5 comments about Composing Music: A New Approach.

1. The book's author is clearly influenced by minimalism not only in his approach to music, but also to writing and music instruction. His clearly modal approach to both melody and harmony is presented in superbly logical and fluff-free sequence of explanations and exercises. Some of advanced chapters on topics such as mating lyrics with music or writing picture music are brilliant as well.



2. I see that most people have high ratings for this book, but I cannot give it more than 2 stars for several reasons. First of all, the book does give a ton of exercises, but I didn't find these very useful--most of them were very simple exercises that had restrictions on how you could write the piece. This book does give much information about music theory, and the author does allow you to use this theory to write small (usually 10-15 bar) monophonic melodies, but by the end of the book this was all that I had learned to do. Yes, I did learn a lot of theory but I did not learn how to use the theoretical concept to its fullest potential when I composed a piece. At the end of the book, I found that, since the book gave me no practice at writing for more than one instrument at a time, I was not any better of a composer than I was at the start of the book.

   In my opinion, the author should add a CD to the book to illustrate how each concept he teaches is used to its fullest potential in a musical example. A major part of learning to compose is to listen and imitate--without listening, how are you supposed to know how to use this new music theory that you have just learned?

   Overall, the book is just a music theory book with a bunch of useless (to me, anyway) compositional exercises. Perhaps this book is for people who already have experience composing for a while. Personally, I am an ameateur and have piano skills and I wanted a book to teach me to compose, but I am afraid it did not help me very much, and I don't think it will help other ameateurs either.




3. If you are a real musician or lyricist, this book will help inspire you and give you some background in the format of western pop music. I recommend this book to any seroius songwriter, but please no more songs about butterflies!



4. I picked this book up a few years ago, and am still getting a lot out of the exercises. The processes used are very refreshing, from a music student's perspective. The approach is from the view of more contemporary music, and the text leaves out the stuffy, "unnecessary" theory. If you want to study theory, get a theory book.
   
   This book is designed to teach the individual who has little experience outside of very basic music fundamentals. From the first page you'll be writing "mini-compositions". The book works through the following concepts (chapter by chapter):
   
   1. The Cell, the Row, and Some Scales
   2. Harmony (I)
   3. Transformation
   4. The Small Theme and the Large Theme
   5. More Scales and teh 12-tone Row
   6 Isomelody and Isorhythm, Combined
   7. Ostinato
   8. Accompaniment Procedures
   9. Harmony (II)
   10. Counterpoint
   11. Organum
   12. Imitation: A Useful Game
   13. Words and Music
   14. Picture Music
   15. Popular Music as a Source
   16. Minimalism
   
   Although you certainly don't need to have advanced theory knowledge to make use of this book, once you do gain those skills, the book will prove that much more helpful.



5. This book was very helpful to me; the excercizes have you writing right away, and I liked that- learning by doing. I had very little technical knowledge when I started, but it didn't hinder me from understanding and using this book. I think this is an excellent starting point for someone just learning to compose. It is encouraging to be writing right away, especially when something ends up sounding good. I never thought I could write music!

No comments about A New Approach to Ear Training : A Programmed Course in Melodic and Harmonic Dictation - Text.

5 comments about The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.

1. Understanding topics of human achievement often means understanding their history. Such is the case when we investigate the creation of unprecedented wealth during the last centuries of our existence. The result is as we see it, but it could have been very different. An indeed, many examples of similar initial conditions exist, which did not translate into an industrial revolution, and hence a "lever of riches".
   
   And so, this is a book of history. Indeed, the creation of wealth is more than the economic decision to put so many people with so many tools at work, in order to produce so much output. After history went its course, it turns out that some people can produce many, many times over what other people can do during a similar period of time.
   
   The question is why, and that answer is easy: technology. Having, and being able to use it, technology is the difference between eking out a living at the margin of subsistence, or breaking through age-old Malthusian constraints. The hard question is why some people do, and others do not, have the use of this technology.
   
