Here are 100 books that Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? An Invitation to Music-Making fans have personally recommended if you like
Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? An Invitation to Music-Making.
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Laurie grew up in a rural community and had the good fortune of working with kind and dedicated teachers who were both skillful pedagogues and encouraging mentors. Their passion for quality teaching and high-level musicianship instilled in Laurie the powerful relationship between teaching and artistic performance. Cornelia dreamed of playing the cello beautifully but didn’t have a real teacher until she was twenty. While the work required relearning almost everything she thought she knew, she was old enough to observe her own transformation, guided by a thoughtful and dedicated teacher, and teaching and performing became the inseparable “two sides of the same coin.”They've worked together ever since, writing, teaching, presenting, and sharing great ideas.
The title clearly outlines the premise of the book, and it delivers what it promises.
Although these essays are related to teaching and learning music, the overarching principles are applicable to the development of any skill. Duke challenges any approach that would promote difficult over beautiful, or fast over meticulous, championing music teaching itself as an art.
We’ve read this book dozens of times, used it as a text for classes over the past 25 years, and included it on every suggested reading list that has anything to do with teaching and learning. If a reader takes time to deeply consider the messages in this book and put the recommended strategies into practice, the efficiency and effectiveness of every lesson will improve.
In this collection of insightful essays, the author describes fundamental principles of human learning in the context of teaching music. Written in an engaging, conversational style, the individual essays outline the elements of intelligent, creative teaching. Duke effectively explains how teachers can meet the needs of individual students from a wide range of abilities by understanding more deeply how people learn. Teachers and interested parents alike will benefit from this informative and highly readable book.
Laurie grew up in a rural community and had the good fortune of working with kind and dedicated teachers who were both skillful pedagogues and encouraging mentors. Their passion for quality teaching and high-level musicianship instilled in Laurie the powerful relationship between teaching and artistic performance. Cornelia dreamed of playing the cello beautifully but didn’t have a real teacher until she was twenty. While the work required relearning almost everything she thought she knew, she was old enough to observe her own transformation, guided by a thoughtful and dedicated teacher, and teaching and performing became the inseparable “two sides of the same coin.”They've worked together ever since, writing, teaching, presenting, and sharing great ideas.
Booth wrote this book to be a complete guide for musicians seeking to expand their careers by offering educational concerts and in-school residencies, but the unusual title is likely a subtle reference to “lessons” that challenge widely accepted assumptions in the world…of music performance.
Open to any chapter to read important, focused information on designing a compelling educational concert, but it doesn’t take long to come shocking statements like “being a teaching artist makes you a better artist” (is it possible?) or a demand that we answer the question “why an inner-city fifth grader should give a damn about Mozart” (you mean they don’t?).
Whether Booth is astutely defining the difference between entertainment and art, exploring the importance of good questioning, or reminding us how play is essential to learning and growth, the nuggets of teaching wisdom embedded in these pages are worth their weight in gold.
When the artist moves into the classroom or community to educate and inspire students and audience members, this is Teaching Artistry. It is a proven means for practicing professional musicians to create a successful career in music, providing not only necessary income but deep and lasting satisfaction through engaging people in learning experiences about the arts. Filled with practical advice on the most critical issues facing the music teaching artist today-from economic and time-management issues of being a musician and teacher to communicating effectively with students-The Music Teaching Artist's Bible uncovers the essentials that every musician needs in order to…
Laurie grew up in a rural community and had the good fortune of working with kind and dedicated teachers who were both skillful pedagogues and encouraging mentors. Their passion for quality teaching and high-level musicianship instilled in Laurie the powerful relationship between teaching and artistic performance. Cornelia dreamed of playing the cello beautifully but didn’t have a real teacher until she was twenty. While the work required relearning almost everything she thought she knew, she was old enough to observe her own transformation, guided by a thoughtful and dedicated teacher, and teaching and performing became the inseparable “two sides of the same coin.”They've worked together ever since, writing, teaching, presenting, and sharing great ideas.
Psychotherapist and string teacher Edmund Sprunger addresses the complex challenges parents face when trying to help their children learn.
Violin is the subject matter here, but it’s not a stretch to transfer his understanding to virtually any other learning situation (piano lessons, math assignments, baseball practice, etc). It’s also easy to replace “Helping Parents Practice” with “Helping Mature Students Practice” and “Helping Teachers Teach” because the wisdom in this book is so universal.
