13 Best Books About Music, Sorted by the Question They Answer

Levitin worked as a producer and engineer before he trained as a cognitive psychologist, so the book moves between studio and lab without either voice sounding borrowed. He starts with the raw materials, pitch, timbre, rhythm and metre, then builds up to the trick that runs the whole system: music sets a pattern in your head and then plays games with your prediction of it. There are chapters on why we like what we like, why the music of your teens gets welded to you for life, and what musical expertise actually consists of. He uses real songs as examples throughout, so keep a queue running.

Sacks collected the strange edges of the musical brain. A surgeon hit by lightning who suddenly needed to play the piano. People living with music hallucinated at full volume. A musician whose memory lasts seconds and who can still conduct a choir from beginning to end. Patients with Parkinson's who cannot start walking until the right rhythm arrives. Each chapter is a short case handled with a doctor's care and no laboratory jargon, and together they make an argument he never has to state: music is wired into more parts of us than anyone expected, including parts that keep working after memory has gone.

Byrne opens with the claim that music does not descend from genius, it fits its container. African music built for open air and many voices, Bach for a stone church with a long decay, CBGB songs for a loud narrow bar, dance records for a club system with a subwoofer. From there he covers his own career, how recording rewired what a song even is, what a record deal actually pays out, and how scenes assemble themselves. It wanders, and the business chapters read like notes from a very sharp consultant, which some readers enjoy more than the theory.

Smith arrives in New York in 1967 with nothing, meets Mapplethorpe almost by accident, and the two of them live on stolen bread and a shared coat while working out what they are going to be. The Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, the slow drift from poetry into a band with a guitar behind it. She wrote the book because she promised him she would, while he was dying, and that promise sits under every page. Her prose is formal and old fashioned, closer to a nineteenth century memoir than to rock writing, and it contains the most careful sentences on this list.

Richards talks for five hundred pages, with James Fox shaping the result, and the surprise is how technical he gets. The best stretches are about the music itself: the five string open G tuning behind Honky Tonk Women and Start Me Up, the blues records he learned by ear in a cold flat, the way he and Charlie Watts locked together and stayed locked for forty years. Around that sits the life you already half know, the heroin years, the arrests, the long feud with Mick Jagger, told with very little apology. He is funny, unbothered and sometimes unfair.

Marr grew up in a Manchester council house with Irish parents and a record player that never got a rest, formed The Smiths at nineteen by knocking on Morrissey's door, and wrote the music for one of the most argued over catalogues in British pop. The band chapters are specific in a way this genre rarely manages: the tuning, the capo position, the morning a riff turned up, the arguments in the studio about what to keep. After the split he keeps working, with Electronic, The The and Modest Mouse, and he stays generous about almost everyone, which is close to unheard of here.

Devidayal is taken to a small flat near Kennedy Bridge to learn from Dhondutai Kulkarni of the Jaipur gharana, and the lessons carry on for decades. The book braids three lives together: the teacher's, the teacher's own legendary guru's, and the author's drift between riyaaz and an ordinary Bombay life of school, college, America and a job. It is honest about what Hindustani classical training demands, hours a day for years with no visible progress, and honest about the guilt of a student who cannot give it that. It is the best account of the guru and shishya bond I have read in English.

Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal go through R.D. Burman's career song by song, from the years assisting his father to the seventies peak to the long cold stretch before 1942: A Love Story. What makes it unusual is the detail. Which musicians were in the room, which instrument made that sound, how a rhythm was got out of a beer bottle or a comb, why an arrangement lifts a semitone exactly where it does. The session players and arrangers are interviewed at length, many of them for the first time, and you finish the book hearing familiar songs in layers.

Anantharaman treats the film song as the popular music of this country, which it plainly is, and walks it forward from the theatre trained voices of the thirties through the Naushad and S.D. Burman years, the long peak of Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi, the disco eighties, and the remix era that followed. There are chapters on lyricists, which most Indian music writing skips entirely, and short profiles that give you a door into any period you care about. It is a survey rather than a deep study, so specialists will find it thin in a few places.

Ross opens in 1906 with Mahler and Strauss in the same town and moves forward through Schoenberg and the end of comfortable harmony, Shostakovich composing with Stalin listening, exiles writing film scores in Hollywood, the postwar avant garde, and the American minimalists who made repetition beautiful again. The politics is not decoration. The book is really about what happens to artists when a state takes an interest in them. He also does the near impossible thing, describing music on the page so clearly that you can hear it before you have heard it.

Goodman interviewed hundreds of musicians, managers, journalists and hangers on, then cut their quotes into an oral history of the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the scene that grew around them, with September 2001 sitting in the middle of it. Nobody narrates. You get four versions of the same night and you work out for yourself who is lying and who has simply forgotten. It is gossipy, and it is also a study of what happens when a scene gets discovered, sold and burnt out inside a single decade.

Rob runs a failing record shop in London, makes a list out of everything, and has just been left by Laura. He decides to phone his top five heartbreaks in order to work out what is wrong with him, which is funny and also the least healthy research project in fiction. The shop scenes with Barry and Dick are why people still quote this book thirty years later, and the music talk is accurate about a certain kind of man who uses taste as a substitute for a personality. Hornby is kinder to Rob than Rob has earned, and that is the joke.

The novel is written as an oral history with no narration at all, just band members, managers and hangers on being interviewed decades later about a fictional group that got enormous and then walked off stage for good. Daisy is the singer who arrives and changes the chemistry, Billy is the frontman staying sober one day at a time, and the songs they write together say more than either of them will admit out loud. Reid gets the form exactly right, including the moments where two people describe one night in ways that cannot both be true.