Customer Reviews

Guide to Musical Analysis

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In this book, Nicholas Cook explains different techniques of musical analysis in a fairly straight-forward style that is not difficult to understand. You do however need to have a solid background on music theory to understand what he is talking about, as this is not a book for beginners in music theory and music analysis. For those of you who do know a bit about music theory, you'll find some original techniques, some of which are a little outdated. Nevertheless it is a very good complementary read.

For example, he describes one technique whereby you study a piece of music literally for as long as the composer would have taken to write it, to really get into the depth of the piece. Of course, he also says that this technique is the most practical one and he then develops that point further, however there clearly is a feeling in this book whereby you get a lot of tools of analysing music effectively. His techniques go into a lot of detail, which often very technical, but which nevertheless give the reader a complete set of tools to musical analysis.

Four points are awarded to this book, as it very good, however it does not provide an easy read for non experts in the fields of musical analysis. It is more of an excellent complementary read for students, teachers and music historians.