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Scholarly monographs are single-topic/single-author books for an academic audience. This should be distinguished from books for a more general audience and books that are collections of essays by multiple authors. In this walkthrough of approaches to reading a book like this, I’ll use Marie Sumner Lott’s book on 19th-century chamber music. You may want to open the book in another tab to look through it.

Reading an academic monograph can be a bit intimidating. They’re usually written by experts for an audience of people with similar expertise, and they can be long and densely packed with arguments and information.  

When you’re reading for research, though, you may not need to read and absorb the entire book, cover to cover. Often, you need to understand the overall argument and how it relates, or could relate, to your research topic. Reading strategically can help you get the most out of an academic book, and find your own way into the conversation. 

I’m looking at a book called The Social Worlds of Nineteenth Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities. I’ve already done a quick basic assessment to see that this is a scholarly monograph—it’s published by a university press, and the author, Marie Sumner Lott, is an academic musicologist. The title tells me that this book will focus on social aspects of chamber music in the nineteenth century, but I’m not sure quite what that means. 

My first step now is to look at the table of contents, to see how the book is divided. I see that, after the introduction, there the first chapter establishes some of the kinds of evidence she’ll use—archival documents, or primary sources like letters, diaries, and payment records. The other chapters either focus on a type of music, like arrangements of folk music, or the work of a specific composer. If I’m researching one of these kinds of music or composers, I’ll take note of which chapter is going to be most relevant to me.  

If this subject is new to me, and the terms “chamber music,” “arrangements,” or the names of the composers don’t mean much to me, I may need to go back to a more general background source, like an encyclopedia, before I start working with this book. 

Even if the subject is somewhat familiar, I might notice some new vocabulary, some of it in quotation marks as if it has a particular meaning in this context: domestic/domesticating, progressive, consumption. If I’m not familiar with these terms, it might be helpful to either look them up, or make note of them so I can watch for how the author sets up her explanation of the terms early in the book.  

My next step is to read the book’s introduction.  

Right away I see that the title of the introduction implies a slightly more specific scope of topic than the book title: *string* chamber music and its audiences. This gives me a better sense of her main area of focus, and whether it’s useful. 

After an attention-grabbing reading of two images of music making, the opening section ends with a description of the research questions at the heart of the book: What music was available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what does that music tell us about their musical tastes, priorities, and activities? 

If I’m primarily looking to answer biographical questions about composers or analytical questions about the music, this might not be the source for me. But if I’m interested in audiences and the economic and social role of music, even if string chamber music isn’t my main focus, this book might help me to think about what we can learn about historical audiences.  

Working through the rest of the introduction, I get a better sense of why this scope is appropriate for answering the questions, how the major terms and areas of scope are defined, and what some of the scholarly conversations are that intersect with this project.  

By the end of the introduction, I have an idea of what conversations the author is joining, what her contribution is, and why it matters.  

The rest of the chapters will build this argument with specific examples, interpreting historical documents and musical works to demonstrate aspects of the larger argument. However, some of them may not be directly relevant to my research, and just knowing the “big picture” might be enough. A quick look at the index may let me know if my specific areas of concern will be mentioned. For example, if I’m writing about Clara Schumann, I may do a quick check and see that she’s not mentioned in the index. This doesn’t mean the book is useless to me, since the approach may still give me ideas for thinking about her music, but it doesn’t look like there’s going to be major discussion of how her work fits into the argument of the book. 

I’ll continue on to read the chapters of the most interest to me in some detail; but I may just skim or even skip the other chapters.