Early Keyboard Instruments discusses a variety of issues involved in the performance of keyboard music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It brings together a range of topics that have come to the fore in recent decades and forms a useful introduction to historical performance issues for the student performer or amateur, whether playing on period instruments or on the modern piano.

The lute was one of the most important instruments in use in Europe from late medieval times up to the eighteenth century. Despite its acknowledged importance, this study is the first ever comprehensive work on the instrument and its music, apart from performance studies or bibliographical and reference publications. The book focuses on the lute's history, but also contains chapters on the lute in concert, lute song accompaniment, the thearbo, and the lute in Scotland. Written for the music student, the serious listener, the player, maker, and lute enthusiast, Spring makes available for the first time over 40 years of musical scholarship previously the preserve of academic journals.

Schirmer Performance Editions are designed for piano students and their teachers as well as professional pianists. Pedagogical in nature, these editions offer insightful interpretive suggestions, pertinent fingering, and historical and stylistic commentary. Prepared by renowned artists/teachers, these publicatons provide an accurate, well-informed score resource for pianists. The charming inventiveness of Kabalevsky's 24 Pieces for Children, Opus 39 has made this collection a favorite source of piano teaching repertoire since its first publication in the 1930s. Kabalevsky began composing in his teens, and many of his earlier piano solos were written for his own students. The wide range of expression and exploration of varied dynamics, tempos, and articulations provide valuable opportunities for the late-elementary and early-intermediate student to hone their musical abilities.

(Boosey & Hawkes Voice). This landmark publication includes 61 songs, combining the contents of the seven published books of Britten folksong arrangements in High and Low Voice editions. Some of the songs have never before been transposed. The songs of Volume 6, for voice and guitar, have been transcribed for voice and piano for this edition.

These wonderful teaching pieces by the Russian keyboard pedagogue and composer are now available in convenient individual editions.

How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, and painting. The arts direct us to intimate and particularized relationships - with the people represented in the works, or with those we imagine produced them. When we listen to music or look at a purely abstract painting, or when we drink a glass of wine, can we enjoy the experience without verbalizing our response? Do our interpretative assumptions, our awareness of technique, and our attitudes to fantasy, get in the way of our appreciation of art, or enhance it? As the book examines these questions and more, we discover how curiosity drives us to enjoy narratives, ordinary jokes, metaphors, and modernist epiphanies, and how narrative in all the arts can order and provoke intense enjoyment. Pleasurable in its own right, Pleasure and the Arts presents a sparkling explanation of the enduring interest of artistic expression.

Includes: Trois Gymnopedies; Six Gnossiennes; Sonneries de la Rose + Croix (3 pieces); Pieces froides (6 pieces); La Diva de l'Empire; Je te veux; Le Piccadilly; Poudre d'or; La Belle Excentrique (2 pieces); Vexations.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

Wye Jamison Allanbrook's "The Secular Commedia" is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, Allanbrook shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa. Allanbrook mines a rich trove of writings by eighteenth-century philosophers and music theorists to show that vocal music was considered aesthetically superior to instrumental music and that listeners easily perceived the theatrical tropes that underpinned the style. Tracing Enlightenment notions of character and expression back to Greek and Latin writings about comedy and drama, she strips away preoccupations with symphonic form and teleology to reveal anew the kaleidoscopic variety and gestural vitality of the musical surface. In prose as graceful and nimble as the music she discusses, Allanbrook elucidates the idiom of this period for contemporary readers. With notes, musical examples, and a foreword by editors Mary Ann Smart and Richard Taruskin.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story!" With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

In the 1930s swing music was everywhere-on radio, recordings, and in the great ballrooms, hotels, theatres, and clubs. Perhaps at no other time were drummers more central to the sound and spirit of jazz. Benny Goodman showcased Gene Krupa. Jimmy Dorsey featured Ray McKinley. Artie Shaw helped make Buddy Rich a star while Count Basie riffed with the innovative Jo Jones. Drummers were at the core of this music; as Jo Jones said, "The drummer is the key-the heartbeat of jazz." An oral history told by the drummers, other musicians, and industry figures, Drummin' Men is also Burt Korall's memoir of more than fifty years in jazz. Personal and moving, the book is a celebration of the music of the time and the men who made it. Meet Chick Webb, small, fragile-looking, a hunchback from childhood, whose explosive drumming style thrilled and amazed; Gene Krupa, the great showman and pacemaker; Ray McKinley, whose rhythmic charm, light touch, and musical approach provided a great example for countless others, and the many more that populate this story. Based on interviews with a collection of the most important jazzmen, Drummin' Men offers an inside view of the swing years that cannot be found anywhere else.

A continental tour of Europe doesn't go quite as planned! When Stockwell Park Orchestra goes on tour to Europe, it proves a challenge for even the most efficient German logistical planner. A teenage stowaway, brass players falling in canals and a sabotaged timpani van are all in a day's work for Ingrid Bauer of Note Perfect Tours, but even she can't solve all the problems this week throws at her. Maybe a bit of surprise Bach can calm the muddy Brexit waters. She just has to fish out the musicians first. Praise for The Stockwell Park Orchestra Series: "I was charmed... a very enjoyable read." Marian Keyes "Friendly insults between musicians, sacrosanct coffee-and-biscuit breaks, tedious committee meetings: welcome to the world of the amateur orchestra." BBC Music Magazine "...a witty and irreverent musical romp, full of characters I'd love to go for a pint with. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the Stockwell Park Orchestra and can't wait for the next book in the series." Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow "Sharp, witty and richly entertaining." Lev Parikian, author of Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? "With its retro humour bordering on farce, this novel offers an escape into the turbulent (and bonkers) world of the orchestra." Isabel Costello, author of Paris Mon Amour "...a very funny tale of musical shenanigans set in the febrile atmosphere of the Stockwell Park Orchestra" Ian Critchley

Ever since the nineteenth century, descriptions of musical form have tended to rely heavily on architectonic analogies. In contrast, earlier discussions more often invoked the metaphor of a journey to describe the structure of a composition. In Journeys Through Galant Expositions, author L. Poundie Burstein encourages readers to view the form of Galant music through this earlier metaphorical lens, much as those who composed, performed, improvised, and listened to music in the mid-1700s would have experienced it. By elucidating eighteenth-century ideas regarding musical form and applying them to works by a wide range of composers - including Haydn and Mozart, as well as a host of others who are often overlooked - this innovative study provides an accessible new window into the music of this time. Rather than dissecting concepts from the 1700s as a mere historical exercise or treating them as a precursor of later theories, Burstein invigorates the ideas of theorists such as Heinrich Christoph Koch and shows how they can directly impact our understanding and appreciation of Galant music as audiences and performers.

Contents: A Spring Morning * Good Night * O Music * She's Like the Swallow * Simple Gifts * The Salley Gardens.

Bolcom's commission was originally to write a duet piece for Metropolitan Opera stars soprano Benita Valente and mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos. However, while the composition was in development, Troyanos unexpectedly died. The design was then changed, representing the late mezzo-soprano with a viola instead. The composer selected three poems about the acceptance of death for the set: "Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens and Mayfield" (Maya Angelou), "'Tis not that Dying hurts us so" (Emily Dickinson), and "Let Evening Come" (Jane Kenyon). Let Evening Come was recorded by soprano Benita Valenti, pianist Cynthia Raim and violist Michael Tree, and released on Centaur Records.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story!" With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.