Music Composition Books: A Composer’s Reading List

Analyzing Classical Form by William Caplin is will give you a solid toolset for understanding musical form. He bases his theory of form off of many of the ideas from Arnold Schoenberg’s book, The Fundamentals of Musical Composition. I cannot overstate the impact his book has made on my compositional thinking. Highly recommended for all composers. Also check out my interview with him.

This books really started me on the right path to understanding composition. Schoenberg has a great way of explaining the processes of composition and breaking them down for beginners.

This is the best book on modal counterpoint, hands down. He breaks the process into simple steps and has very clear rules to follow. He also gives a great historical perspective by quoting extensively from original manuals on counterpoint from the Renaissance.

The Art of Partimento will open your eyes to the traditional methods of music composition instruction that was prevalent during the 18th and 19th century in Italy and beyond. The book contains the history of partimento training, as well as how the system works. Partimento is basically teaching students the fundamentals of composition through learning to harmonize basslines, and apply them to many different practice compositions. They would start with simple pieces, and work all the way up to complex fugues. An excellent book!

This book opened up my mind to new ideas (actually old and lost ideas) about the relationship between singing, melody and counterpoint. It’s a different way to sing solfeggio clarifies key relationships in a more useful way for composing.

Voice Leading by David Huron is a fascinating book that goes into the psychological aspects of how we hear independent musical lines and the principles behind them. For the first time, he has truly cleared up the plethora of conflicting rules given by different books on the subject of voice leading and counterpoint.

This is an amazing book that really shows the logic behind how our harmony works. I have referenced his ideas frequently in my courses and articles.

A great resource to break out of traditional harmony.

Creative Orchestration is one of the few books on orchestration that has actual principles to follow, and not just rules of thumb.

This is a must read for anyone wanting to learn orchestration. Samuel Adler’s book on orchestration has been the de facto text book in America for decades and its easy to see why. It has clear explanations, many examples and years of experience all boiled into one book. Also, check out my interview with him.

For advanced orchestrators, Brant’s book really breaks down balance and timbre like no other author has done before.

The best resource on music notation. This is always on my desk when I am preparing parts and orchestral scores. There are so many intricacies of music notation, that every composer eventually runs into a question that they cannot answer from experience. This book has the answers.