What to Listen for in Music helps explain how to enjoy both the beauty and the intelligence behind classical music by teaching you what you should be listening for. It seems to go from describing what a whole note means to explaining complicated musical forms in a short time, so it will be either too remedial or too advanced in parts. Nonetheless, the book teaches you what it says it will.

I think that with any kind of book that teaches you something, the biggest question is: could you get this information by reading a summary and not miss much? In this book, I think you could get a lot by just reading that you are supposed to follow the melody, even if that means picking apart the various voices of the piece. On the flip side, there is a lot of the flavor and little detail that you would miss out on.

As usual, I listened to this as an audiobook, and I didn't bother to look for the supplementary material. In part, I did this because I wanted the big picture. In part, it is because I wouldn't get through it if I stopped for every example. When I listen to a classical piece, I will rarely analyze the sheet music, and if I want to know if it is a rondo or some other form, I'll just look it up online. Yep, this is lazy of me. Nope, I don't care.

The point is that while I didn't memorize the various forms, I did make some notes and pick up some details that are useful when listening to music. The other thing that I got in addition to details were some totally unexpected historical bits. Copland spends a bit of time explaining that music snobs in his time hated opera (!) because it was too much for the common people and that they really hated Wagner. Now, let's just pause here. Music snobs hating opera?!? Hating Wagner?!? This is not true today. Okay, then Copland goes on to explain that opera isn't realistic (yes, it is so bizarre that he has to explain that people don't just randomly start singing arias in the street) and that it is okay for something to not be realistic.

Normally, when I read about history, I find that nearly all that is written about people is still true. However, clearly something was going on in 1939 that I do not understand.

Anyway, it is worth reading this book just for this tidbit. However, I really felt that by the end, both Copland and the guy who updated the book were cheering on my desire to learn more about music. It was a good feeling. If you want to learn about classical music and have some very basic knowledge of reading music, it is a good place to start. Be prepared for some pieces to be way less easy to understand than Copland seems to say that they will be, but even if you just listen to the 6 hour audiobook and occasionally stop to watch a video of one of the songs he mentions on YouTube, I think you'll still get enough out of it to be enjoyable.