Now I haven't done any serious reading for many years - just some delving into reference books & reading articles online. Never really been into reading novels etc so the last time I did any 'serious' reading was probably way back when I was at college (1977-79)!
Luckily I've kept all of my books over the years and have a reasonable collection of music books (sadly many that I have never read) so I thought a good place to start would be 'An outline history of European Music' by Michael Hurd. This was one of the text books I bought when at college and is only 132 pages so wouldn't be too demanding! So the other night whilst the family were watching soaps etc on the TV I grabbed a mug of coffee and settled down in the study and began. What seemed like only a short amount of time later one of my daughters appeared to wish me goodnight - I'd been sat there for almost three hours and had just about completed the book in one reading session. Now whether or not I will retain much of the information read is another matter but I got quite engrossed and really enjoyed it.
The book pretty much covered everything from the beginnings of polyphony in the middle ages through to the music of the 20th century (predominantly classical based). So it was really a good grounding to get me started.
So what to cover next? Revision of Harmony & Composition; Psychology For Musicians; The Language of Music? Who knows - they all need covering at some point so will pick the next one purely based on my mood at the time :-)
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