Classical Music for Dummies

Amazon.com

In a time when school music classes (if they exist at all) teach their students the finer points of the themes from The Twilight Zone and Jaws instead of real music; when classical radio stations are converted to Lite Rock or switched to a "top 100" classical jukebox format; and when even churches increasingly favor banal "Jesus Is My Boyfriend"-style slop instead of Bach, Mozart, and Vaughn Williams, classical music may legitimately be seen as an endangered cultural species. Enter Scott Speck and David Pogue, who take out the unnecessary mystery, and offer an easy-to-swallow quickie education, ranging from Gregorian chants to contemporary composers such as John Adams and John Corigliano. If you can't tell an oboe from a bassoon, there's also a dandy guide to the instruments of the orchestra, and once you're through that information you'll know the difference between a concerto and a sonata. Best of all is the introduction to music theory, which actually makes a daunting subject seem easy. It's all supported by a helpful enhanced compact disc (it works in your CD-ROM drive; it plays on your stereo's CD player) containing more than an hour of representative musical tidbits from good EMI recordings. Although the tone is unremittingly flippant and the jokes are, for the most part, pretty bad, Classical Music for Dummies is one of the better works in this series, and really does provide a useful reference for a subject too often seen as arcane.

Book Description

The more you know about classical music, the more you love it. Now, thanks to Classical Music For Dummies, you can achieve a whole new level of insight into both the composers and the compositions that have made classical music one of the great accomplishments of humankind.

Classical Music For Dummies doesn't assume that you have a degree in musicology -- or even that you took a course in music appreciation. Rather, the multimedially gifted David Pogue and renowned conductor Scott Speck explain classical music in terms you can understand, and they describe musical elements so that you can hear them for yourself.

A reference you can dip into at any point, Classical Music For Dummies covers such topics as

The various forms that classical music takes -- from symphonies to string quartets
What goes on behind the scenes and on stage to fill a concert hall with great classical music
How to recognize, by sight and by sound, the many instruments that make up an orchestra
The nuts and bolts of classical music -- from rhythm to harmonic progression

Plus, Classical Music For Dummies comes complete with a CD containing over 60 minutes of masterpieces compiled especially for the book. The CD also includes a demo version of the Angel/EMI Classics For Dummies ^TM multimedia interface to try out on your Windows-based PC or Macintosh computer.

Customer Reviews:

classical music appreciation and theory.......2007-09-04

This book is incredibly well written. It was totally absorbing, entertaining and informative. By the time I finished it, I felt like I had earned a degree in classical music appreciation and another in music theory.

Great book.......2007-08-23

My husband had never been exposed to classical music and when we got married, he wanted to be able to carry on a conversation with the rest of my family. He has loved this book and it has really taught him a lot about classical music.

humor overpowers the content.......2007-08-09

You have to be careful with the Dummies series. Some authors use humor with discretion, others, as in this case, lard on so much humor that it gets in the way of learning and turns what should be a pleasure into an ordeal of extracting the useful information from the attempt at clever wise-cracks, puns and general satire.

Yes, there is information here if you are willing to work to get it, but a good 50% of the text is gratuitous laughs. There are other books, such as "The Classical Music Experience" by Jacobson, that treat the reader as someone intelligent who seeks to know rather than to be entertained.

The best advice is to go to the library and look in the music appreciation section. You'll find many superior alternatives to this book.

Really gets you up to speed on classical music.......2007-07-08

If you love--or would like to at least understand--classical music, then this is the book to read. It is fun, quick and not so technical or snooty as many books on this subject. In fact, it's not snooty at all. I learned a bunch I had no idea of, reaffirmed things I did know, and corrected several misconceptions. Read this if you are going to be around "high-brow" snooty types and then just smile quietly as they rattle on and on. Little will they know that you "understand the language."

A very good entry level book.......2005-09-14

This is a very good entry level book, about classical music.
It's fun to read and it's written in an easy to understand level.
I recomend this book for all the people who likes classical music and wants to learn more before moving to more serious books.

