The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Theory, Analysis, and Listening Paperback – 14 Jan. 2016

A must for any musician, especially music students

Early days but the book explains complicated ideas in straightforward terms. This fourth edition has online streaming for the musical examples rather than a DVD. There are some errors in the numbering of these excerpts and also some are missing entirely. A few of the pages are poorly printed, either fuzzy or pale, which is a little disappointing at this price point. I will update this review when I have progressed further into the book.

I bought this book from a regular bookshop, more expensive, yes, but given the outlay I wanted to have a look at it first before buying it, obviously not close enough. This was last month and I have had a few weeks to work with it very closely. I studied music at school many years ago and for the past 3 years have been using Sibelius 7, writing quite complicated pieces of music but I felt I lacked a strong basic knowledge of harmony and the 'rules' of music. Prior to buying this book I have been studying Walter Piston's book and Schoenberg's book on the principles of harmony, both have been useful but I thought, given the size and range of The Complete Musician that this book would give me the thorough grounding I needed. Certainly this book covers a huge range of related subjects and the on-line musical examples are useful but for someone, even with a degree of prior knowledge, it is decidedly not a 'friendly' book and not a book to use if you are working on your own. There are useful exercises to work through each point but there is a distinct lack of clarity here as to what is expected, on several occasions I had to check the answers first to understand exactly how to proceed with the exercises. Compounding this I am astonished just how many mistakes I have found in the on-line answer pages. For some exercises only half the answers are given, for others answers from different exercises appear. Unfortunately, I no longer have any confidence in the rest of the book's exercises. The problem with this book is in its title, it wants to encompass all levels of musical knowledge and fails.