(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best music composition books

The best way to learn Max is kind of a tricky subject and I'm sure the other people on here would be able to suggest some more ways, but here are a few that have helped me out:

1. Read the built-in tutorials. They're listed under the Help section as Max tutorials, MSP tutorials, and Jitter tutorials. In case you don't know, Max deals with data and was primarily designed to handle interactions with MIDI. It's grown to encompass more data structures, but MIDI is where it really shines. I'd recommend doing this one first to get a feel for what Max is all about. MSP is audio rate processing and the kind of thing that you're doing now. Jitter is all about matrix operations (linear algebra if you have any experience with that) and is primarily used for processing video and images, though there's a lot of really awesome stuff that you can do with audio from Jitter.
   
2. Watch some of the Delicious tutorials on YouTube. Some of them might be more advanced, but they're really helpful and he teaches you how to make some really awesome stuff. From what I know of the guy that makes them, he has some really impressive credentials.
   
3. Get ideas for projects and hack them together. One of the more fun things about Max is that there are many ways to solve the same problem. Having the ability to go from idea to prototype to working implementation is really useful when you start using Max in a professional (whatever that word means in this context) setting. The ideas can be something like a simple synthesizer, a looping pedal, or an audio effect. Something a friend of mine and I used to do was to pick an audio pluggin that we liked and try to replicate it in Max.
   
4. Pick a topic to focus on and do a few projects in that vein. There are so many different things that you can do with Max that it's worthwhile to get really good at a particular topic. You might want to only build synths for a while. Or, you might be more of an effect guy/girl. Max will do both really well and a bunch of other things too.
   
5. Solve programming puzzles in Max. Remembering that Max is a programming language, try and solve some common programming puzzles that people normally use to learn other programming languages. A quick google search should reveal quite a few of them, but a few more simple ones would be something like getting the Nth Fibonnacci number or reversing a string. Not all of these exercises would be of benefit, but doing a few will really give you a sense of how data flows in Max and what it does well versus what it does badly. For instance, passing numbers around in Max is really easy while dealing with strings can be a real hassle at first.
   
6. This one isn't Max specific, but if you don't already have it, get a grasp on the basic concepts of electronic music and digital signal processing (at least as it relates to audio). Learn about the different forms of audio synthesis such as additive, subtractive, and granular. Learn how sound is represented in the computer. Learn about the basics of filters and what they do to sound. Learn how to implement common audio effects using basic DSP building blocks such as filters and delays. Getting a firm grounding in this kind of stuff will keep you from being what a I refer to as a "knob-twittler electronic musician" or someone who just blindly twists knobs on a synth until something sounds good. Note that there's nothing wrong with this approach and there are many good musicians who make beautiful art with it. But, as Morton Subotnick is fond of pointing out, this approach leaves you completely at the mercy of the people who build the tools that you are using. Max is about a different paradigm, one in which you build your own tools.
   
   Here are a few books that have helped me out in the past:
   
   

• Composing Interactive Music by Todd Winkler
  
  
• Max/MSP/Jitter for Music by VJ Manzo
  
  
• Introduction to Digital Signal Processing by Tae Hong Park This one's my favorite book on the basic concepts in DSP
  
  

A few items you might consider reading but honestly, picking up one good general introduction to post-tonal music would be more than enough to get you started. These links are just to get you started on ypur hunt; you can find many of these for waaaay cheaper than the listed price. And there's always libraries.

Strauss's Introduction to Post-Tonal Music Please choose this text first, it's just divine. Like seriously, if you read nothing else on this list or in this post/thread, please read this book. Please!

Persichetti's 20th Century Harmony

Kostka's Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music

An old lecture(?) on serial materials by Fields

Schoenberg's serial Odyssey by Haimo

Krenek's treatise on counterpoint

Serial Composition and Atonality by Perle

And the various essays and articles by Babbit.

As for how exactly to get started. I would pick up the Strauss book and read about both pitch-class set theory (really important!) and serialism. It will give you a very nice overview of the techniques in question. Honestly, it's some of the easiest music theory I've ever learned so this step shouldn't take long.

Realize that no two serial composers approached serialsim the same way. Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Boulez, Babbit, Stockhausen, Nono, Seeger, Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Krenek, Wuorinen, and Lutyens all approach it differently with equally different results.

