Lang Lang Piano Academy: mastering the piano level 5 (approximately equivalent to Grade 5/Intermediate) includes sections on legato pedalling, phrasing and rubato and new accompaniment styles. Units: Developing dexterity Instinctive pedalling Refining the touch Phrasing and rubato Character Ornamentation Interpretation and style Performing Mastering the piano is the first series of books to be launched in the Lang Lang Piano Academy. Comprising five progressive books, mastering the piano captures Lang Lang's passion, drive and extraordinary mastery of the piano. Each book gives students the chance to learn from this exceptional talent, with: 8 units that develop key aspects of piano technique; specially devised exercises & studies; a diverse selection of repertoire including Lang Lang's favourite works; and inspirational commentary & guidance from Lang Lang himself. Mastering the piano is also available as an iPad App! Listen to Lang Lang perform Prelude in C by J. S. Bach Download FREE Scales & Arpeggios Chart for Level 5

The piano works of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) are among the most treasured musical compositions of the twentieth century. In this volume, pianist and Russian music scholar Sofia Moshevich provides detailed interpretive analyses of the ten major piano solo works by Shostakovich, carefully noting important stylistic details and specific ways to overcome the numerous musical and technical challenges presented by the music. Each piece is introduced with a brief historic and structural description, followed by an examination of such interpretive aspects as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, voice balance, pedaling, and fingering. This book will be an invaluable resource for students, pedagogues, and performers of Shostakovich's piano solos.

Model Cornerstone Assessments (MCAs), that were developed for the National Core Arts Standards in Music, are curriculum-embedded measures designed for music students to apply relevant knowledge and skills while demonstrating learning in the standards that define the artistic processes. They are meant to engage students in tasks authentic to a school's curriculum and honor the intent of the Music Performance Standards. They are created as models to allow for usefulness in a variety of curricular contexts and demographics. The intent of each MCA is to provide research-based assessment tasks that is specifically focused on the expected learning for the performance standards with rubrics that has been tested for scoring consistency. Following substantial development and piloting in schools across the United States, this book provides a thorough background of the MCAs and the confidence measures administered to guide implementation by teachers, administrators, and the educational community.

Foundations of Mariachi Education: Materials, Methods, and Resources, the first book of its kind, is a comprehensive handbook on teaching mariachi in secondary school to music students of all levels. Beginning with how to start a mariachi program, each chapter addresses a specific topic in mariachi education, including choosing appropriate repertoire, preparing for performances, and teaching each mariachi instrument-including voice. Each instrument chapter includes practical advice on care of the instrument, tuning, posture, fingerings, technique, and the role of the instrument within the mariachi ensemble. With dozens of music exercises distributed throughout the chapters, this resource shows you how to build your students' technical skills using mariachi repertoire so your students truly shine onstage. You'll also learn how to develop a district-wide program and use mariachi to support literacy goals. Whether you have experience teaching mariachi music or not, this book will guide you through each step of starting or developing a program, from changing an instrument string to buying trajes for your students to executing mariachi mOnicos. This resource is a must-have for every music educator looking for ways to bring new energy to the music classroom.

A musical composer, guitar rocker, and lyric opera singer team up to write this sensational book on songwriting. This book includes everything you want to know about the core competencies of songwriting, elements of music, and lyrics. Features include writing song lyrics, crafting musical compositions, musical styles, getting a contract, sustaining a career, publishers and agents, recording, and even how to survive in the music industry. No matter what music genre you desire---blues, country, hip hop, gospel, punk, classical, alternative, jingles, or rock---this is the book for you. You will find this fascinating book filled with tips, quotes from famous songwriters and musicians, and numerous stories on songwriting that will keep you fully engaged.

Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions.

