Best books/papers/articles on music pls. Tired of being a philistine

Best books/papers/articles on music pls. Tired of being a philistine.

Charles Rosen is essential reading.
Freedom and the Arts, the Classical Style, and the Romantic Generation should get you started.

This bloke is right. For 20th c. stuff, Alex Ross's book is a great introduction and is very readable.

Found the first half of that very interesting, second half a little less. 33 1/3 has good discussions of single albums though some can be quite poor.

Lift your skinny fists and give me more replies

Don’t have any recs but wanted to pay respect to the Byrne

what about the talking heads is so reddit?

If one of the first things that pops into your head when you think of the Talking Heads is "reddit" then you're likely not into music.

>the Talking Heads
>the

Just subscribe to The Wire and become a 60 year old retired British patrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music throughout history and 20th century avant-garde jazz.

Jazz is degenerate garbage

I have a degree in music. There is no viable alternative to reading primary sources. Many, many composers were critics as well. Read the critiques of Debussy and Schumann. Read the letters of Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Read the original biographies or autobiographies if you can. The post-modern distance acquired by contemporary writers completely obscures what their subjects actually did and thought. Alex Ross writes decently entertaining stuff. But the majority of modern commentaries completely neglect the world surrounding the composer and just talk about the composer himself, whereas anything from that time will be inextricably linked to the world you want to learn about. Debussy's concert reviews will mention dozens of composers you've never heard of. Reading Chopin's letters will make the random names of his dedicatees into actual stories.

any book about music that doesn't have this in it is not worth reading

Good thing they cover lots of classical in here for you gramps. Oh dearie, he's gone on a tantrum again. Radio 3 has played a Coltrane tune.

Any of Adorno's writings on the subject
Wagner's essays
Larkin's Jazz reviews

Adorno was a hack and his taste in music was objectively shit.

>j*zz n*gger

get out of here degenerate filth
sickening "music"

Jizz Nagger

The Wire is cultural marxism

Or you could write for the Wire like that cuck David Keenan.

music from the mid-20th c. onwards is cultural marxism

His article about New Weird America was pretty good. There's still a neat psychedelic folk/drone/American Primitive scene here.

I'm from California and agree about the scene being lively; but imo his interviews are cringy and Ive been around him and his wife enough to know that.. unironically he is cuckold

Simon Reynold's books on retromania and post-punk are deece.

...

This, and Alex Ross as other anons have mentioned. Get to it

Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks

been wondering about this one

>circlejerks Beethoven, Schoenberg and Mahler
His taste seems pretty good