The Joy of Music[1] is Leonard Bernstein's first book, originally published as a hardcover in 1959 by Simon & Schuster.

In the books' introduction, "The Happy Medium", Bernstein discusses the nature of music and the difficulties of writing about it.

The first part of the book, "Imaginary Conversations", is about Beethoven, meaning in music, and the difficulty to write popular tunes for serious composers.

A brief section, "Interlude: Upper Dubbing, Calif.", describes the peculiarities of composing film music.

[4] The second part consists of seven scripts from the TV series Omnibus, three of which had been published between 1956 and 1958 in Vogue.