Michel Gondry's directorial work buzzes with playfulness and invention: in a body of work that includes feature films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, to music videos, commercials, television episodes, and documentaries, he has experimented with blending animation and live action, complex narrative structures, and philosophical subject matter. Central to that experimentation is Gondry's use of music and sound, which this book addresses in a new detailed study. Kate McQuiston examines the hybrid nature of Gondry's work, his process of collaboration, how he uses sound and music to create a highly stylized reinforcement of often-elusive subjects such as psychology, dreams, the loss of memory, and the fraught relationship between humans and the environment. This concise volume provides new insight into Gondry's richly creative multimedia productions, and their distinctive use of the soundtrack.

It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music's current status as a commodity and popular music's unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrated listening, the form of musical reception fostered by Western art music, now appears to be but one of the many ways in which audiences respond to organized sound. Cinema, for example, has developed specific ways of combining images and sounds; and, more recently, digital technology has redefined the standard forms of mass communication. Information is aestheticized, and music in turn is incorporated into pre-existing symbolic fields. This volume - the first in the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century - offers a wide-ranging exploration of the relations between sound, technology and listening practices, considered from the complementary perspectives of art music and popular music, music theatre and multimedia, composition and performance, ethnographic and anthropological research.

In Essays in Honor of Christopher Hogwood: The Maestro's Direction, Thomas Donahue has collected several essays from authors who have been motivated and inspired by the distinguished keyboard player, music editor, writer, and conductor, Christopher Hogwood, in honor of his 70th birthday in 2011. As is clearly shown in the assembled articles, Hogwood has had considerable influence in the latter half of the 20th century in advocating the historically informed performance of early music. Contributions from such scholars as Yo Tomita, Richard Troeger, Sabine K. Klaus, Bridget Cunningham, and Annette Richards pay tribute to this major musician of the 20th century, one of the strongest advocates for the performance of early music. The volume begins with a foreword by Bernard Brauchli, followed by a chronology of Hogwood's education and career, including his publications and awards. The succeeding essays cover a variety of subjects associated with Hogwood's approach to early music, including the interpretation of composers' notations, discussions of musical instrument construction and use, elucidation of performance traditions and conventions of the past, and analysis of the music itself. The essays provide insights on the music of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and J.S. and C.P.E. Bach and consider various keyboard instruments such as the clavichord, square piano, spinet, and claviorgan. An afterword by Hogwood himself completes this well rounded collection.

This guide to the piano literature for the one-handed pianist surveys over 2,100 individual piano pieces which include not only concert literature but pedagogical pieces as well. Following the introduction are four chapters cataloguing original works for the right hand alone, original works for the left hand alone, music arranged or transcribed for one hand alone, and concerted works for one hand in concert with other pianists, instruments, or voices. Each entry assesses the individual composition, its quality, its difficulty, its particular appeal, and its uses with the composer's name, dates, and nationality, where possible. Also included is a selected discography of commercially produced phonodiscs, compact discs, and cassettes.

Instructors and pianists alike will appreciate this exhaustive guide to one-handed piano music. To aid further research, a bibliography of books, articles, and theses about the literature is provided along with a chapter that lists the contents of thirty-six anthologies devoted to one-handed piano music. This unique reference also includes an index.

Master musical skills quickly and easily! From classical music to new age, hard rock, and pop, music has always played an important role in everyday life. Whether you're an intermediate musician or an aspiring music major, The Everything Essential Music Theory Book is a guide to mastering one of the most important tools for every musician: musical understanding. This compact, portable volume covers all the basics, including: The construction of chords and scales How to understand rhythm and time signatures How keys are identified and organized Creating harmonization and melody With each clear and easy-to-understand chapter, musician and educator Marc Schonbrun takes you through the essentials of music theory--the very glue that holds music together.

Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies is one of the first books to promote the reform of music studies with a centralized presence of jazz and black music to ground American musicians in a core facet of their true cultural heritage. Ed Sarath applies an emergent consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory to music studies while drawing upon overarching conversations on diversity and race and a rich body of literature on the seminal place of black music in American culture. Combining a visionary perspective with an activist tone, Sarath installs jazz and black music in as a foundation for a new paradigm of twenty-first-century musical training that will yield an unprecedented skill set for transcultural navigation among musicians. Sarath analyzes prevalent patterns in music studies change discourse, including an in-depth critique of multiculturalism, and proposes new curricular and organizational systems along with a new model of music inquiry called Integral Musicology. This jazz/black music paradigm further develops into a revolutionary catalyst for development of creativity and consciousness in education and society at large. Sarath's work engages all those who share an interest in black-white race dynamics and its musical ramifications, spirituality and consciousness, and the promotion of creativity throughout all forms of intellectual and personal expression.

