The Biology of Musical Performance and Performance-Related Injury by
The Biology of Musical Performance and Performance-Related Injury presents singers and instrumentalists with accurate information on the physical processes that underlie their craft. The book provides a concise overview of the biological principles associated with performance technique while assuming no prior scientific knowledge, making it accessible to both musicians and to health professionals who treat performance-related medical conditions.
Author Alan H. D. Watson explains the concepts and techniques of music performance, discussing themes such as posture and the back; movements of the arm and hand and associated problems; breathing in singers and wind players; the embouchure and respiratory tract in wind playing; the larynx and vocal tract in singers; the brain and its role in skill acquisition and aural processing; and stress and its management. Watson offers performers and teachers the tools they need to create a rational approach to the development and communication of technique. He also provides insight into the origins of performance-related injury, helping to reduce the risk of such problems by encouraging a technique that is sustainable in the long term. Each chapter includes several illustrations and an extensive bibliography for further reading. To support the text, a CD-Rom is included, featuring original diagrams that clearly illustrate the relevant aspects of body structure and function, explaining and illuminating key concepts through an extensive set of animations, sound files, and videos.
The Inner Game of Music by
By the best-selling co-author of Inner Tennis, here's a book designed to help musicians overcome obstacles, help improve concentration, and reduce nervousness, allowing them to reach new levels of performing excellence and musical artistry.
Musical Performance: a guide to understanding by 
The Musician's Breath: The Role of Breathing in Human Expression by
Examining breath in its role as the "delivery system” for ideas in musical performance, this provocative book makes a compelling case for the power of submitting oneself to its miracles. The study is divided into two sections the first discussing the "why" of breathing and the second providing the "how" with practical applications for singers, instrumentalists, and conductors. Unique perspectives on the practice of yoga and other paradigms help to reveal the breath’s potential, ensuring that all musicians from choral directors to solo instrumentalists can deepen their understanding of human expression through this simple practice.
On Becoming a Rock Musician by
In the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a rock musician was different than playing other kinds of music. It was a learned rather than taught skill. In On Becoming a Rock Musician, sociologist H. Stith Bennett observes what makes a rock musician and then persuades others to take him seriously. The book explores how bands form; the backstage and on-stage reality of playing in a band; how bands promote themselves and interact with an audience and music professionals, such as DJs; and the role of performance.
Performance Anxiety Strategies: a musician's guide to managing stage fright by
Presents relevant and noteworthy research and insight into some of the most popular and many lesser-known holistic, exposure, cognitive, and behavioral therapies and medical treatments
The Science and Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning by
What type of practice makes a musician perfect? What sort of child is most likely to succeed on a musical instrument? What practice strategies yield the fastest improvement in skills such as sight-reading, memorization, and intonation? Scientific and psychological research can offer answers to these and other questions that musicians face every day. In The Science and Psychology of Music Performance, Richard Parncutt and Gary McPherson assemble relevant current research findings and make them accessible to musicians and music educators. This book describes new approaches to teaching music, learning music, and making music at all educational and skill levels.Each chapter represents the collaboration between a music researcher (usually a music psychologist) and a performer or music educator. This combination of expertise results in excellent practical advice. Readers will learn, for example, that they are in the majority (57%) if they experience rapid heartbeat before performances; the chapter devoted to performance anxiety will help them decide whether beta-blocker medication, hypnotherapy, or the Alexander Technique of relaxation might alleviate their stage fright. Another chapter outlines a step-by-step method for introducing children to musical notation, firmly based on research in cognitive development. Altogether, the 21 chapters cover the personal, environmental, and acoustical influences that shape the learning and performance of music.
A Soprano on Her Head: right-side-up reflections on life and other performances by 
Stage Presence from Head to Toe: a manual for musicians by
...the only resource of its kind: a practical, authoritative guide to accepted practices of stage presence for performing musicians. It answers the basic questions every musician has about a performance: how to prepare, how to dress, how to walk out on stage, how to bow, how to look confident and put your audience at ease, how to interact with other musicians on stage and with backstage personnel. The book discusses the specific needs of soloists and small and large ensembles, both instrumental and vocal. Includes illustrations, several helpful checklists and a comprehensive bibliography.
