The Listening Book : Discovering Your Own Music

Hi Folks,

For the composers and performers amongst you, I thought you might like
this little book I recently found. It is:

The Listening Book : Discovering Your Own Music
by W. A. Mathieu, Emily Sell (Editor)
Shambhala Pubns; ISBN: 0877736103

The book is about a lot more than just listening and is full of lots of
examples to get you playing/improvising/composing.

The author also talks (a little) about playing with pitches outside of
12tET, singing against drones to explore pitch relationships, etc., so I
figured that makes this an on-topic post. ;-)

Seriously though, especially if you want something to inspire you to
play/improvise/compose more, I highly recommend this great little book.

When I first picked up the book and read a couple of pages here and
there I though some of it sounded rather silly, but before long I
started to appreciate the book as a whole and now I've dog-eared so many
pages that the top right edge of the book is significantly thicker than
the rest of the book. :-)

Here's an example: the author suggests as one possible division of music
practice time (though he says one should be flexible and not limit
oneself to this):

1/4 time spent working on technique
1/4 time spent playing other people's music
1/4 time spent playing/improvising/composing your own music
1/4 time spent listening to music

Before reading this book I was mainly working on technique and playing
other people's music and not spending much time actually listening or
working on my own music. I find that allocating time to listen and to
create my own music has really made my practice time more fulfilling.
:-)

Cheers,
Christopher