   The history part shows in a very clear way, and into some modest detail, how many societies of the past at some point stagnated, while a few, including medieval Europe did not. But apart from learning history, we also learn to think *about* history. What influence have factors like, say, climate? Or religion? Can we learn something by borrowing models from evolutionary theory?
   
   Apart from theoretical considerations, there is also a good deal of more practical history. How does Roman Europe compare with medieval Europe? Why did Europe see progress at an age and a stage where China did not, or at least much less? And why did England take off in a way that turned the rest of Europe into a bunch of followers?
   
   The picture that emerges is one where a multitude of necessary conditions have to combine into a long story of increasing capability and efficiency. Only if and when those conditions are met, societies make the kind of progress that allows them to follow the road to improving material life. And though the book thereby confirms this road is not necessarily an easy one for those who didn't find it yet, it also yields some thoughts about how to hand over our own lever of riches to those who still need it so much.
   
   As I would reserve 5 stars for those truly outstanding books you should read as a masterpiece of art, even if you couldn't care less about the topic, I will quote this book four stars. Highly recommended if you're interested in this subject.



2. This is a scholarly and fact-focused treatment of a subject that has often been treated in a way that is meant to support a particular author's theoretical framework. The subject is complicated, and the book does a good job of dealing with the facts. As is so often the case, the most valuable part of the book is the commentary it elicits, so if you're going to go to the effort of reading the book, take the extra ten minutes to read whatever commentaries/reviews it gets, too. Just the ones on Amazon are pretty helpful for putting it in context.
   
   dgc



3. 
   This is an important book about the historical process that not so long ago was unashamedly called "progress." Mokyr is professor of economics at Northwestern and author of The Economics of the Industrial Revolution. The present work undertakes a systematic cross-cultural, longitudinal study of the causes and conditions of economic growth. A central contention is that contemporary microeconomics lacks the conceptual equipment to elucidate the increment to economic growth supplied by technological change. This is a startling claim: can a science founded in industrialising Scotland to explain the causes of the wealth of nations fail to explicate what everyone knows is the mainspring of economic growth? Mokyr aligns with economists who believe that this is so. They call their heterodoxy "Schumpeterian economics." In the Theory of Economic Development (1912), Joseph Schumpeter emphasized that innovation is the fundamental impulse of capitalist production. Innovation is all-sided. Production, product, resource procurement, efficiency, and marketing are all drawn into the kinetic performance. The key to this dynamism was the relentless, aggressive drive of entrepreneurs. His contemporary heirs replace the entrepreneur by the inventor as the chief wealth-producing agent. While this assessment of the critical role of technology may seem obvious to the layman, it's scandalous in microeconomics.
   
   Readers are alerted to heterodoxy on the first page when Mokyr signals that his findings are at odds with "one of the most pervasive half-truths that economists teach their students, . . . that there is no such thing as a free lunch." We are apprised that it is the specific achievement of technology to deliver banquets for millions. It does so thanks to transactions between creative minds and nature that result in tapping natural powers and harnessing them to productive output. The wheel, the sail, the water mill, the wind mill (a wheel-sail), and the steam engine exemplify ways by which ingenuity coaxes nature into delivering disposable power at a precise point. These transactions occur outside the domain of market exchange, although they may and often do intersect with exchange. But it is not obvious to orthodox economics, whose doctrine is that technological innovation can be calculated as a response to market demand or else as a production cost. Mokyr answers that technological input is supply-led in the double sense that technology creates products and services unimagined by consumers, and that technology creates the incomes that make a demand for technology possible.
   
   Mokyr's strategy for supplementing economics with a theory of technological innovation is to accept the half-truth that growth can be understood within economics of commercial expansion, size and scale effects, and investment. This will capture "microinnovation," that is, efficiency improvements and other changes that are made more or less spontaneously in the course of production. But then he passes on to macroinnovationm, which "involves an attack . . . on a constraint that everyone else takes as given" (9). Macroinnovators are mavericks who would change the givens. Market reward doesn't come easy. The strategy is to focus micro- and macroinnovation simultaneously in selected time-slices, and to examine their cross-fertilisation as well as the intersections between macroinnovation and the market.
   