Ukulele Quest is an ideal first ukulele book that teaches many musical styles, including rock, reggae and the blues. This colourful tutor provides a great introduction to chord charts, how to read music and musical concepts such as dynamics, pitch and tempo. Accompanying audio at every stage brings the music to life. Come on a quest into the world of music and learn how to play the ukulele! Travel through time, meet dragons, pirates and robots, and make new friends along the way. "This book is beautifully put together and extremely well researched... It's the ukulele book all children deserve." Phil Castang, Head of Bristol Plays Music

Lavish musical soundtracks contributed a special grandeur to the new widescreen, stereophonic sound movie experience of postwar biblical epics such as Samson and Delilah, Ben-Hur, and Quo Vadis. In Epic Sound, Stephen C. Meyer shows how music was utilized for various effects, sometimes serving as a vehicle for narrative plot and at times complicating biblical and cinematic interpretation. In this way, the soundscapes of these films reflected the ideological and aesthetic tensions within the genre, and more generally, within postwar American society. By examining key biblical films, Meyer adeptly engages musicology with film studies to explore cinematic interpretations of the Bible during the 1940s through the 1960s.

Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

Country music, an original American artform, has been around since before the recording industry began and long before a singer even had the opportunity to sing into a microphone. From the early beginnings in the hills of Appalachia, to the rise of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and the more recent megastars, including Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood, country music has proven to have staying power. It is one of the most popular styles of music in the world today, garnering more sales and downloads currently than any other genre. Many talented individuals are aspiring to sing country music and are determined to turn it into a successful career. Because of this growing popularity, there is a need to educate interested singers with information and methods that will give them the best possible chance at either having a career as a artist, working in the industry as a background vocalist or session singer, or simply realizing their potential in country music. Kelly K. Garner's So You Want To Sing Country is a book devoted to briefly reviewing the rich heritage of country singing and thoroughly examining the techniques and methods of singing in a country style. Additional topics of discussion will include country song types and structure, instrumentation, performing on stage and in the studio, and career options in country music. Additional chapters by Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne, and Matthew Edwards address universal questions of voice science and pedagogy, vocal health, and audio enhancement technology. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Country features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

Specifically designed to teach jazz basics to students with 1 or 2 years playing experience, but with no prior experience playing jazz. Great for individual or classroom use. Teaches the basics of swing style in a step-by-step approach using well-known songs. Improvisation is made easy starting with simple 2-measure phrases. Scales and basic theory are introduced in a simple and easy to understand approach. 2 CD's are included with recordings of all exercises and arrangements. Other features: 7 full band arrangements, sample solos, jazz history and people.

While there are many similarities between solo and choral singing, they are not the same discipline, and it is important to realize the different approaches necessary for each. In The Solo Singer in the Choral Setting: A Handbook for Achieving Vocal Health, Olson presents the unique perspective of choral singing from a soloist's viewpoint, providing a clear outline of several issues facing the solo singer in the choral setting. She discusses concepts as diverse as body position in rehearsal and acoustic sound production, and she offers practical ideas for solving these challenges. Teaching examples and case studies help illustrate the problems and offer potential solutions for handling the challenges of the choral environment. After a general overview of vocal technique, the chapters address the physiological, psychological, pedagogical, acoustic, and interpretive issues facing the solo singer in the choral setting. Concepts, such as phonation; resonation and timbre; approaches to diction; voice classification; choral blend; interpreting emotion; relationships among choral conductor, singer, and teacher of singing; and the use of vibrato are examined in detail. Concluding with a conversation with two choral conductors, as well as a glossary, bibliography, and index, this volume is beneficial to singers, teachers, and conductors alike.