Genesis of a Music—Harry Partch's account of his theories, his musical philosophy, the design and building of his instruments, and the composition of six major works, plus his highly opinionated views on the history of tuning. 552 pp. Paperback.
Harry Partch, a Biography—Bob Gilmore A conventional, linear biography, carefully researched and well written, of the pioneering American composer, theorist, and "Philosophical Music Man." 468 pp. Hardcover.
Bitter Music (Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos)—Harry Partch/Ed. Thomas McGeary A Journal from Partch's hobo period, with interpolated speech-music, and his account of a hiking trip through California's "Lost Coast." Also includes collected essays and introductions from throughout his career and librettos from all of his major theatrical works. 487 pp. Paperback.
Lou Harrison—Leta A. Miller and Fredric Lieberman (book and CD) A shorter, more conventional biography by the authors of Composing a World. 168 pp. Hardcover.
Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer—Leta A. Miller and Fredric Lieberman (book and CD) Revised and updated since the composer's death in 2003. A biography of America's other twentieth-century Just Intonation pioneer, it is divided between a conventional, chronological biography and sections on Harrison's special interests,
including tuning, instrument building, gamelan, and dance. Also includes a complete catalog of Harrison's compositions. The CD includes first-time recordings of Simfony #13 and Simfony in Freestyle, plus excerpts from a number of other rarely heard works. 416 pp. Paperback, plus CD.
Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music—Ben Johnston (Ed. Bob Gilmore) Forty years worth of essays and articles by this important twentieth century composer and theorist are collected here for the first time in a single voulme. Includes "Rational Structure in Music," "Scalar Order as a Compositional Resource," notes on several of his string quartets. 275 pp. Hardcover.
Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela—Ed. William Duckworth and Richard Flemming A collection of essays and articles on minimalist/JI pioneer Young and his visual artist wife. Authors include Kyle Gann, Terry Riley, Ben Neill, Henry Flynt, and Catherine Christer Hennix. 232 pp. Hardcover.
Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics—Arthur H. Benade The best book on this topic for the lay reader currently in print. Covers interval perception, room acoustics, and all major families of musical instruments. Each topic is presented in great detail, without pages of intimidating equations. Benade's description of "special relationships" that can be tuned accurately by ear presents a strong case for the primacy of Just Intonation. 608 pp. Paperback.
Horns, Strings, and Harmony—Arthur H. Benade
A painless introduction to musical acoustics for the
scientifically and mathematically challenged.
288 pp. Paperback.
The Physics and Psychophysics of Music—Juan V. Roederer Deals with the physical systems and physiological processes that intervene in music. It analyzes what objective, physical properties of sound are associated with what subjective psychological sensations of music, and it describes how these sound patterns are actually generated in musical instruments, how they propagate through the environment, and how they are detected by the ear and interpreted in the brain. 236 pp. Paperback.
On the Sensations of Tone—Hermann Helmholtz, translated, with additions, by Alexander Ellis The classic 19th century work on musical acoustics and intonation, including the first attempt at a scientific theory of consonance, an early account of difference tones, and much pioneering work on the behavior of musical instruments.
Ellis' additions are almost a book in themselves, with tables of just
intervals, historical pitch standards, historical and world music
tunings, and Ellis' scheme of extended five-limit Just
Intonation, "the Doudinarium."
576 pp. Paperback.
Tuning and Temperament—J. Murray Barbour Although based on a false premise—that 12-equal is the best possible tuning for Western music and all other tunings can be judged according how closely they approach 12-equal—this is nevertheless quite a useful book, as it contains the most complete and concise account of Western tuning practices between 1500 and 1900 available in a single book. 240 pp. Paperback.
Treatise on Harmony— Jean-Philippe Rameau, translated by Phillip Gossett First published in 1722, the Treatise on Harmony explains the intervals, scales, and chords of Western music in terms of whole-number divisions of a string and introduces Rameau's famous theory of the fundamental bass. It also includes extensive accounts of baroque compositional practices and accompaniment techniques. 444 pp. Paperback.
Harmonic Experience—W.A. Mathieu This book undertakes two somewhat divergent tasks; it teaches the practice and theory (the emphasis is on practice) of Just Intonation through singing with a drone, and it attempts to to explain harmonic practice in Western tempered music in terms of extended JI lattices. 563 pp. Hardcover.
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony—Ross W. Duffin The premise of this book is that most of the music of the common-practice period, from J.S. Bach at least through Beethoven, was intended for and sounds better in a tuning other than 12-equal, typically an extended form of 1/6 comma meantone. Written for musicians without a background in tuning theory. 196 pp. Hardcover.
The Myth of Invariance—Ernest G. McClain Based on the premise that mathematical metaphors found in ancient mythology and literature, from the Vedas to the Bible to Plato's dialogs, derive from matrices of numbers representing tunings, and that the study of these matrices had a profound influence on the beginnings of both science and religion. Profound insight or crackpot theory? You decide. 216 pp. Paperback.
Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale—William A. Sethares Begins by asking the question: How can we build a device to measure consonance and dissonance? The remainder of the book describes the impact of such a dissonance meter on music theory, synthesizer design, the construction of musical scales, and instrument design, and introduces related compositional techniques and new methods of musicological analyses. 430 pp. Hardcover.