What makes us lose patience with the learning process? Or why, when we try to please others, we feel like it’s never enough? Sprunger teaches us how to recognize and respond to underlying issues—often tangled up with the love we desire and deserve or don’t deserve—to discover a more internally-motivated and peaceful way to learn.
Ideas for Making it Easier. Written in small, easily managed sections for the busy parent. The aim is to support and inform parents who want to maximize their usefulness and minimize their interference--but are sometimes unsure how to achieve these goals during practice. 270 pages.
Laurie grew up in a rural community and had the good fortune of working with kind and dedicated teachers who were both skillful pedagogues and encouraging mentors. Their passion for quality teaching and high-level musicianship instilled in Laurie the powerful relationship between teaching and artistic performance. Cornelia dreamed of playing the cello beautifully but didn’t have a real teacher until she was twenty. While the work required relearning almost everything she thought she knew, she was old enough to observe her own transformation, guided by a thoughtful and dedicated teacher, and teaching and performing became the inseparable “two sides of the same coin.”They've worked together ever since, writing, teaching, presenting, and sharing great ideas.
Most teachers have a clear vision of where their students are headed: the sequences of instruction required, the stages and pacing of learning, and what students will be able to do at the end.
However, if knowledge of that end goal is not shared with students, the momentum generated by the learning, even with successful completion of each step, can be lost. When students can see where they are going, and trust the pathway designed for their optimal learning, there is a ‘buy-in” that supports their internally-driven focus and the investment of time necessary for achievement.
We have enjoyed reading, rereading, and recommending this book that clearly explains research-based and consistently effective teaching strategies.
In November 2008, John Hattie's ground-breaking book Visible Learning synthesised the results of more than fifteen years research involving millions of students and represented the biggest ever collection of evidence-based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning.
Visible Learning for Teachers takes the next step and brings those ground breaking concepts to a completely new audience. Written for students, pre-service and in-service teachers, it explains how to apply the principles of Visible Learning to any classroom anywhere in the world. The author offers concise and user-friendly summaries of the most successful interventions and offers practical step-by-step guidance…
I grew up with the music of the 1960s. Going to packed, pheromone-heavy dances featuring The Lincolns—Nova Scotia’s most popular and most soulful band—were a huge part of my teenage years. Those experiences implanted a deep love of R&B, and somehow or other pointed me in the direction of becoming a writer. It’s a bit of a mystery how it all works. In any case, of all my books, none was as much fun to work on as Kings of Friday Night. It has received lots of love, including from readers who grew up far from the time and place I write about. Long live local bands! And live music everywhere!
Alan Leeds does a wonderful job presenting his eyewitness experiences as part of the James Brown entourage in the 1960s and beyond. The reader can’t wait to find out what happens next in the riveting story he presents of Soul Brother No. 1, the “hardest working man in show business.” It’s a fascinating tale, which presents Brown as an innovative musical force, determined artist, forceful businessman, and unpredictable personality. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the Chitlin’ Circuit when soul music was taking off as a dynamic new genre—as recalled by a young, Jewish kid from Queens who joined James Brown’s team and learned the music business at the hand of the performer who mastered it.
“Alan Leeds was a protegé of James Brown and a true historian of the world that nurtured the great entertainer. Alan was a witness to the vibrant black music scene of the ’60s and ’70s—whose book is both a memoir and a document of a lost world of sound.”—Nelson George, an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker
A behind-the-scenes look at the Chitlin’ Circuit during American’s most vital period of soul music—from the eyes and ears of a young, Jewish kid from Queens who joined the team of the…
Writing about history came to me rather late in life and I suppose it’s because the past now looks more inviting than the future. But there’s more to it than that. Everything has a history; it’s a bottomless topic. I became fascinated with the history of my own geographic environment and began exploring areas that were basically in my own backyard, which led to the inception of my first book. And, after years working as a graphic artist, I decided to help the narrative along by adding illustrations. A second book soon followed, then a third, a fourth, and now I’ve just finished my fifth book.
This is an absolute must for anyone interested in almost any musical genre.
Now in its fifth edition, it takes on the arduous task of sifting through the back stories of over 1,000 of the most familiar tunes through 500 years of musical history.
A more recent, albeit still antique reference, is the story of how “Jingle Bells” came to be, and the controversy regarding where it was actually, written; the snow-covered streets of Medford, Massachusetts, or the live oak-lined thoroughfares of Savanah, Georgia.
