The Joy of Music is Leonard Bernstein's first book, originally published in 1959 by Simon and Schuster. A highly acclaimed, bestselling work, it is still in print today.
In the book, Bernstein completely abandons the traditional academic style of books on classical music. Some of the chapters are cast in the style of conversations about music between Bernstein and several imaginary people. (One of these conversations contains Bernstein's thoughts on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, a work he never conducted or recorded.) Other chapters of the book are made up of complete transcribed scripts of Bernstein's television music lectures of the 1950s, taken from the TV show Omnibus. They include his famous dissection of the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.