@Il-pleut The Rhythmic Structure of Music looks good, thanks for that one. One of the things about western theory which irks me to no end is the way it treats melody and rhythm as interesting little things that just happen or as a side effect of harmony. And a couple books; Unplayed Melodies - Javanese Gamelan and the Genesis of Music Theory and The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory are two of my favorites.

@oid Well in serial music thing go the other way, there melodie and harmonie are more or less considered as if non existant, agregats, ostinantos and clusters draw shapes tiled with transposable cells or sets of pitch-class.

But those books introduce to many other way to see things. And in his book "other harmonys" Tom Johnson introduces, aside of many theorical composition technics, his own analysis software called "mathematica".

Another one that features only female composers, with compositions as recent as 2014 :

If you want to dig into contemporary philosofical thinking of sounds :

And if you want to explore a part of the
past, an apogée, a golden age :

And because guitare is important too, and because this is a book that is based on another key book of the twentieth century...

To put some perspective, a little bit of history of chinese music. Quite atonishing,
you realize that some musical objects are centuries older than you think.

@oid

@Il-pleut That looks great and I was even able to find a copy with a sane price, most copies were $100-250 and there were not many to choose from. I do like Malagasy music quite a bit, especially D'Gary whose guitar playing is infuriatingly difficult to figure out. I have really been trying hard to not buy more books and you are making that difficult, already got me to buy two and there are a few which I am rather tempted by.

To continue the american century,
those three :

ho and....