The interest in piano and the desire to play, has increased tremendously in the past few years. Especially is this noticeable among adults who have either had some elementary piano instruction in their youth or have been denied this study for various reasons. This increased interest is partly due to the widespread influence of radio. Hearing music almost daily has become an integral part of our lives and it is this constant influence which has awakened a keen and natural desire to become an active participant. it is to the furtherance and stimulation of this natural desire that this course was planned. The adult approach has been kept constantly in mind, however not to the exclusion of certain basic principles which are necessary in order to make rapid and satisfactory progress. The logical and stepwise manner of progression in this course should prove of inestimable aid to both the student and teacher.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone "color", "wet" acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, "the illusory stuff of our dreams." This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both "classical" and "popular" music. These range, in "classical" music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in "popular" music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.