You Are Your Instrument: the definitive musician's guide to practice and performance by 
The Art of Practicing: a guide to making music from the heart by
This landmark book enlightens amateur and professional musicians about a way of practicing that transforms a sometimes frustrating, monotonous, and overly strenuous labor into an exhilarating and rewarding experience. Acclaimed pianist and teacher Madeline Bruser combines physiological and meditative principles to help musicians release physical and mental tension and unleash their innate musical talent. She offers practical techniques for cultivating free and natural movement, a keen enjoyment of sounds and sensations, a clear and relaxed mind, and an open heart and she explains how to Prepare the body and mind to practice with ease Understand the effect of posture on flexibility and expressiveness Make efficient use of the hands and arms Employ listening techniques to improve coordination Increase the range of color and dynamics by using less effort Cultivate rhythmic vitality Perform with confidence, warmth, and freedom Photographs show essential points of posture and movement for a variety of instruments.
The Perfect Wrong Note: learning to trust your musical self by
In this groundbreaking book, prize-winning pianist and noted educator William Westney helps readers rediscover their own path to the natural, transcendent fulfillment of making music. Teachers, professionals and students of any instrument, as well as parents and music lovers of all ages, will benefit from his unique and inspiring philosophy, expressed with clarity and immediacy. Award-wiining auther, William Westney, offers healthy alternatives for lifelong learning and suggests significant change in the way music is taught. For example, playing a wrong note can be constructive, useful, even enlightening. The energetic creator of the acclaimed Un-Master Class workshop also explores the special potential of group work, outlining the basics of his revelatory workshop that has transformed the music experience for participants the world over.
The Pianist's Problems: a modern approach to efficient practice and musicianly performance by
"The reader must have noted in the favorite magazines of the practicing pianist how often the same troubled queries reappear: How can memorizing be made easier and more secure? How can the fourth and fifth fingers be strengthened? What produces musicianship? These and many others are perennial questions of the greatest practical importance to student, teacher, and performer. Strange, then, that adequate answers are so hard to find. With all the time and effort devoted to the study ofthe piano, with all the advances in the psychology of training, with all the special studies that have been conducted, there should be, by now, if not one right answer to each question, at least a preferred answer that will be right for the large majority of pianists. As a matter of fact, there are preferred answers in almost every instance. . . . The need is to bring these answers together, in one place, and to present them in nontechnical language as a concise, up-to-date, coordinated philosophy of piano playing. To meet this need, the present book has been written."--from the Preface
The Practice Revolution: getting great results from the six days between music lessons by 
Baroque music : style and performance, a handbook by 
The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century by
Part history, part explanation of early music, this book also plays devil's advocate, criticizing current practices and urging experimentation. Haynes, a veteran of the movement, describes a vision of the future that involves improvisation, rhetorical expression, and composition.
A History of Musical Style by
Style -- the distinctive manner of presentation, construction, and execution in any art -- is a topic of primary importance in music history. This highly regarded text by noted musicologist Richard Crocker (University of California, Berkeley) takes a much-needed fresh look at the subject and attempts to reshape some basic ideas in the light of modern research. Seeking the reasons for stylistic change within the history of style itself (rather than in the history of men or of ideas), this enlightening account shows how music, growing out of its own past, has shaped its own development.
Professor Crocker's exceptionally clear and systematic presentation enables students to easily follow the evolution of Western musical style from Gregorian Chant (ca. 750) to the atonal music of the mid-20th century. The book stresses the continuity of basic musical principles over long periods of history, while it explores in detail moments of high stylistic achievement and the composers who exemplified them.
Drawing of the earliest written records, Crocker begins his description and analysis of Western music's changing style with a discussion of Frankish Gregorian Chant, laudes and melismas, and polyphony -- the leading medium of musical development after 1150. The author traces the progression of new polyphonic forms from the Parisian motet of the 13th and 14th centuries through Italian song forms to the Franco-Flemish style of the 15th and 16th centuries. This sweeping survey then documents the emergence of the Classic Style after 1550, embodied in the music of such composers as Palestrina and Byrd, moves through new Italian dramatic styles (1600--1650) and on to the harmonic and polyphonic contributions of the 17th- and 18th-century masters.
With perception and insight, Crocker traces the creation of the German symphonic style, epitomized in the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and deals with the parallel development of operatic style. An illuminating examination of new styles after 1900, including the serial music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, concludes this exhaustive study.
Over 140 music examples complement Crocker's lucid text, and lists of Selected Study Materials for each chapter are given at the back of the book. This work will be welcomed by music students at all levels, music scholars, and the interested layman as well.