   The study is divided into historical narrative and systematics. The narrative covers classical antiquity, the middle ages, and the development of technology in western Europe from 1500 to 1914. The systematics is assisted by three comparative studies, of classical antiquity and medieval Europe, of China and Europe, and of Britain and Europe. Each study develops a theme meant to elucidate why macroinnovations occur and the circumstances that influence their uptake into production. They illustrate of the book's centrepiece, an analytical chapter entitled "Understanding Technological Progress." The second part of the author's systematics attempts to forge links between the dynamics of technological change and the Darwinian analysis of evolutionary change. This is a very ambitious undertaking, not easily understandable without specialist knowledge of evolutionary thought.
   
   Here are some of Mokyr's results:
   
   * Opposition to technological innovation is culturally pandemic. Often it's income- and market-related. Labour combinations and tariffs, over many centuries, document attempts to protect inefficient productive methods. There's also a syndrome of technology aversion. Islam and China after 1400 A.D. exhibit this syndrome after having passed through a long period of technology development. These cultures became progressively more risk-averse and xenophobic to the point of stigmatizing the imitation of foreign innovations. His description of the closure of these cultures helps understand the values and institutional prescriptions that arrest innovation; but what occasioned this turn-about? Mokyr believes that it expressed conservatism or risk-aversion at the power centers of society, that is, anxiety about loss of social control.
   
   * Status values and the structure of preferences in a culture may assign low status to commerce or technology or both. This well-known diagnosis of Greek and Roman antiquity is confirmed by the author's investigations. He reminds us that this preference structure was nuanced. The Greeks discovered the science of mechanics and developed metallurgy and machine construction to a high pitch. But in the Greco-Roman world machines of war and building construction were the only areas in which sustained applications were made.
   
   * Governments do not figure in Mokyr's study as significant promoters of technological innovation. The positive role of the mandarins prior to the onset of risk-aversion is emphasised, as is the strong affirmation of technology development in revolutionary and Bonapartist France. But these are exceptions; the author is more impressed by the tendency of governments to discourage innovation. The optimum recipe was the circumstance of early modern Europe, where a diversity of competing states and domestic institutions removed the option of risk-aversion taken in China and Islam. This diagnosis is confirmed by those cases where monarchs successfully imposed risk-aversion-Spain and Hapsburg went into economic decline. Since the author's history stops at 1914, we are left wondering whether the strong involvement of governments in R & D since 1945 marks a fundamental enhancement of the institutional capacity to promote technological innovation. The Soviet Union developed its technology entirely under government auspices, with mixed success. Perhaps Mokyr will explore this experience in a subsequent publication.
   
   * The influence of ambient attitudes is discussed episodically throughout the study. The prevailing thought is that technological development is fostered best by an environment open to new ideas and new practices, which is not risk-averse and not intolerant, and which accords dignity to inventors and inventions. Religions are reckoned to be endogenous variables expressing a society's preference structure; Mokyr observes wryly that "every society . . . gets the religion it deserves" (171). The social rigidity of the Hindu religion strongly discouraged innovation, whereas the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man's dominion over nature provided support for technological intervention. Lynn White's fine studies of the Benedictine order are cited to substantiate this claim. The Protestant ethic is not mentioned as a relevant consideration.
   
   Coming now to innovation and invention themselves, Mokyr treats them as aggregates and seeks to discern their properties. He stipulates that growth through invention and innovation is "any change in the application of information to the production process in such a way as to increase efficiency, resulting either in the production of a given output with fewer resources (i.e., lower costs) or the production of better or new products" (6). An invention is an increment in the set of total knowledge of a society, which is in turn the union of sets of individual technical knowledge. Since an invention that isn't utilized is without economic effect, the on-going synchronization of invention and innovation are critical to sustaining economic growth. The absence of this synchronisation is the reason why few societies have been technologically creative.
   