I say this because you absolutely must listen to these various styles in action. Your likes and dislikes here, combined with theoretical knowledge will help you decide how you want to approach 12-tone composition. The people over at r/classicalresources have made spotify playlists for 20th century music or you might just work your way through listening to the piece from this wiki list. >!Okay I lied, you should listen to this advice as well!<

From there, I would recommend, if you can, find journal articles or dissertations on your favorite pieces/composers so you can really dig into analyzing them, so to speak. Not everyone's a theory wonk though so I would understand if you don't deep dive anytime soon :p

And the entire time you're doing that, write some etudes. Experiment with the various serial techniques like derived rows, combinatoriality, partitioning, multi-dimensional set presentations, set multiplication, rotations, reordering, multiple independent rows, etc.

But whatever else you do, please feel free to ask more questions here. The more specific, obviously, the better able we'll be to help you (There's genuinely nothing I love more than a well-honed question!) This was a very quick and dirty reply and I'm positive one of our Benefic Legend-Keepers will have something to add but I do hope it at least gets you started.

Have fun serailizing and take care! I'd love to see and hear what you come up with!

>!Maybe one of these days, I'll work up the gumption to start a thread about tone row design and application. Maybe.!<

If you have the budget for it, there's always grabbing one of the many theory/aural skills textbooks and doing some of their self-tests. This is one of the textbooks we used for my aural training class, and it comes with a CD that has a ton of listening examples; I think all of them except the quizzes have an answer key in the book, so that can be good for self-testing.

The Kostka textbook also has a workbook with some exercises - see this review for some critiques of that textbook series, but if you're using it for self-practice as opposed to first-time learning, I think it would be okay and it does cover a pretty broad base of topics for studying.

Of course, as someone else pointed out, musictheory.net and teoria.com are also good online resources for a lot of this stuff as well, so check out those self-tests. I also agree that grabbing music on IMSLP can be really good practice that's easy to access. In addition to Bach, try looking at some of Mozart's piano works, since those tend to be fairly straightforward but offer a slightly different texture for identifying harmonies.

Otherwise, I mean - I think most of these topics are things that fall into "the more you do it, the better you'll get" category, so I would just encourage you to immerse yourself in whatever music you're participating in, and focus on these topics. When you have downtime in a rehearsal - analyze. When you're waiting for a bus/picking up your kid/dinner to finish cooking - analyze. Listening to music on the radio - analyze. You get the idea. :) The more you build it into your life and the music you're actually doing, the more relevant it feels and the better you'll learn it.

>It's perhaps the least romantic gift ever

Hahahahaha! I would definitely agree, though—I think the CHWMT would be an excellent book. If she goes through any sort of History of Theory course (which most PhD programs do), I can't imagine she wouldn't use this book. Even if she didn't have such a course, this book is a collection of (with perhaps one exception) excellent essays written by top scholars on almost every major theoretical approach or issue in the history of Western music.

I won't speak for other sub-disciplines—vornska's suggestions are definitely some of the central books in present theoretical studies—but let me make some suggestions for books more oriented towards Schenkerian analysis.

Schenker's Free Composition — this is Schenker's magnum opus in which he lays out his mature theory. For any Schenkerian, this is definitely a Bible of sorts, and a must-have. Just be sure, if you end up purchasing this, to get both volumes; one volume is the text and the second is the examples. You can also find the hardcover first English edition, sometimes even for less than the price of the two paperbacks.

Cadwallader and Gagné's Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach — this has become the standard textbook for teaching Schenkerian analysis, and I still find myself referring to it after years of Schenkerian studies. A somewhat dry but very clear and beneficial book.

Schachter's Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis — Carl Schachter is one of the greatest Schenkerians; nearly everybody who's anybody in the world of Schenkerian analysis studied with him. This book is a wonderful collection of some of his greatest essays. His writing style is exceptional and his analysis are some of the best I've seen.

Yay! I love pop, and I try to produce pop from time to time. IMO, what makes pop different from "normal" EDM is the vocal arrangements, the vocals have such a major position in the mix and the arrangement that you can't afford to get it wrong. Listen to Die Young by Ke$ha for example, so much detail in the vocal production.

