Good Reads

Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization
The Violinist.com Interviews: Volume 1
The Musician’s Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music,its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it, and the human brain.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
This is Daniel Levitin’s daring theory of “six songs,” illuminating how the brain evolved to play and listen to music in six fundamental forms – for knowledge, friendship, religion, joy, comfort, and love.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition.
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)
What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in “equal temperament” – the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, “we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor ‘black’ ”.
The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.
What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents, teachers, coaches, businesspeople – and everyone else – with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
The Violin Explained: Components, Mechanism, and Sound
This unique book explains not only how a violin produces sound but also of how that sound causes what we hear. Drawing on extensive experience as a performer and composer, Beament includes down-to-earth advice on strings, maintenance, purchase, and children’s instruments.
Violin Dreams
Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument.

Indivisible by Four: A String Quartet in Pursuit of Harmony
The Guarneri Quartet is fabled for its unique longevity and high-spirited virtuosity. Here is its story from the inside–a story filled with drama, humor, danger, compassion, and, of course, glorious music.
Thesis on Freedom of Movement in Violin Playing (pdf)
All You Have To Do Is Listen: Music From Inside Out
Rob Kapilow has been helping audiences hear more in great music for almost twenty years with his What Makes It Great? series on NPR, at Lincoln Center, and in concert halls throughout the US and Canada. In this book, he gives you a set of tools you can use when listening to any piece of music in order to hear its “plot” – its story told in notes.

Teaching Violin