The Symphony, 1800-1900

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.