Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments


Book Description

J. S. Bach's musician son explains the technique for performing eighteenth-century compositions, discussing fingering, embellishments, bass, and accompaniment




Freedom and the Arts


Book Description

Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.




Essays for Piano


Book Description

Essays for Piano consists of 15 original compositions for intermediate contemporary-classical piano. The music provides fresh new material for piano students, teachers, professionals and casual players alike. The compositions are ideal for use as additional learning material and recital repertoire for intermediate classical piano students. The pieces range in style from baroque and classical minuets and marches - to romantic waltzes, preludes, nocturnes and etudes - to modern monotone, pentatonic and whole tone music. Each piece also provides practice for specific skills important to the development of the intermediate level pianist - such as knowledge of more difficult keys, alternating base-chord patterns, arpeggios, scales, contrary motion, and the tasteful implementation of expression through effective use of legato, rubato, and sostenuto. A unique combination of enjoyable melodies with technical challenge, Essays for Piano provides a valuable addition to the piano repertoire of the intermediate level piano student as well as the casual player.




Essays on Artistic Piano Playing and Other Topics


Book Description

Annotation In tribute to his influential piano teacher, Guerry (music emeritus, Louisiana State U.) has compiled some previously unpublished essays by Italian-American Scionti (1882-1973)--the subject of his 1991 biography and a 1995 compact disc. In delightful counterpoint to essays amplified with examples on the basics of fine piano playing and the art of pedaling, is the concluding "Maxims for a Spaghetti Party."Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.




Nineteenth-century Piano Music


Book Description

Focusing on the core composers of the 19th century, this text provides an overview of the repertoire & keyboard technique of the era. This new edition includes a chapter on women composers, in particular Fanny Hensel & Clara Schumann.




Alfred Brendel on Music


Book Description

Illuminating and challenging, this collection of essays should appeal to both the specialist and the music lover. Brendel provides not only stimulating reading but an insight into the exceptional mind of a great pianist. The essays cover the mid 1950s to the mid 1990s.




Write All These Down


Book Description

Joseph Kerman is one of the most eminent, wide ranging, and readable of today's writers on music. Admirers of his many books - on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music - will find much to interest them in this collection of essays, taken from general journals, such as the Hudson Review and the New York Review of Books, as well as more specialized publications.




The Art Spirit


Book Description




My First Piano Adventure: Lesson Book A with CD


Book Description

(Faber Piano Adventures ). Written for ages 5 and 6, My First Piano Adventure captures the child's playful spirit. Fun-filled songs, rhythm games and technique activities develop beginning keyboard skills. Three distinguishing features of the Lesson Book A make it unique and effective for the young 5-6 year old beginner. 1. A strong focus on technique embedded in the book through playful technique games, chants, and carefully-composed pieces that gently lead the child into pianistic motions. 2. An outstanding CD for the young student to listen, sing, tap, and play along with at the piano. The orchestrated songs on the CD feature children singing the lyrics, which has great appeal to the 5-6 year old beginner. The CD becomes a ready-made practice partner that guides the student and parent for all the pieces and activities in the books. 3. The fanciful art features five multi-cultural children who are also learning to play. These friends at the piano introduce basic rhythms, white key names, and a variety of white and black-key songs that span classical, folk, and blues. Young students will listen, sing, create, and play more musically with Nancy and Randall Faber s My First Piano Adventure, Lesson Book A. The Lesson Book introduces directional pre-reading, elementary music theory and technique with engaging songs, games, and creative discovery at the keyboard. Young students will enjoy the multi-cultural "friends at the piano" who introduce white-key names, basic rhythms, and a variety of songs which span classical, folk, and blues. Ear-training and eye-training are also part of the curriculum. The Fabers' instructional theory "ACE" - Analysis, Creativity, and Expression, guides the pedagogy of My First Piano Adventure. Analysis leads to understanding, creativity leads to self-discovery, and expression develops personal artistry. The CD for this book offers a unique listening experience with outstanding orchestrations and vocals. The recordings demonstrate a key principle of the course: when children listen, sing, tap, and move to their piano music, they play more musically. View Helpful Introductory Videos Here




Music as Dream


Book Description

Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi showcases recent scholarly criticism on the music and philosophy of the brilliantly original composer Giacinto Scelsi. In this collection, Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini select and translate into English for the first time essays that reflect the evolution of recent scholarship on Scelsi’s musical compositions. Music as Dream opens with “The Scelsi Case,” which erupted shortly after Scelsi’s death in 1988 when composer Vieri Tosatti claimed ownership of his works. This quarrel reached its zenith in the pages of PianoTime’s March 1989 issue, where musicologist Guido Zaccagnini questioned a group of noted composers, writers, and arts managers about whether a composer can claim sole authorship for a work accomplished in collaboration with others. The essays are wide-ranging in scope. French musicologist Michelle Biget-Mainfroy, a specialist in “gestural” piano writing, offers an in-depth study of Scelsi’s complex piano output; Gianmario Borio looks at Scelsi’s “Sound as Compositional Process”; Alessandra Montali examines and details Scelsi’s theoretical and literary writings; Luciano Martinis and Franco Sciannameo explore the lives and whereabouts of obscure composers Giacinto Sallustio, Walther Klein, and Richard Falk, who were Scelsi’s collaborators until the early 1940s when Tosatti took sole charge; Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini elaborates on Scelsi’s most important composition of his first period, presenting a tour-de-force that pieces together its complex story through research at the newly organized Scelsi Archive at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome; and Friedrich Jaecker’s and Sandro Marrocu’s essays also draw on research conducted at the archive of Fondazione. Finally, an updated bibliography and discography conclude the book