Player Piano


Book Description

A treatise on how player pianos function, and how to get them back into top playing condition if they don't work. For beginners and experienced technicians alike.




Ethnic Piano Rolls in the United States


Book Description

‘Ethnic’ piano rolls are an important part of a still-neglected musical heritage. Having come to prominence in the first part of the twentieth century, they encapsulate the musical life of several continents and various ethnic communities based in the USA. This volume represents the latest research on these unique and rare cultural artefacts.




Beginner Classical Piano Music


Book Description

This book and streaming video course is all that you will ever need for getting started playing the most famous and cherished piano classics by the great composers, like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven! Piano Professor, Damon Ferrante guides you through each piece with step-by-step piano lessons (for beginners) and 20 streaming video lessons. This easy-to-follow method, used by thousands of piano students and teachers, is designed to be interactive, engaging and fun. No music reading is required! The lessons will greatly expand your repertoire of beloved piano classics and improve your piano technique, creativity, and understanding of music. Whether you are teaching yourself piano or learning with a music instructor, this book and streaming video course will take your piano playing to a whole new level! Ask yourself this: 1. Have you always wanted to learn how to play famous classical piano pieces, but did not know where to start? 2. Did you start piano lessons once and give up because the lessons were too difficult? 3. Are you struggling to follow online piano lessons that seem to jump all over the place without any sense of direction or consistency? 4. Would you like to expand your musical understanding and learn how to play the piano through an affordable, step-by-step book and video course? If your answer to any of the these questions is yes, then this beginner piano classics book and video course is definitely for you! The follow great pieces are covered in this book and streaming video course: Beethoven's Fur Elise J.S. Bach's Prelude in C Major Mozart's Turkish Rondo Pachelbel's Canon Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Liszt's Hungarian Dance Brahms' Lullaby Mendelssohn's Wedding March Strauss's The Blue Danube Waltz Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King Handel's Hallelujah Dvorak's New World Symphony Chopin's Prelude Bizet's The Toreador Song Verdi's La donna e mobile Schumann's The Wild Horseman Paganini's Caprice Number 24 Beethoven's Ode to Joy Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice Dvorak's New World Symphony Erik Satie's Gymnopedie Greensleeves Rossini's William Tell Overture (Theme from the Lone Ranger) and many more classics!"




The Performing Style of Alexander Scriabin


Book Description

When Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin's music was performed during his lifetime, it always elicited ecstatic responses from the listeners. Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Vienna opera, rushed backstage after one of Scriabin's concerts and fell on his knees crying, 'It's genius, it's genius...'. After the composer’s death in 1915, however, his music steadily lost the captivating appeal it once held. The main reason for this drastic change in the listeners’ attitude is an enormous gap existing between the printed scores of Scriabin’s music and the way the composer himself played his works. Apparently, what Scriabin's audiences heard at the time was significantly different from, and vastly superior to, modern performances that are based primarily on published scores. Scriabin recorded nineteen of his compositions on the Hupfeld and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos in 1908 and 1910, respectively. Full score transcriptions of the piano rolls, which are included in the book, provide many substantial features of Scriabin's performance: exact pitches and their timing against each other, rhythms, tempo fluctuations, articulation, dynamics and essential pedal application. Using these transcriptions and other historical documents as the groundwork for his research, Anatole Leikin explores Scriabin's performing style within the broader context of Romantic performance practice.




Mechanical Music


Book Description

Covers the history, development, use and fall from favour of many types of exotic instruments, from pocket-sized musical boxes to roll-playing pipe organs and everything else in between. This book describes pianolas, organettes, roller organs, orchestrions, nickelodeons, carillons and more.




The Player Piano Mouse


Book Description

A talented mouse earns her fame by chewing holes and discovers her muscial gift.




Jazz in Print (1859-1929)


Book Description

This anthology was compiled to aid the scholar working on the origins and evolution of jazz. Covering materials published through 1929, it also begins with articles from 1856 which do not concern jazz directly, but will serve to present a solid foundation for understanding the American music scene from which jazz developed. Chronologically listed and well-indexed, the hundreds of articles comprise, in effect, a history of jazz as it evolved. Beginning with accounts of negro music in the pre-jazz era, continuing in an exploration of spirituals, followed by a description of ragtime, we finally learn about the development of jazz from its practitioners and informed audiences of the time.




The Welte-Mignon


Book Description







The Music of Conlon Nancarrow


Book Description

The expatriate American experimentalist composer Conlon Nancarrow is increasingly recognised as having one of the most innovative musical minds of this century. His music, almost all written for player piano, is the most rhythmically complex ever written, couched in intricate contrapuntal systems using up to twelve different tempos at the same time. Yet despite its complexity, Nancarrow's music drew its early influences from the jazz pianism of Art Tatum and Earl Hines and from the rhythms of Indian music; Nancarrow's whirlwinds of notes are joyously physical in their energy. Composed in almost complete isolation from 1940, this music has achieved international fame only in the last few years. Born in 1912, the son of the mayor of Texarkana, Nancarrow fought in the Lincoln Brigade, then fled America to Mexico City to avoid being hounded for his former Communist affiliations. The author travelled to Mexico City to research Nancarrow's music and to discuss it with him. He analyses sixty-five works, virtually the composer's complete output, and includes a biographical chapter containing much information never before published.