Average customer rating:

Música clásica para Dummies
David Pogue , and Scott Speck
Manufacturer: Norma
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 9580442029

Book Description

¿Se pone nervioso cuando sus amigos lo invitan a uno de los conciertos de temporada de la Sinfónica porque usted no distingue entre Beethoven y Bach? ¿Se siente incapaz de escoger la música apropiada para la cena de esta noche? ¿Le encantan los sonidos de la música clásica pero no sabe la diferencia entre un violín y una viola?

Música clásica para dummies es una guía fácil que le ayudará a disfrutar la música clásica desde el principio. Si está interesado en ir a conciertos, comprar discos de obras maestras, o simplemente quiere ser capaz de hablar del tema de manera inteligente, ¡éste es el libro para usted!

Con la ayuda de esta obra usted podrá:

--Distinguir entre los diferentes estilos y géneros de música clásica del mundo occidental.
--Utilizar el disco compacto que viene con el libro para identificar, entender y disfrutar obras maestras clásicas.
--Ir debidamente preparado a un concierto: saber escoger los puestos más convenientes; entender el programa; identificar los diferentes instrumentos, y mucho más.
--Leer y entender partituras.
--Apreciar los sonidos de la orquesta - desde violines y violonchelos hasta trombones.
--Coleccionar una maravillosa discoteca de música clásica enteramente a su gusto.
--Localizar en Internet sensacionales sitios Web y grupos de conversación sobre música clásica.

Average customer rating:

Everybody NEEDS this!

Classical Music Without Fear: A Guide for General Audiences
Marianne Williams Tobias
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Classical | Musical Genres | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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In this entertaining and engaging book, Marianne Williams Tobias demystifies the potentially intimidating world of classical music for a general readership. Classical Music Without Fear aims at the intelligent reader by demonstrating the universality and relevancy of classical music to today's listeners.

This easy-access book contains lively historical commentary, intelligent explanations of musical style and form, helpful tips on attending concerts, a quick guide to reading music and musical scores, and a glossary of terms. Also included is a reference section that summarizes standard concert works and suggests choices for starting your own classical CD collection. Lavishly illustrated with full-color reproductions of period artwork and numerous other portraits, musical scores, and illustrations, Classical Music Without Fear brings the heritage of classical music to life.

Customer Reviews:

Everybody NEEDS this!.......2003-10-28

Boy, talk about taking the next step in the evolution of the "For Dummies" series! This really is a must-have for everyone, whether musicians and classical enthusiasts, or not. Dr. Tobias has written "for the masses," making everything fun and interesting, while imparting a great deal of information in a very palatable way. And the photos and illustrations are to DIE FOR. Everyone should rush out and buy copies, not only for themselves, but for all their families and friends. After all, Christmas IS just around the corner!

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General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

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Composing Digital Music For Dummies simplifies the process of composing music and allows the reader to develop insight into how music is written and arranged. It also aids readers in mastering the fundamentals of composition and helps them publish their creations via the internet.

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Music Composition For Dummies explains how to use music theory to write music in a variety of forms. It introduces the basic chord construction and shows the reader how to compose music both with chords and melody, develop simple melodic motifs and themes into longer compositions, arrange compositions, create scores, and select the right instruments and voicing to express musical ideas. Music Composition For Dummies also tells how to create popular songs, classically structured pieces, film and television scores, videogame soundtracks, and more using both traditional and improvisational techniques.

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An Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men, one observer called electricity, and it proved to be the most significant scientific discovery of the Enlightenment. Lecturers attracted huge audiences who marveled at sparkling fountains, flaming drinks, pirouetting dancers, and electrified boys. Flamboyant experimenters made chains of soldiers leap into the air, while wealthy women titillated their admirers with a sensational electric kiss. Optimists predicted that this strange power of nature would cure illnesses, improve crop production, even bring the dead back to life. An Entertainment for Angels tells the story of how electricity charged the eighteenth-century imagination. With contemporary illustrations and engaging prose, Patricia Fara vividly portrays the struggles to understand the unusual and exciting effects that electrical experiments were producing.

