📚 Music

Composition, genre and history — how the music that fills our days got its forms, and how to listen to it with real understanding.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject music in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Discovering Classical Music	Ian Christians	1991	125
	Carmen	Georges Bizet	1800	92
	Music	Roger Kamien	1976	75
	Correspondence	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	1865	74
	Faust	Charles Gounod	1800	63
	The enjoyment of music	Joseph Machlis	1955	44
	Musicophilia	Oliver Sacks	2007	43
	The Oxford companion to music	Scholes, Percy Alfred	1938	38
	Concise History of Western Music	Barbara Russano Hanning	1997	38
	Picasso	Gertrude Stein	1938	32
	A history of western music	Grout, Donald Jay.	1960	28
	Blues people	Amiri Baraka	1963	28
	Understanding Music	Jeremy Yudkin	1995	26
	Music in theory and practice	Bruce Benward	1977	24
	Music business handbook and career guide	David Baskerville	1979	24
	Listen	Joseph Kerman	1972	23
	What to Listen for in Music	Aaron Copland	1939	21
	Can't stop, won't stop	Jeff Chang	2005	21
	Basic materials in music theory	Paul O. Harder	1965	20
	How to listen to music	Henry Edward Krehbiel	1896	19
	Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen	Johann Joachim Quantz	1752	18
	How Music Works	David Byrne	2012	15
	A creative approach to music fundamentals	William Duckworth	1981	14
	The Enjoyment of Music	Kristine Forney	1996	14
	All You Need to Know About the Music Business	Donald S. Passman	1991	13
	Listeners guide to musical understanding	Leon Dallin	1959	12
	Norton anthology of western music	Claude V. Palisca	1980	12
	Essays in musical analysis	Sir Donald Francis Tovey	1935	11
	German Hl Guitar Method Book 1	Will Schmid	1970	11
	This business of music	M. William Krasilovsky	1971	11

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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