Voices: musical holiday gifts: book suggestions

Learning music is fun any time of year, so ways to do that make especially good gifts, for yourself and others. Here are several ideas:

Ellery Klein’s Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing the Fiddle takes you from the very basics of learning the parts of the fiddle to thinking about buying or renting one to caring for the instrument and yourself while learning. She starts you off with enjoyable, interesting exercises on tunes that you’ll probably know, whatever your musical taste. She gives tips on reading music and advice on learning by ear. Once you’re up to speed on the basics, there are chapters on Scottish, Irish, and bluegrass music with plenty of tunes to play and interesting bits of history along the way. The last third of the book gives you tools to learn more, including practical tips on such things as how to play really fast (and when not to), music camps and workshops to look into, and fiddle players whose albums you’ll want to check out. The CI Guide format is quite structured, breaking things down into really bite sized piece of information, Klein, who toured for a number of years with the band Gaelic Storm, keeps it all connected and lightens things with just the right touches of humor. There is a dvd along with the book, with several short video segments illustrating points in the text, and with all the tunes played through so you can learn them by ear. Even if you’re not a beginner on the fiddle this will prove an interesting and useful handbook, and it would be a good resource for music teachers, too.

David Hamburger’s two dvd set, The Acousitc Guitar Method, offers nearly four hours of teaching about finger picking and flat picking picking the guitar, with examples, songs, and tunes to learn drawn mainly from American folk and roots music. Hamburger is a respected teacher at the National Guitar Workshops, and that shows here: his style is relaxed and informal -- which is a good thing, because he’s conveying lots of information. Each of the lessons is bite sized, though, and Hamburger often gives the stories of the songs the songs he teaches. There’s a small booklet with tab and musical notation for some of the songs included.

Shannon Heaton plays the flute, and she’s not going to teach you how to do that in her book Oil for the Chain. On the other hand, you could play any instrument -- and especially those used in Irish music -- and get good ideas from following through what she offers. Heaton, who also loves to ride her bicycle, points out that “just as bicycle chains need oil to function. Irish musicians need tunes to play,” and she provides dozens of them, presented in two tune sets, along with commentary, learning points for players, and ideas for backing musicians as well. The first two thirds of the book comprise traditional tunes, and the last third is made up of originals by Heaton and her husband Matt, a guitar and bouzouki player with whom she often performs as a duo. She offers advice on learning tunes, practicing, and the nuances of playing music with others among other things. There is a CD of all the tunes included with the book. Heaton, who has studied music in Ireland, the United States, and Thailand and performed internationally as well, offers a succinct and very musical trip, one well worth the traveling.

Another way to learn about music is to read the stories of those who make it. Irish singer Christy Moore had some difficulty figuring out how to tell his story until one day he started making a list of all the songs he knew. They aren’t all in One Voice:my life in song of course, but they make an interesting structure for a book that’s part autobiography, part memoirs, and part music commentary.

American singer and songwriter Amy Grant has been on the public stage since she was a teenager -- her first record came out while she was still in high school. Music, faith, and family have always been touchstones for Grant’s life, and she, too, chose a bit of an unusual way to speak about these. Mosaic is the right title, as the chapters consist sometimes of narrative, sometimes of poetry, sometimes of song lyrics, and sometimes of a mix of all three. In a lesser artist this could have been self indulgent, but this instead comes across as a person who’s in the midst of her life, seeing the funny, the sad, the challenging and the joyous, a woman and artist who knows there aren’t any easy answers but the questions are worth the trip.

you may also want to see

Music Road: Matt & Shannon Heaton: Fine Winter's Night

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.