One of the heroes of the story is Benjamin Franklin, renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as an expert on electricity, who introduced lightning rods to protect tall buildings, pioneered techniques to treat paralyzed patients, and developed one of the most successful explanations of this mysterious phenomenon. Others include Luigi Galvani, whose electrical research on frogs and animals makes for grisly reading but led to the discovery of direct current electricity; and Alessandro Volta, who -- with Napoleon's enthusiastic support -- became one of Europe's leading scientific practitioners and invented the world's first battery.

An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment

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Benjamin Franklin's science.(Scientists' Bookshelf)(Book Review): An article from: American Scientist

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Informative and fun

A Must Have!

2005 Wild Woman's Guide to Texas Hold 'Em Poker
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This book introduces you to the basics of the most interesting poker game in the universe: Texas Hold 'Em Poker. It covers everything from hand rankings to poker terminology.

Customer Reviews:

Informative and fun.......2005-03-03

I had a trip to Las Vegas planned and everybody told me texas hold 'em was the game to play. The Wild Woman's Guide gave me all the basic info I needed to learn how--after reading it I couldn't wait to hit the tables. Great presentation with lots of fun pictures throughout!

A Must Have!.......2005-03-03

I have never had the nerve to sit down at a Texas Hold 'Em table. I read this book on the plane in route to Las Vegas. It is clear, informative and a must have before you ever sit down at the table. It eliminated any intimidation that I would have had.

Average customer rating:

A book with no target audience

Disappointing

Great non-techie intro

Sound non-technical explanations of J2EE 1.4

I'm learning, but this book is too repetive and not technical enough

J2EE 1.4: The Big Picture
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Book Description

A thorough introduction to the complexities of J2EE that explains the big picture without getting bogged down in the details or hype.

Written for managers and techies alike
J2EE helps enterprises extend their reach, reduce their costs, and lower their response times by providing easy-to-access services to customers, partners, employees, and suppliers
Tightly focused on J2EE, a great first stop for anyone seeking to learn about the potential and promises of the technology

In short, J2EE is a powerful, but complex technology. J2EE is many things, but essentially it is a standard for application servers. In this innovative new book, the authors provide a concise and entertaining introduction to the J2EE platform for professionals who need to understand the big picture, and may or may not be technically savvy. The book provides an overview of the four key tiers in J2EE and how they work, at a level anyone can understand. This book is tightly focused on J2EE and will not address competing technologies or extended implementation or specific development or deployment details.

Customer Reviews:

A book with no target audience.......2006-08-15

This is quite possibly the worst book ever written. I've actually not finished reading it, and probably never will; I've tried three times, but end up putting it down after 20 pages every time I pick it up. I recently brought it on a plane trip with me so I had several hours with it, but it's just not possible to get very far. You truly have to suspend disbelief while reading this piece of garbage: "Are they really writing this? Doesn't Prentice Hall use editors? Or at least some sort of grammar check?"

Every aspect of technology has been personified or anthropomorphized. The Dolphin is constantly talking to the Statue of Atlas who in turn talks to the Golden Retriever, but they only explain once that the Golden Retrieve equals the database server, so after five pages when you've forgotten that fact none of it makes any sense any more. You literally need Cliffs Notes to decode what the authors are talking about. All the "characters" talk to each other, with dialogue and everything. And the dialogue is AWFUL. If you can't write poetry or prose, then why bother writing a little play between the web serving Bee and the web containing Horse? Reading terrible writing is surprisingly distracting. Midway through trying to comprehend a concept the authors cut away to an example where the Scarecrow says something unbelievably stupid to the Cowardly Lion and all you can think is "how did this make it into the final draft?" Congratulations: you just wasted the last five minutes of your life, and you have nothing at all to show for it. (Aside: they actually use the characters from the Wizard of Oz to represent some concept, but the analogy is so flawed that they literally take several sentences explaining how the Tin Man represents Resource Management. You will never get those three minutes back, and you will be dumber for having read it. Shouldn't an example metaphor whose purpose is to illustrate a point be somewhat obvious?)

