Material Detail

Playable Books is a free library of reading editions of 19 public-domain music theory treatises in which every musical example plays in the browser. As an example plays, a playhead moves through the notation, and each figure links to its page in the original scanned print. Titles include Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (the 1725 Latin with an aligned English translation), Kitson’s Counterpoint for Beginners, Goetschius’s two counterpoint books, Fenaroli’s Partimenti, Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony, the harmony manuals of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, Prout’s analysis of Bach’s Forty-Eight, and the orchestration treatises of Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov and Forsyth. One search covers all the books, and a concept index links related passages across them. No account, no ads, no cost. Transcriptions and translations were made with AI assistance and checked against the printed page; editions are marked “in review”, and every example has a button for reporting errors.

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