This focus on vocals also adds a whole new dimension to the songwriting - you have to be a great songwriter (music as well as lyrics) as well as a great producer to make good pop music.

Many pop producers them are also accomplished musicians which is clearly evident in their tracks, e.g. frequently recording live instruments. Calvin Harris does this too, his songs is so much more than just a couple of VST's. I'm not saying this is necessary to make good music, it just adds something special.

My top 3 in pop producers: Dr. Luke, Max Martin, and Shellback (video of him playing the Moves like Jagger riff)
. Check out their production credits and get blown away!

Edit: I recommend this book for those who are interested in common songwriting techniques and tips.

Hey, I’m kind of a book junkie when it comes to common practice stuff, so I’m gonna throw a bunch of em at ya. The common practice era of composition can be broken down into 3 major fields of study: Form/Composition, Harmony and Orchestration. Form/composition is about how music develops over time harmonically and melodically. Harmony is about how vertical sonorities interact with one another, this is one of the most fleshed out aspects of music theory. Orchestration, usually the capstone discipline, dives into how groups of instruments interact with one another on a harmonic level and a melodic one. Harmony+composition can be studied simultaneously considering there is so much overlap, orchestration usually comes after you have a middling understanding of the other two subjects.

There are a bunch of free online materials on these subjects, but here is my personal favorite:
http://openmusictheory.com/contents.html

There are also a few free books on harmony, orchestration and composition, but most of them were published a very long time ago. As a consequence, you may run into outdated or poorly explained concepts.

Harmony:

Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony

Orchestration:

Principles of Orchestration

Composition:

Fundamentals of music Composition

Exercises in Melody Writing

Most of the stuff with comprehensive+up to date information on these subjects is going to be something you pay for. Here are my favorite textbooks. One thing I value in a textbook is an accompanying workbook and/or some sort of exercise based learning, so I’ll be listing the workbooks (if applicable) as well.

Melody in Songwriting

Craft of Musical Composition Parts One and Two

Models For Beginners in Composition

Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music

Workbook for Harm Practice

The Study of Orchestration

Workbook for The Study of Orchestration

This isn’t an exhaustive list but it’s pretty solid.


Recording orchestras is out of reach for most, so you’ll probably need some good VSTs to use and some knowledge of how to make them sound ‘real’. Building an orchestra template is key to making music quickly and efficiently. It’s a massive headache to have to wait for Kontakt to load and instrument every time you want to add a flute or violin to your score. Here are the basics of what you’ll need:


Woodwinds:

Flutes

Clarinets

Saxophones

Oboes

Bassoons



Brass:

French horns

Trumpets

Trombones

Tubas

“Low brass”


Strings:

1st Violins

2nd Violins

Violas

Cellos

Bass

First chairs of each


Others:

PIANOS

Harps

Choirs

Guitars

Vibraphones

Glockenspiels

Etc


Orchestral percussion

Concert Toms

Taikos

Snares

Concert bass drums


Here are some places to get all of that:

Audio Bro (the ARC system is awesome)

Spitfire

8Dio

Orchestral Tools (my favorite)

CineSamples

EastWest Sounds

Heres a resource to make all of that stuff sound ‘real’. It’s a lot more difficult then you may think.

The Guide to MIDI Orchestration 4e

These are both UK based, but The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records was quite interesting bc it explains what was going on culturally/historically for each song/time period, and explains why things became popular when they did.
The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters made me interested in a few artists I previously didn't really care a whole lot about, as well as reinforcing why I care about certain others.

Personally, if I were 100% deaf, I wouldn't really understand why certain intervals were avoided or emphasized in musical theory. In fact, I'd mostly be driven by written music and the spatial relationships of the notes. This would naturally lead me to geometric descriptions of musical intervals and progressions.

For example, I would probably notice certain symmetries between collections of notes (inter-chordal symmetry) and collections of chords (chordal symmetries). I would understand the tritone as the furthest interval possible from a tonic that doesn't simply represent a transposition or inversion of all other intervals.

This can be seen by mapping the 12 possible notes of the equally tempered scale to a clock face and noting that, although seven is further than six in the counter clockwise direction, it's merely an inverted image of 5; if I move five steps counter-clockwise I'm at seven. Six is actually more "distant" from the tonic as it has no inversion other than the tonic itself.

