Off the Record is a revealing exploration of piano performing practices of the high Romantic era. Author and well-known keyboard player Neal Peres Da Costa bases his investigation on a range of early sound recordings (acoustic, piano roll and electric) that capture a generation of highly-esteemed pianists trained as far back as the mid-nineteenth-century. Placing general practices of late nineteenth-century piano performance alongside evidence of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of legendary pianists such as Carl Reinecke (1824-1910), Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915), Camille Saint-Saens (1838-1921) and Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), he examines prevalent techniques of the time--dislocation, unnotated arpeggiation, rhythmic alteration, tempo fluctuation--and unfolds the background and lineage of significant performer/pedagogues. Throughout, Peres Da Costa demonstrates that these early recordings do not simply capture the idiosyncrasies of aging musicians as has been commonly asserted, but in fact represent a range of established expressive practices of a lost age.
An extensive collection of these fascinating and sometimes rare professional recordings of the Romantic age masters are available on a companion web site, and in addition, Peres Da Costa, himself a renowned period keyboardist, illustrates points made throughout the book with his own playing. Of essential value to student and professional pianists, historical musicologists of 19th and early 20th century performance practice, and also to the general music aficionado audience, Off the Record is an indispensable resource for scholarly research, performance inspiration, and listening enjoyment."

The Recital Books congratulate students for a job well done by providing correlated repertoire to their Lesson Books that are based on concepts they've already learned. As a result, the pieces are quickly mastered. Included are such familiar favorites as "Clementine" and "Arkansas Traveler," and originals with a classical feel like "Divertimento in D" and "Rondo."

Join the superhero world of Lang Lang and come on a piano adventure with The Lang Lang Piano Method Level 3. Level 3 continues the progression by: extending the note range to an octave exploring different keys including more hands-together in pieces. The five progressive books in The Lang Lang Piano Method provide a unique and imaginative way for complete beginners to learn the piano with the world's most successful concert pianist, Lang Lang. There's plenty to play all around the keyboard right from the start. Fun, imaginative pieces develop the left and right hands equally and supporting audio features exclusive performances by Lang Lang of the concert pieces. Musicianship is developed through theory pages and listening to exclusive performances by Lang Lang of piano classics for children. "I've written The Lang Lang Piano Method to inspire today's kids with my passion for the piano." Lang Lang

Play everyone's favorite songs with this collection of the most memorable hits of the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s Classic rock fans will have a blast applying their talent to more than 40 enduring songs made famous by legendary artists like The Beatles, David Bowie, Journey, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Rush, The Who, and more. The arrangements in this collection capture the essence of the original recordings in fun, easy piano renditions that are great for solo performance or sing-alongs. Titles: 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Paul Simon) * Africa (Toto) * All Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix) * All My Love (Led Zeppelin) * Behind Blue Eyes (The Who) * Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell) * Blinded by the Light (Manfred Mann's Earth Band) * Blowin' in the Wind (Bob Dylan) * Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen) * Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon and Garfunkel) * Closer to the Heart (Rush) * Dancing in the Moonlight (King Harvest) * Do You Feel Like We Do (Peter Frampton) * Don't Stop Believin' (Journey) * Faithfully (Journey) * Fool in the Rain (Led Zeppelin) * From Me to You (The Beatles) * Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker) (Parliament) * Going Up the Country (Canned Heat) * The Great Gig in the Sky (Pink Floyd) * I Love L.A. (Randy Newman) * I Saw Her Standing There (The Beatles) * Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan) * Live and Let Die (Paul McCartney) * Love Reign O'er Me (The Who) * Money (Pink Floyd) * Nights in White Satin (The Moody Blues) * Paranoid (Black Sabbath) * P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) (Parliament) * Pinball Wizard (The Who) * River (Joni Mitchell) * Saturday in the Park (Chicago) * She Loves You (The Beatles) * She's a Rainbow (The Rolling Stones) * The Sound of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel) * Space Oddity (David Bowie) * St. Stephen (Grateful Dead) * Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin) * Thunder Road (Bruce Springsteen) * Tom Sawyer (Rush) * Uncle John's Band (Grateful Dead) * A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) * Wild Hors

This book contains nine pieces from ABRSM's Grade 5 Piano syllabus for 2021 & 2022, three pieces chosen from each of Lists A, B and C. The pieces have been carefully selected to offer an attractive and varied range of styles, creating a collection that provides an excellent source of repertoire to suit every performer. The book also contains helpful footnotes and, for those preparing for exams, useful syllabus information. The enclosed CD features inspiring recordings of all 30 pieces on the Grade 5 syllabus, performed by Yulia Chaplina, Mei Yi Foo, Nikki Iles, Dinara Klinton, Charles Owen, Robert Thompson and Richard Uttley.

