I was pretty excited about this book because I'm a big fan of Copland and writing about music in general. In the end, I found this book to be good, but not great.

Copland, more than anything, knows what he's talking about and if you want to go into 'classical' music experiences with a better understanding of what's going on, this book is for you. I've studied classical music theory and composition rules in the past so a lot of this was review. I did learn some things about musical structures (rondo, sonata allegro, etc) that I didn't know before.

My biggest beef with this book was that it's pretty elitist. He covers classical (well classical, romantic, baroque, modern etc), ballet, opera and film music fairly extensively, but besides passing mentions of jazz, Indian ragas and some Chinese scales, he really doesn't cover other music. Granted the book was written in 1939 and revised in the '50s, so there wasn't really rock music and the access to blues and other American musics were less, but we know that Copland listened to these (he cannibalized--brilliantly, I may add--a version of "Bonaparte's Retreat" for Rodeo, Shaker songs for Appalachian Spring, cowboy songs for Billy the Kid) and they are all music, so what should we listen for in them? Very few people will say that blues or other folk traditions are as complex as Beethoven, but it is still music that can use contextualization.

(By the way, if you wish to contextualize and figure out what to listen to in the blues, read Alan Lomax's Land Where the Blue Began.)