I imagine this would eventually lead me to mathematical descriptions of music that attempt to describe these spatial relationships, specifically something like Allen Forte's set theoretical approach to music. Here, there are many interesting relationships made between chords and their intervallic content, and these relationships need not rely on how intervals and chords sound, per se (although that has clearly been important throughout music history) — they're primarily "geometric" relationships, chords that are similar because they contain similar intervallic content.

As a quick example, although laymen might consider major and minor chords as opposites, they are in fact nothing more than inversions of each other; they contain the exact same intervallic content, but one is a mirror inversion of the other (again, assuming equal temperament). The A minor chord contains one different note than the C major chord, but both contain the intervals of a perfect fifth, a major third and a minor third. From a set theoretical perspective they are simply the same set (chord) expressed in two different ways, specifically through inversion and transposition.

Now, eventually I might notice that there seems to be a deeper underlying algebraic structure to music that looks very much like group theory. In fact, eventually I would discover that this has been thoroughly explored by modern music theorists, specifically in the Transformational Theory set out in David Lewin's treastise Generalized Interval Systems and Transformations. This is advanced enough that getting into an example would probably not be useful as it depends on a level of mathematical sophistication that isn't part of most secondary education, i.e., the afore-mentioned group theory.

Of course, all this would be predicated on the notion that I could actually read music, or at least identify written pitches and intervals. Once this is done it's a simple matter of abstracting these into objects in a space, much like the integers are "objects" on the number line. The rest is just modern algebra.

For a nice introduction to transformational theory, I recommend Abstract Musical Intervals by Ming Tsao (and maybe a preliminary crash course in abstract algebra).

I really like the tactical approach in Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting: 126 Proven Techniques for Writing Songs That Sell

My suggestion would be to take the approach that Robin has and break songwriting down into actionable tactics. You can borrow her tactics, but the best thing to do is listen to tons and tons of songs and start creating your own conceptual framework for understanding the mechanics of songwriting. Everyone hears songs differently, so you should really focus on developing and refining how you understand songs. Then it becomes much easier to deploy the tactics that resonate and come natural to you in your own writing.

I'm a tech house producer and I spend 90 - 120 minutes a day analyzing songs, so I can apply the techniques I extract to my own productions. Every day I discover something new and I get more nuanced with my ideas. It's starting to translate into my productions as well.

There are a few books by an author named Jonathan E Peters on Amazon that have been very, very beneficial to me (the first time I learned about tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chord substitution, for example). I haven't read all of these, but the ones I have read are amazing:

• Music Composition 1: Learn how to compose well-written rhythms and melodies (Volume 1)
  
  
• Music Composition 2
  
  
• Music Theory: An in-depth and straight forward approach to understanding music
  
  
• Fundamentals of Writing Four-part Harmony
  
  If you're looking for more advanced theory, Rick Beato's YouTube channel has a ton of videos on really intense theory. He also has a book, The Beato Book, but I just started reading it so I can't vouch for how good it is yet.

The ones that I felt were the most comprehensive and not so boring were these: and I recommend using them in this order:

https://www.amazon.com/Producing-Music-Ableton-Quick-Guides/dp/1480355100/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652098&sr=8-3&keywords=ableton+books

https://www.amazon.com/Interactive-Composition-Strategies-Using-Ableton/dp/0199973822/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652133&sr=8-1&keywords=interactive+composition

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Mixing-Mastering-Ableton-Guides/dp/1480355119/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652098&sr=8-2&keywords=ableton+books

I went through a handful more than this but those three probably helped me the most. Notable mention is Ableton Live 9 Power! But I found it to be really boring.

You could just go with the first book and it would be a fantastic step in the door to Ableton. Interactive Composition is the most fun but it's definitely less thorough. The last book is just if you want to go even deeper into using Ableton, it just shows more of Abletons uses for mixing. It basically starts off right where the first book ends. It's also shorter than the first so it's pretty quick to get through.

These three books have been a huge help to me:

Elements of Computer Music by F. Richard Moore

Computer Music by Charles Dodge

The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads

They are geared toward music, but they explain in fair depth methods of DSP design and sound generation algorithms. A strong background in math is helpful, but not required.

