, yet he failed to deconstruct the Kantian epic. The book performs this deconstruction by juxtaposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the infinite, Sehnsucht, the divided self, and unconscious drives with contemporary readings of instrumental music. 

Critically assessing Edmund Burke, James Usher, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this book re-presents the sublime as a feeling that defers resolution and hangs suspended between pain and pleasure. Musically Sublime rewrites the mathematical sublime as différance, while it redresses the dynamical sublime as trauma: unending, undetermined, unresolved.

Whereas most musicological studies in this area have focused on traces of the Kantian sublime in Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, this book calls on the nineteenth-century theorist Arthur Seidl to analyze the sublime of, rather than in, music. It does so by invoking Seidl's concept of formwidrigkeit ("form-contrariness") in juxtaposition with Romantic piano music, (post)modernist musical minimalisms, and Lyotard's postmodern sublime. It presents a sublime of matter, rather than form-performative rather than representational. In doing so, Musically Sublime shows that the binary distinction Lyotard posits between the postmodern and romantic sublime is finally untenable. "

I have it somewhere. I remember it as being fairly enjoyable, though nothing in it was particularly unexpected for me since I had previously read Michael Kennedy's excellent biography of Boult. It is a collection of miscellaneous short articles mostly a few pages long, which are his opinions of various musical things, or appreciations of people like Elgar or Nikisch. 

Ted  

@TedR, Thank you very much for your input.

@Brumas, I dare not speak the dreaded name! His writings used to be on MusicWeb, but were eventually removed. He calls himself a "Dr."... Can you guess now?