The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Revealed by Contemporary Evidence by 
The Notation Is Not the Music: Reflections on Early Music Practice and Performance by
Written by a leading authority and artist of the historical transverse flute, The Notation Is Not the Music offers invaluable insight into the issues of historically informed performance and the parameters--and limitations--of notation-dependent performance. As Barthold Kuijken illustrates, performers of historical music should consider what is written on the page as a mere steppingstone for performance. Only by continual examination and reexamination of the sources to discover original intent can an early music practitioner come close to authentic performance.
Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance by 
Cello Technique : principles and forms of movement by The Compleat Violinist : thoughts, exercises, reflections of an itinerant violinist by 
The Viola : complete guide for teachers and students by 
Flute Technique by How to Play Clarinet by 
Oboe Unbound : Contemporary Techniques by
After decades of experimentation, musicians have begun to utilize a strikingly colorful palette of sounds on woodwind instruments. Flute, clarinet, and saxophone players, in many different musical settings, regularly use sounds that were unheard of in the middle of the twentieth century. Oboists, in comparison, have lagged somewhat behind their more adventurous colleagues. In writing Oboe Unbound: Contemporary Techniques, author Libby Van Cleve opens up the tradition-bound assumptions of the instrument’s capabilities. Not only does she include descriptions of the instrument’s standard technique from range and reeds to the use of vibrato, but she also discusses recent techniques, such as multiphonics, microtones, altered timbres, and extended range, to name a few. Van Cleve bolsters this book with numerous music examples and professionally-tested fingering charts, and concludes with basic information about the use of electronics for amplification, recording, and sound enhancement. The book’s appendixes include a substantial bibliography of music and literature and a discography including jazz, non-western, and art music recordings. The revised edition incorporates new information about resources now available through the internet and marks the launch of a website that includes examples of all the contemporary sounds as well as audio and video recordings of unreleased compositions.
Oboe Technique by 
On Playing the Flute by The single reeds : the nuts and bolts of clarinet and saxophone by 
Buzz to Brilliance : A Beginning and Intermediate Guide to Trumpet Playing by 
Guide to the Tuba Repertoire by
Guide to the Tuba Repertoire is the most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken into the literature and discography of any single musical instrument. Under the direction of R. Winston Morris and Daniel Perantoni, this publication represents more than 40 years of research by dozens of leading professionals throughout the world. The guide defines the current status of the tuba and documents its growth since its inception in 1835. Contributors are Ron Davis, Jeffrey Funderburk, David Graves, Skip Gray, Charles A. McAdams, R. Winston Morris, Mark A. Nelson, Timothy J. Northcut, Daniel Perantoni, Philip Sinder, Joseph Skillen, Kenyon Wilson, and Jerry A. Young.
Trumpet Technique by
In the last forty years, many elite performers in the arts have gleaned valuable lessons and techniques from research and advances in sport science, psychomotor research, learning theory, and psychology. Numerous "peak performance" books have made these tools and insights available to athletes.Now, professor and performer Frank Gabriel Campos has translated this concept for trumpet players and other brass and wind instrumentalists, creating an accessible and comprehensive guide to performance skill. Trumpet Technique combines the newest research on skill acquisition and peak performance with the time-honored and proven techniques of master teachers and performers. All aspects of brass technique are discussed in detail, including the breath, embouchure, oral cavity, tongue, jaw, and proper body use, as well as information on performance psychology, practice techniques, musicians' occupational injuries, and much more.Comprehensive and detailed, Trumpet Technique is an invaluable resource for performers, teachers, and students at all levels seeking to move to the highest level of skill with their instrument.
Wind Talk for Brass : A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching Brass Instruments by
Wind Talk for Brass provides instrumental music teachers, practitioners, and students with a handy, easy-to-use pedagogical resource for brass instruments found in school instrumental programs. With thorough coverage of the most common brass instruments - trumpet, horn, trombone, baritone/euphonium, and tuba/sousaphone - the book offers the most topical and information necessary for effective teaching. This includes terminology, topics, and concepts associated with each specific instrument, along with teaching suggestions that can be applied in the classroom. Be sure to look to the back of the book for a "Practical Tips" section, which discusses common technical faults and corrections, common problems with sound (as well as their causes and solutions to them), fingering charts, literature lists (study materials, method books, and solos), as well as a list of additional resources relevant to teaching brass instruments (articles, websites, audio recordings). Without question, Wind Talk for Brass stands alone as an invaluable resource for woodwinds!
