Theory of Musical Composition (Volume 1); Treated with a View to a Naturally Consecutive Arrangement of Topics (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: present acquaintance with the subject. It is truly just the book that we need. On the one hand, it is the best authority that the world contains; on the other, it is simple and easy to be understood. The very copiousness of the work is, for us at least, one of its best traits. No impression could be more false or absurd, than is that so currently entertained by the mass of community on this point. Brevity has universally been sought, while it is the very last thing that should be sought. If knowledge is to be acquired easily, or fully, or accurately, copious treatises, not abridgements, are the ones to be used. Counter as this idea is to the general current of opinion, no one who tests it by experiment will fail to find it true. And welcome indeed to our shores should be a work so well adapted in this respect, as is Weber's, to the condition and wants of our country. The first part of the work, embracing $$ I?C, is made up of preliminary matter. Its object is to prepare the way for what follows, and hence it consists, as its title imports, of General Musical Instruction. This portion of the work is adapted to every one who studies music in any form whatsoever,?to every one who wishes to learn to sing, or to play, (as e. g. the piano-forte, the flute, the violin, or any other instrument,) or to lead, or to teach. It embraces first principles, things which lie at the foundation of all musical knowledge and attainments. Hence it is a book which should be, not only in the hands of every beginner in music, but also in the hands of every one, who, though he may have studied music more or less, has never enjoyed the advantages of that enlarged, thorough, and standard instruction which this work contains. But no musical student who has an inquisitive mind, or who means to make solid...