This book contains nine pieces from ABRSM's Grade 7 Piano syllabus for 2023 & 2024, three pieces chosen from each of Lists A, B and C - ideal for both Practical and Performance Grade exams. The pieces have been carefully selected to offer an attractive and varied range of styles, creating a collection that provides an excellent source of repertoire to suit every performer. The book also contains helpful footnotes and, for those preparing for exams, useful syllabus information.Audio recordings of all 39 pieces on the Grade 7 syllabus, performed by expert musicians, are included (via the download code in the book). A version of this book without audio download is also available.

This easy step-by-step method emphasizes correct playing habits and note reading through interval recognition. Level 6 concepts include: a review of major and minor triads; diminished and augmented triads; the diminished seventh chord; a special style of pedaling; the key of F sharp Minor; the E Major scale; the key of C sharp minor; the A flat Major scale; thirty-second notes; and dotted sixteenth notes. This book also contains an important daily scale routine and a dictionary of musical terms. For reinforcement of each principle as it is introduced, supplementary material is carefully coordinated, page for page, at each level of instruction. Correlated supplemental books for Level 6 include: Ear Training * Recital * Theory and Top Hits! Solo.

Designed to coordinate page-by-page with the Lesson Books. Contains enjoyable games and quizzes that reinforce the principles presented in the Lesson Books. Students can increase their musical understanding while they are away from the keyboard.

Providing essential tools to transform college piano students into professional piano teachers, Courtney Crappell's Teaching Piano Pedagogy helps teachers develop pedagogy course curricula, design and facilitate practicum-teaching experiences, and guide research projects in piano pedagogy. The book grounds the reader in the history of the domain, investigates course materials, and explores unique methods to introduce students to course concepts and help them put those concepts into practice. To facilitate easy integration into the curriculum, Crappell provides example classroom exercises and assignments throughout the text, which are designed to help students understand and practice the related topics and skills. Teaching Piano Pedagogy is not simply a book about teaching piano-it is a book about how piano students learn to teach.

Warm, lyrical, cantabile melodies and rich harmonic structures are found in this expressive series.

This easy step-by-step method emphasizes correct playing habits and note reading through interval recognition. Lesson Book 2 continues where Level 1B finishes. This book introduces dotted half notes and dotted quarter notes, plus intervals of 6ths, 7ths and octaves. Teaches greater movement of the hands, including crossing two over one and scalework. Students will also learn more about triads, primary chords, and blocked and broken chords.

This catalogue completes the bibliographic survey of French harpsichord music begun in Bruce Gustafson's French Harpsichord Music of the Seventeenth Century: A Thematic Catalogue of Sources with Commentary (Ann Arbor, 1979). It has entries for all of the printed music known to have existed, over 230 volumes, and 150 manuscripts. It offers precise transcriptions of the title pages, full contents, dating, locations, editions, facsimiles, evaluations in the contemporary press, identifications of dedicatees, and stylistic comments. The eighteenth-century French harpsichord repertory is shown to extend from 1699 to about 1780, from Louis Marchand's Pieces de clavecin to the four Symphonies concertantes by Jean-Francois Tapray that juxtapose the harpsichord and piano as solo instruments. All original keyboard music is included. Since the introduction of the piano into France occurred during the twenty years preceding 1780, this Catalogue includes some music that may have been intended for that instrument rather than for the harpsichord. This period of transition is discussed in full in the Introduction.

In Chopin's set of 24 interconnected "Preludes (Op. 28)," we are presented with 24 distinct compositional surfaces, aiming at as many distinguishable emotional expressions. As such, the Preludes stand as a virtual survey of the developing musical manners of the 19th century--which was, after all, the stylistic period in which mood was promoted most energetically and frankly. Under analytic investigation, the technical means to these varied expressive ends can be discovered and assessed. 24 separate explorations reveal themselves to the inquiring musician, who can investigate any or as many of the pieces as is wished or needed. At the same time, the Preludes form a fairly compelling total entity, related by precise balances of mood and key, as well as certain subtler interconnecting details.

The individual analyses aim at conjoined descriptive statements that take into account the various separable, but ultimately fused, musical elements: line and harmony in the pitch domain; rhythm in terms of local detail, but also at the levels of meter, phrase, and form; and the various expressive modifications of dynamics and articulation. Form is seen to grow out of the harnessed progress of these elements, which together determine expressive content. "The Chopin Preludes," a centerpiece of 19th-century Romanticism, are unique: two dozen distinct moods that seem to summarize the musical manners of the time, they also function as an organic whole. This book is a detailed guide through the "Preludes," both individually and as a group. The analyses assess technical and expressive means and ends.

Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.

Alfred's Basic Prep Course, Levels A through F, was written to answer a demand for a course of piano study designed especially for students who are five years old and up. This course offers a careful introduction of fundamentals, music that fits comfortably under the young student's normal hand span, plus constant reinforcement--all leading to results beyond those generated by other piano methods. After Lesson Book D, the student may progress to Prep Course, Lesson Book E or choose to go directly into the faster paced Level 2 of Alfred's Basic Piano Library. The complete Prep Course consists of six books (Levels A through F).