This book is 90% filler and 100% poorly written. I just cannot figure out who the target audience is. It is not for anyone remotely technical. Anyone who is functional and has risen to a managerial role is probably too busy to deal with the ridiculousness of the book. But if you do have the time to wade through this disaster and are simple enough to appreciate this mess, then how could you possibly need to know about J2EE? Who are you people that gave this book five stars?!? What companies pay your salaries?!?

Disappointing.......2006-06-19

The book is full of "cutesiness" which makes the book much longer than it need be.
Conversely - what the book lacks is a good solid explanation, with detailed examples, of basic elements of J2EE like the Home_interface Component/Local/Remote interface - and how they actually tie-in with the Clients and RDBMS. It's not that these things aren't mentioned. They are. For example chapter12, p.148 :
"The Home interface is kind of like a hostess at a restaurant. In fancier restaurants you don't find your own table and order your food directly from the chef; you ask the hostess to find you a seat and the hostess assigns you a waiter who talks to the chef.You ask the waiter for your food".
Followed by 8 pages containing some codes and and explanations - that don't really explain how you connect everything together.

So in conclusion - if what you want is to know the buzz-words, the book is to long.
If what you need is technical detail beyond a long explanation why J2EE is like a fancy restaurant,
and that: "The database just sits around holding data. Sometimes it hums snatches from Broadway musicals softly to itself but mostly it doesn't do much. And that doesn't do anyone any good. like a library without a librarian" (p.159)
- than this book is disappointing

Great non-techie intro.......2006-05-27

Good non-techie intro. I'm now ready for a technical introduction to J2EE.

It helps to have an introduction to enterprise architecture (i.e. Martin Fowler Enterprise Patterns) before moving on to this book.

Sound non-technical explanations of J2EE 1.4 .......2006-03-17

Sun does a lot of things right with their Java products, but one thing they do wrong is in how they name their versions of Java. J2EE 1.4 is an environment that allows you to do very many things. Short for Java 1.(2) Enterprise Edition, it is a set of tools used to write large, distributed applications, although from the name, it is hard to discern that fact. Since distributed applications have many parts, simply understanding how those parts can be put together is a major undertaking. This book is designed to give the reader a broad overview of J2EE, the various components and what each is used for.
There is very little code in the book. What does appear is skeletal and easy to understand. The premise is that Antoine is starting an online gourmet pizza business after being successful in selling locally. His online component is wildly successful and before long he realizes that he must scale his online business dramatically upward. The current structure of his website does not allow for rapid and efficient expansion, so his online business is in danger of collapsing under the weight of his success.
The book is designed to be an overview of the different ways the components of J2EE can be used to create an application server. It is not in any way meant to be an in-depth technical manual, the goal is to explain the components of J2EE in a way that non-technical people can understand. That goal is successfully met, there is never a time where the authors rise to a technical level beyond that of someone who understands how software operates.
If your goal is to learn the overall use of J2EE in creating large distributed systems, then this is the book for you. However, if you possess some technical knowledge, then it will probably not be interesting or challenging.

I'm learning, but this book is too repetive and not technical enough.......2005-10-09

I'm reading this book and learning concepts like what a JSP is. To me, the JSP serves the same purpose that my PHP, HTML, mySQL website does. JSP is like the HTML page that has PHP scripting built into it.

The book though repeats itself over-and-over again. I would rather have this book in the style of the Visual Quickstart books. This book should be much shorter.

Some things are just silly like likening various parts of the J2EE platform to the characters in the Wizard of Oz. Brains, Courage, and Heart?

There is little technical content as advertised, but there could have been more. There was one page that I read that tells how to graduate into technical material from the web.

It seems that as I go, there is more technical material, but I really don't like to have to be spoon-fed the stuff that I have already read repeatedly. I have to read the repetivie stuff to get to the more and more technical stuff as I read the later chapters.

I'd rather have a book that I could highlight the main points and vocubulary and concepts and review them myself. I learned in a book called "How to Study in College" that rather than reading the same stuff over and over that if you actively study yourself, you learn more.

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