The Symphony 1800 1900: A Norton Music Anthology

Rating:
Summary: recommended
Review: 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.