Guide to Bach, Beethoven, More

Yale University Press has published a nearly thousand-page book on classical orchestral music by Robert Philip, a British scholar, broadcaster, and musician. This is good news for a number of reasons. I had thought books like this had gone the way of the dinosaur. That was the hard lesson I took away when my own 500-page book on 20th- and 21st-century music, Surprised by Beauty, went nearly extinct the same year it was published in 2016. Before that, one has to reach back to Ted Libbey’s NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music from 2006, or to his NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection from 1994, to find works similar to Philip’s. The behemoth, biannual Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music ceased publication in 2010. The rest is silence—so I thought. No one, it seemed, was very much interested in classical music anymore. Or if they were, they simply read online and didn’t bother with books.