   Space doesn't permit a discussion of Mokyr's extended analogy between organic evolution and the cultural evolution of technology. Let it be said that he endorses the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution because it incorporates macroevolution. As for the underlying psychology that microeconomics never elucidates, Mokyr's thinking is convergence with my own elucidation of "polytechnic rationality" which I developed in The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic.



4. This book is an in-depth study in why technological Creativity happens. Mokyr is doing more than just discussing history; he is giving it intellectual context. The reader should expect to think deeply about why certain innovations did or did not happen.
   
   Anyone interested in how humanity has struggled within our world to advance productivity, increase quality of life, and sustain ever-increasing population growth will be enlightened by this book.
   
   This book is complemented excellently with Mokyr's 2002 book "The Gifts of Athena."



5. This was another book required by my European Economic History class. While there is a ton of useful information in this book, it didn't feel like there were any original insights or theories. For anyone who knows a lot about the Industrial Revolution, this book is just a regurgitation of existing ideas.

3 comments about Practical Approach to the Study of Form in Music.

1. With Spencer and Temko's focused approach to musical analysis, this intimidating discipline is made interesting and accessible. It does require knowledge of music theory, but even those students who regard theory as anathema can be put at ease within the first twenty pages of this succinct book.

   The magic formula (which is an expansion of Jan La Rue's "musical parameters" view of analysis) is found in a chart of what are called musical "phenomena". "Observations" would have done as nicely, since the student is asked simply to state what he sees or hears in a score, using a three letter code. For example, a change in dynamics from loud to soft, signalling perhaps a new theme or key is marked IN THE SCORE with "dyn". This orderly process, indicated above the score in tabular fashion, allows the student to use the composer's own indications to assist in finding those defining points in the myriad of notes which, taken as a whole, can be overwhelming to a college junior. This makes analysis obvious and (in the words of my students) fun.

   I use an anthology with this, plus the students' own scores. Later in the course, we meet in the music library, selecting unknown scores to analyze for form, period, and composer, using the same 3-letter codes. Recommended.




2. If you want to learn about forms and modulations, and aren't really concerned about anything else then this book is great. Concise, accurate and well organized. If you don't think that form is more important than content, or if you're looking for an in depth discussion of how musical forms operate (instead of just descriptions) then this book misses the point entierly. Prepare for tedious and ultimately misguided generalizations. Music is much more interesting than this.



3. While I applaud the analysis method, based on Jan la Rue's "Five Parameters of Music" (here expanded to nine phenomena), this text poses several problems for the standard college classroom. An anthology is mandatory, though no one anthology seems to work with it. The analysis method itself yields a very densely marked score, with code observations which are more confusing than helpful. As to the standard terminology regarding binary, ternary, and compound forms, the wording is off-putting, requiring a good bit of translation from the professor. While form is a difficult bird for some, I was willing to take time to translate and go the extra mile. I also made use of the examples in the text at the keyboard. I have a doctorate in performance. Heaven help a clarinetist-professor.Very difficult excertps.Three years and out it goes.

No comments about Theory for Today's Musician Workbook w/ Workbook CD-ROM.

4 comments about Workbook for Counterpoint.

1. I'VE NEVER SEEN WORKBOOK OF COUNTERPOINT AND I THINK IT'S VERY USEFULL AND CAN HELP WHO STUDYING COMPOSITIONS.IF YOU INTEREST HOW CAN YOU WRITE COUNTERPOINT YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!



2. Make sure you have the accompanying textbook. The workbook doesn't work without it, make sure you also have the correct edition of the textbook.



