Listener's Book on Harmony Lawrence Abbott 1943

Abbott writes for general readers, to promote the pleasure that can be gained from informed listening to music, and his examples come from folk song, hymns, American popular song, and musicals as well as from the music of the concert hall and opera house. He argues that music has a vocabulary and a grammar, so that understanding those will add to the experience of listening. He does expect readers to be able to play the many examples on a piano, which was not possible in the British Library and probably wasn’t for many of his readers in the 1940s either, but even a complete musical novice could learn from his descriptions. The penultimate chapter reveals that he does not approve of “modernistic” music, but the final chapter provides a useful overview from Palestrina to Debussy and stresses that he does approve of jazz.

Condition - some scuffing around edge and discolouration due to age. There is also a stamp inside the front cover about the previous owner