Available for the first time in 25 years, this book of songs and sheet music, a collaboration between J. R. R. Tolkien and the composer Donald Swann, will delight Tolkien fans everywhere as the book to stand beside their copies of Lord of The Rings, the essays, poems and calendars. Includes a bonus CD containing performances of all the songs. In this song book the composer Donald Swann gives Tolkien characters Bilbo, Treebeard, Sam Gamgee and Tom Bombadil tunes for their ballads of the road. Professor Tolkien approved of this and added a tune of his own, decorated the book in his own hand and added a glossary of Elvish terms and lore that appears nowhere else.

This guy's books explains it better than anything else I've read. He has a corresponding online course as well. Really, it's just great at giving you a vocabulary for analyzing music. That way, after you've transcribed something you like, you can analyze the methods the composer used.

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Composition-1-Jonathan-Peters-ebook/dp/B00I9JF3PG/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1518845768&sr=8-16&keywords=music+composition

On October 15,2018, my second published book “The Loney Smith Locksmith Music Theory 1.0” was released on Amazon!

The product ID on Amazon is B07JFLY2RF.

Anyone who would love to learn how to compose and produce music and harmonies on an iPhone, iPad, Android device, or desktop computer using FL Studio, Apple Logic Pro X or GarageBand, Propellerhead Reason, or Ableton Live will greatly benefit from my book!

Unlock YOUR inner music composer!

The Loney Smith Locksmith Music Theory 1.0

Reginald Smith-Brindle's Musical Composition is quite good. He expects decent familiarity with theory beforehand, but you should be okay if you've been playing for 7 years. Make sure you're getting the right book – Serial Composition is his more well-known one.

Unlike the other respondents, I would encourage against trying to find something that is (or claims to be) stylistically neutral.

BTW I don't know where you got the term "music language modelling" from, but it certainly isn't the term used within the industry. The term used by academics is simply "algorithmic composition". If you're not approaching this from an academic standpoint I what suggest hitting up IEEE, AES, ISMIR and journals like Computer Music Journal and Journal of New Music Research. The Nierhaus book also provides a good overview. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Automated-Generation/dp/321175539X

Actually, wiki is a pretty good resource here. People have been doing speech synthesis for a really surprisingly long time, and doing pretty well at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis

As for your question about "Sss" vs. "Shh", it is actually amazing that our brains are so good at fuzzy logic that they are able to not only distinguish between these sounds, but even understand them over a radio with limited bandwidth or from someone who is heavily accented. The actual waveform difference is a matter of filtering different frequencies. The "sss" has lots of very high-frequency content, while the "shh" is much lower.

If you're not familiar, Charles Dodge wrote like the manual for synthesis. Don't be put off by the title, many of the techniques are applicable outside of computers:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Music-Synthesis-Composition-Performance/dp/0028646827

I recommend grabbing a copy of Songwriting For Dummies and Music Composition For Dummies. Music Theory For Dummies is also pretty good for novices too.

Aside from that, just go make some music. It'll be crap, but that's okay. It's a learning process.

I started off only being good at playing the piano (like from sheet music, couldnt write my own).

This pdf has all that music theory and discussion about how to write music, its been wonderful for me:

http://www.amazon.com/Music-Composition-Dummies-Scott-Jarrett/dp/0470224215

as far as learning to play keys, I can't help you much there.
The ASDR, synth programming stuff isn't in that book, but there are plenty of tuts on youtube that are sufficient, I'd look at those.

Have you used a DAW at all so far? Are you familiar with making music and performing/playing anything?

This book is gold.
https://amzn.com/0199973822

Also, there is an Ableton Subreddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/abletonlive/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/

And, if you go through Computer Music magazine on digital copy, it's cheaper and always a good read.

also nice is this book http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Automated-Generation/dp/321175539X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323458504&sr=8-1

and yeah it's not a new idea, but using a hive-mind approach to evaluate ascii-code-music in oder to find general patterns is a new approach

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony

Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition

Music Composition For Dummies

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Composition

Music Composition 1: Learn how to compose well-written rhythms and melodies (Volume 1)

More at Amazon.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/Composition/