Thanks for the recommendations. Many look interesting but are not books I would organically bump into, which is an alternative description of what I was looking

Thanks for the recommendations. Many look interesting but are not books I would organically bump into, which is an alternative description of what I was looking for. As for a Sadai's book: it is an extremely thorough book about western harmony from first principles. It treats what is perceived - what we hear - as the anchor, and not what we see when we analyse the notes on paper. A good example of that is how we decide to give names to chords. We tend to name chords based on the notes in them, but this can sometime lead to misunderstandings because the context and how those notes are spread through the chord are also very important. Basics like which note is in the bass is taken into consideration, but otherwise these factors are often ignored. Sadai shows many examples for that throughout the book - as well as such "Mistakes" in other famous books. A quote from the book about the approach taken: "The conventional analytic approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical essence".