3. The workbook is put together nicely. I find it be an essential learning tool. However, there is a BIG mistake in the accompanying text "Counterpoint, Based on Eighteenth Century Practice." On page 19, the very first page of chapter three, there is supposed to be an excerpt from a Bach Two-Part Invention. It is not. I don't know where it came from. What makes this a big deal is that this is the chapter that starts you out on species two counterpoint. Amazon has a lot of gaul charging one hundred and four dollars for a text with a huge mistake it. Every counterpoint class in the world has to spend a portion of their initial instruction pointing this out. I had to go the second edition to get it right, which means that I had to wait six weeks to get it through my local library. Doesn't anybody prood read anymore.



4. The product was in the condition it was promised and it came quickly in the mail to me.

4 comments about Modes for Guitar (Private Lessons).

1. I bought this book about 2 years ago. I really liked it. It was extremely useful when I was first learning about each of the major modes. That said, it focuses mostly on the application of the modes, although there is a rather brief introductory chapter on "The Theory of the Modes." Each major mode is covered in detail in it's own chapter, which includes:
   
   -Harmony, matching chord types, and pattern shapes.
   -Description of the mode's "character," what gives it that character, and common usages of the mode.
   -7 to 10 licks, riffs, and solos illustrating and explaining different applications of the mode, all on accompanying CD and all in both tab and standard notation.
   -A jam track for improvising over in that mode (on CD).
   
   It also contains a chapter on "Other Modes," where it briefly touches upon melodic & harmonic minor, the blues scale, and a couple modes of each (like the Altered scale, Phrygian dominant, and the Bluegrass scale). It's somewhat helpful.
   
   One final note: while the examples are not overly technical (for example, no shredding), some of them might be a bit daunting to those who haven't been playing very long. But with a bit of practice anyone could probably get them down. All in all, this was a great book for me, and I recommend it to anyone who's want to be able to do more with the modes. It answers that question, "Okay, so now I know what modes are, but how do I actually use them?"



2. A clear and well presented account of the modes of the major scale. Kolb has a knack of explaining abstract musical idea in the written word, although in this account it is augmented by a CD of examples and useful backing tracks. I'm not sure that this title is aimed at beginners-I doubt they'd follow it, but for the guitarist with a bit of a grasp of music theory and some playing experience, I believe this is an excellent book. Indeed buying this has prompted me to search out and purchase Tom Kolb's other titles. Highly recommended!



3. Presented in straight forward speak. Covers the modes you are probably interested in and none of the ones you probably don't care about. I wanted to learn more about this subject after hearing that Jimmy Page frequently played in Mixolydian and that many of Queensryche's solos are played in Aeolian. I am novice at best and usually just improvise using straight pentatonic scales. After a few weeks with this book and studying Michael Wilton's solos (watching concert videos on DVD) I am now soloing in major scales in aeolian mode. My playing has way more variety now.



4. I found this book to be a great way to connect the dots in your head when it comes to modes. It gave me a better understanding of the rules involved in applying modes, and how to bend and break those rules to suit my own style. I would recomend at least a basic understanding in some music theory in order for this book to be truly effective.

5 comments about The Creation of Patriarchy (Women & History).

1. I thought this book was wonderful because it brings up many topics that get your brain thinking in totally different ways. I am currently doing a research paper on the possiblities of Mother Goddess worship in ancient times and this book has been very helpful. What makes this book different from a lot that I have read on the subject is that she shows many different sides to the topics she brings up. This is great because most of the subject is subjective anyway. The book is also very easy to read and follow. It's a great read!



2. The just cause of feminism is done great harm by books like this that completely fail to read ancient material, contextualy. The "idea" that The Iliad was/is "sexist" would be laughable were it not pernicious because so few people who read Lerner will bother to read Homer, let alone the mountain of scholarly work on the meanings of "his" poems.

   Telemecus' sacrifice of 12 slave women has zero to do with "sexism" and everything to do with an ancient concept of divinity rooted in ritualized repetitions of "sacred" numbers.

