Customer Reviews

The Symphony 1800-1900: A Norton Music Anthology

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Norton is to be commended for gathering together these works in a usable, well-designed book. The reproduction is just large enough that you can appreciate the details and small enough that you can get the larger sweep of what the music is accomplishing.

This is a lot of book at a reasonable price.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Beethoven 3rd (Eroica)
Schubert Symphony in B (Unfinished)
Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique
Mendelssohn 4th (Italian)
Schumann 4th
Tchaikovsky 4th
Brahms 3rd
Bruckner Adagio from 3rd Symphony
Dvorak 8th

Appendix: Reading an Orchestral Score

Buying this book is a good way to start building a library of scores. You get a fair bit of the basic repertoire in one fell swoop, as it were. Unlike as in certain other Norton anthologies, whole works are represented here, and they aren't cluttered with a primary melodic line trace. It's odd that Beethoven's third symphony and Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony are always studied in music history courses. Why not Beethoven's and Tchaikovsky's fifths? Too popular? Too good? Oh, well, you can pick up these scores later. I also recommend "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist" by Jeff Burns.