After many years of knowing I should read this masterful book, I'm so glad I finally did this year. And after I read it once, I went back through it again to write down the strongest points of each section. When it comes to understanding forms in western art music over the past few hundred years, Fundamentals of Musical Composition by the great Arnold Schoenberg was the most helpful, clear, and concise book on the topic I've ever encountered. It does require the reader to have a fair understanding of western music fundamentals in place already, but if you have that and you'd like a bit more insight about what goes into writing a sonata or a symphony – or things derived from those – it's a phenomenal resource.

This is not, significantly, a book about orchestration or arranging. There are many other great texts about those topics (I like the ones by Rimsky-Korsakov and Henry Mancini, for example). The concepts in the Schoenberg book can easily be illustrated with a piano reduction of a score. That's one of the things I found most useful about it: these concepts translate way beyond European classical music. My strongest background is in jazz, fusion, "contemporary instrumental" music, all that, although I've played and studied a fair amount of European classical music in the past. But it's not like I'm writing concertos regularly. Schoenberg's concepts still lit continuous lightbulbs over my head while I was reading.

There's a legendary text about screenwriting by Robert McKee called Story and it's a standard text for all the most prominent screen and stage MFA programs in the country. I consider Fundamentals of Musical Composition to be the parallel for music. I wish I'd read it years ago but I'm glad I finally did. It's not exactly a piece of gear but I still give it five stars across the board.

And that's my first book report for GS.

Arnold Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition is excellent, definitely on my short list of favorite music textbooks.

If you liked that and found it valuable, you may also like and value these:

- Paul Hindemith's The Craft Of Musical Composition
- Joseph N. Straus' Introduction To Post-Tonal Theory
- John Rahn's Basic Atonal Theory
- Charles Wuorinen's Simple Composition
- Robert Morris' Composition With Pitch Classes
- Reginald Smith Brindle's Serial Composition

I feel like my list would be remiss if it didn't also include
- Allen Forte's The Structure Of Atonal Music, and
- George Perle's Serial Composition And Atonality
...but tbh, those two books are way more math-intensive than any musical tome I personally would consider "essential" ...they are awesome reference books, and they are considered the definitive treatises on important 20th Century compositional techniques, but they are deep and heady and to my mind not quite the sort of text that inspires or reveals or provides the curious composer with the "ah-ha!" moment that Schoenberg et al's books do.

The Hindemith and Strauss books should be next on my list, I'm glad you mentioned them!

Thank you for the book report. :-) Just ordered the paperback.

I've got a few theory books, and each of them serve a specific role. Some, like my book of scales around the world serve only to remind me that I simply can't compose in a single scale. This book seems to fill a role still unmet. I love classic theory, but am in no way gearing up to compose classical music although I yearn for a bit of ELO gorgeousness in my creations.