   As in the credits for movies where the studio offers a disclaimer that,"no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture" someone needs to explain to Ms. Lerner that the "people" in the Iliad and the Odyssey were as real as "Christ's" transubstatiation. And before anyone suggests that the "symbolism" still represents a "sexist" culture, it should be pointed out that the 12 were a symbolic gift to the FEMININE spirit for whom Odysseus was laboring, and that, though it was, by our standards, TODAY, "barbaric" the culture of ancient Greece, viewed the Iliad and the Odyssey as epics in celebration of the power of the feminine, as they understood it.

   Let's try to remember, that "Odysseus" was part of a religious service, called the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that the WHOLE of the two books are in fact a description of a fertility cult dedicated to the ancient Greek belief in the power of the earth goddess, and that the entire war is a ritualized expression of worship for the earth goddesses symbol, "Helen", who, goes from Greece to Troy and back, as a symbol of the belief that the masculine (the warriors) must follow the feminine (Helen) and serve her so as to complete the cycle of birth, life, death, and eventualy rebirth in the form of the next, newer generation.

   Feminism deserves far more, and far better than this joke of a book.

   Anything else is an anacronistic "reading" that says more about Lerner's lack of erudition than it does about "Homer." END




3. While this book can be (and is) boring, and while the anger expressed within might be outdated, Lerner (who was writing in the 80s) does an excellent job of displaying some of the reasons WHY we continue to act as we do. Her discussion of the origins of marriage and female slavery were especially helpful.



4. The Creation Of Patriarchy should be a textbook in all Universities, all over the world. Ms. Lerner is brilliant in her assessments of historical data!! I highly recommend this book to all MEN (especially Patriarchs, Machismos, Sexist, Racists, Conservatives, Fascists, and the rest of you who think biology is destiny...life is an ever changing force and we need to respect and change with the times!!

   You Go Girl!




5. This book is the perfect gift - for an historian studying the intellectual history of the ancient Near East from a Feminist point of view. The "boring" part of it is valid only when applied to people outside of the target audience. I was assigned this book in a history class, and read it with great delight cover to cover. I can understand where other people are coming form, but if you have a feminist Mesopotamian intellectual historian, this is THE book.
   
   I give it five stars, but only within it's microniche.

5 comments about Progressive Sight Singing: Includes CD.

1. I have recently used this book and it is fascinating! Dr. Krueger takes sight singing to a new, comfortable, and well paced level. She believes in training the ear before the reading and writing, instead of throwing multiple ideas at the students. I highly recommend this book for college-level or even high school music students. If you ever have the chance to meet or take a class from Dr. K at the University of South Carolina, DO IT!



2. Carol Krueger has taken music learning theory and given it a practical application in sight singing. New skills are introduced one at a time and reinforced throughout the book. This book will become the next "standard text" in collegiate sight singing classes.



3. The sequential order of exercises for learning step-by-step is excellent.
   
   It is also easy to read, the instructions, exercises and the written outlay is clear.
   
   I would recommend this book to others who wants to learn sight-singing at home, or or to be used as a first preliminary step and then have a teacher follow-up.
   
   Berit Rundqvist



4. This book is an exhaustive look at sight-singing. It almost gives too much information, but all the information is relevant to the subject. I recommed this book to anyone who has a general knowledge of music theory and would like to apply a sight-singing technique to increase their musicianship. Many students have a basic understanding of music theory, but have not created an inner ear or inner rhythm. This book shows you how to develop both.



5. The voice, unlike all other instruments, is locked in the body and as a result, the instruction and shaping of this instrument is often based on the teacher's perception or belief of what constitutes proper and healthy voice production. This leaves a lot of room for people to express their (often contradictory) opinions, which can wind up confusing the student as much as helping them. Professor Krueger's book avoids this, and gives solid advice in an incremental fashion. The exercises are logical and plentiful, and I have found her approach to be extremely helpful. I am a tenor in a church choir that sings a lot of high classical repertoire, and the ability to sight-sing is essential with the amount of material we cover in a given rehearsal. I have no reservations about recommending her book.

No comments about The Development of Western Music: An Anthology, Volume I: From Ancient Times through the Baroque Era.