This classic, painstakingly researched compilation of music information, newly revised and enlarged, analyzes nearly 1,000 of the world's most familiar melodies, tracing them back to their original printed sources. Here in one convenient volume are the composers, lyricists, copyright date, first lines of music, lyrics, physical condition of first editions, and other data on a tremendous range of compositions, including We Shall Overcome, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, The Well-Tempered Clavier, There's No Business Like Show Business, Silent Night, Pictures at an Exhibition, Schubert’s Ave Maria, and many more. 30 black-and-white illustrations.
I've been passionate about music for almost my entire life. Jazz music in particular speaks to me but not just jazz. I love music, full stop. I really discovered jazz when I attended a jazz club workshop in London and there, I had to join in or leave. I chose to join in and since then I have never looked back. I was introduced to more jazz musicians and now write about music for three major columns as well as Readers’ Digest. My Women In Jazz book won several awards. I have been International Editor for the Jazz Journalist Association and had my work commissioned by the Library of Congress.
Howard Goodall is one of those authors who explains things incredibly clearly.
I found this book an eye-opener, a way into a deeper understanding of music, and a book to have by my side, to dip into whenever I needed to get an idea straight of understand a concept. Because he writes in such an accessible manner, the complexity of music becomes clearer. There are eye-opening facts, historical stories, and facts alongside well written and informative passages.
Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex.
In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation-harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording-strikes us with its original force. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant,…
More has been accomplished by music to wake us up that any marches, speeches, injustice, and/or wealth. In the beginning, music and its many forms I followed were an accident. Now I see that music is vital for social expression, intimacy, solitude. The walls in my writing room are covered with photos, CDs, 78s, and most certainly live recordings and books. I feel sorry for the soul(s) who will have to pick through this history when I’ve gone to that Upper Room.
Yes, the title is spelled correctly. I’ve known Stanley Booth from our days in Memphis. He has written about The Rolling Stones, B. B. King, Al Green, and Keith Richards. Keith wrote that “The interesting thing about music to me is that music has always seemed streaks ahead of any other Art form or any other form of social expression.” It has never been said any better.
Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil contains studies of numerous, forgotten musicians and singers. It is a study of remote history. Stanley Booth doesn’t write with ink. He writes with grit.
A collection of 20 essays centred on Memphis, Tennessee, and comprising a fusion of fact, essays and fiction in which the author describes his encounters with major figures of American blues and soul music. Stanley Booth also wrote "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones".
I have always seen my life as a journey, with lessons to be learnt along the way. Adventures on land and sea have drawn me into contact with many races and traditions and brought me close to nature in its many moods. When a physical journey ends, an inner journey takes me in directions I had never looked at before. Early spiritual questioning led me to eastern philosophies and made me aware of the underlying links between all cultures. In relying on my own experiences rather than what others have written, I believe my writing brings a freshness and individuality to the age-old questions of who we are and where we are going.
The innovative thinking in this book inspired me to put my original ideas into writing. Here was someone else who was looking into the profound origins of humanity and how the world is made up. It reassured me I was on the right track in associating the Major Arcana of the Tarot with the I-Ching. Michael Hayes goes further in detecting a numerical and musical synthesis between ancient doctrines and current scientific discoveries. It is not a quick read, but a real eye-opener. Whilst not agreeing with all of it, there was so much fascinating information; I had to read it through twice straight off.
This is a numerical study proving that religion and science share a common underlying structure, which is very similar to music theory. This study proposes that all the world's major religious and esoteric doctrines share a common scientific origin. Further that this hidden science is none other than musical theory: music being the true common denominator of both religious and scientific traditions. From the mysterious cults of ancient Egypt, China and India and Greece right through to the latest findings in molecular biology and particle physics, there is a law of proportions that corresponds to the rules of music.
I’ve been trying to balance a need to help make the world a better place with my own small expertise as a musician and teacher. So I’ve played music with birds, whales, and bugs, taught philosophy to engineers for decades, written many books and released many albums, and traveled all over the world learning what people are doing to improve things. I need to find words to read that encourage me and lift me out of the looming pull of depressing statistics and real suffering that we all read about every day. I hope change is possible, and I urge everyone to work toward it in their own specific and unique ways.
From the 1960s but still one of the greatest books on how being creative means trying everything, trusting no one, and listening to everybody and everything. After you read this you will know that you can be an artist, that is, if you are meant to be one.
Silence, John Cage's first book and epic masterpiece, was published in October 1961. In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching. Fifty years later comes a beautiful new edition with a foreword by eminent music critic Kyle Gann. A landmark book in American arts and culture, Silence has been translated into more than forty languages and has…
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