Paris at the turn of the 20th century was obsessed with the interrelations of the arts. It was a time when artists and writers spoke of poetry as music, sounds as colors, and paintings as symphonies. The music of Claude Debussy, with its unique textures and dazzling colors, was the perfect counterpart to the bold new styles of painting in France. Paul Roberts probes the sources of Debussy's artistic inspiration, relating the "impressionist" titles to the artistic and literary ferment of the time. He also draws on his own performing experience to touch on all the principal technical problems for a performer of Debussy's piano music. His many suggestions about interpreting the music will be particularly valuable to performers as well as listeners.

Johana Harris was a musical prodigy who began her education in her native Canada, then moved to New York at the age of 12. The youngest student ever admitted to the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, Harris was destined for greatness on the world stage. However, exploitation by her mother and then by her husband Roy Harris, coupled with the prejudice shown women during the mid-20th century kept her from achieving that pinnacle. Johana Harris: A Biography brings to light the life of an unheralded musical genius, as well as providing new information on her husband Roy Harris, about whom very little is known. This revealing look at the lives of two important musicians who were referred to in the middle years of the last century as "Mr. and Mrs. American Music" is the first book published about these two people.

This volume contains valuable practice material for candidates preparing for the ABRSM Grade 2 Piano exams. The book is written in attractive and approachable styles and representative of the technical level expected in the exam.

The Romantic pianist-the solo pianist who plays nineteenth-century piano music-has become an attractive figure in the popular imagination, considering the innumerable artworks, literature, and films representing this performer's seductive allure. Dreams of Love pursues a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to understanding the "romantic" pianist as a cultural icon, focusing on the role of technology in producing and perpetuating this mythology over the past two centuries. Sound recording and cinema have shaped the pianist's music and image since the early twentieth century, but these contemporary media technologies build upon practices established during the early nineteenth century: the influence of the piano keyboard on early telegraphs and typewriters, the invention of the solo recital alongside developments in photography, and the ways that piano design and the placement of the instrument on stage structure our viewing-listening perspectives. The concept of technology can be broadened to include the performance of gender and sexuality as further ways of making the pianist into an attractive cultural figure. The book's three sections deal with the touch, sights, and sounds of the Romantic pianist's playing as mediated through various forms of technology. Analyzing these persistent Liebestraume and exploring how they function can reveal their meaning for performers, audiences, and music lovers of the past and present too.

English keyboard music reached an unsurpassed level of sophistication in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as organists such as William Byrd and his students took a genre associated with domestic, amateur performance and treated it as seriously as vocal music. This book draws together important research on the music, its sources and the instruments on which it was played. There are two chapters on instruments: John Koster on the use of harpsichord during the period, and Dominic Gwynn on the construction of Tudor-style organs based on the surviving evidence we have for them. This leads to a section devoted to organ performance practice in a liturgical context, in which John Harper discusses what the use of organs pitched in F may imply about their use in alternation with vocal polyphony, and Magnus Williamson explores improvisational practice in the Tudor period. The next section is on sources and repertoire, beginning with Frauke Jurgensen and Rachelle Taylor's chapter on Clarifica me Pater settings, which grows naturally out of the consideration of improvisation in the previous chapter. The next two contributions focus on two of the most important individual manuscript sources: Tihomir Popovic challenges assumptions about My Ladye Nevells Booke by reflecting on what the manuscript can tell us about aristocratic culture, and David J. Smith provides a detailed study of the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The discussion then broadens out into Pieter Dirksen's consideration of a wider selection of sources relating to John Bull, which in turn connects closely to David Leadbetter's work on Gibbons, lute sources and questions of style.

Original and brilliant study...Anyone interested in keyboard instruments of any kind will find in it a great fund of information and insight into matters of general musical interest, especially the performance of Bach's music. EARLY MUSIC TODAY Friederich Griepenkerl, in his 1844 introduction to Volume 1 of the first complete edition of J. S. Bach's organ works, wrote: "Actually the six Sonatas and the Passacaglia were written for a clavichord with two manuals and pedal, an instrument that, in those days, every beginning organist possessed, which they used beforehand, to practice playing with hands and feet in order to make effective use of them at the organ. It would be a good thing to let such instruments be made again, because actually no one who wants to study to be an organist can really do without one." What was the role of the pedal clavichord in music history? Was it a cheap practice instrument for organists or was Griepenkerl right? Was it a teaching tool that helped contribute to the quality of organ playing in its golden age? Most twentieth-century commentary on the pedal clavichord as an historical phenomenon was written in a kind of vacuum, since there were no playable historical models with which to experiment and from which to make an informed judgment. At the heart of Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: An Organist's Guide are some extraordinary recent experiments from the GAteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt) at GAteborg University. The Johan David Gerstenberg pedal clavichord from 1766, now in the Leipzig University museum, was documented and reconstructed; the new copy was then used for several years as a living instrument for organ students and teachers to experience. On thebasis of these experiments and experiences, the book explores, in new and artful ways, Bach's keyboard technique, a technique preserved by his first biographer, J. N. Forkel (1802), and by Forkel's own student, Griepenkerl. It also sifts and weighs the assumptions and claims made for and aga

Written late in his life, J. S. Bach's The Art of Fugue has long been admired-in some quarters revered-as one of his masterworks. Its last movement, Contrapunctus 14, went unfinished, and the enigma of its incompleteness still preoccupies scholars and musical conductors alike. In 1881, Gustav Nottebohm discovered that the three subjects of the movement could be supplemented by a fourth. In 1993, Zoltan Goencz revealed that Bach had planned the passage that would join the four subjects in an entirely unique way. This section has not survived, but, as Goencz notes, it must have been ready in the earliest phase of composition since Bach had created the expositions of the first three subjects from its "disjointed" parts. Goencz then boldly took on the task of reconstructing the original "template" by putting together the once separate pieces. In Bach's Testament: On the Philosophical and Theological Background of The Art of Fugue, Goencz probes the philosophic-theological background of The Art of Fugue, revealing the special structures that supported the 1993 reconstruction. Bach's Testament investigates the reconstruction's metaphysical dimensions, focusing on the quadruple fugue. As a summary of Zoltan Goencz's extensive research over many years, which resulted in the completion of the fugue, this work explores the complex combinatorial, philosophical and theological considerations that inform its structure. Bach's Testament is ideally suited not only to Bach scholars and musicologists but also intellectual historians with particular interests in 18th-century religious and philosophical ideas.

In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

In From Bach's Goldberg to Beethoven's Diabelli: Influence and Independence, music scholar and noted pianist Alfred Kanwischer gives readers an extended exploration in which each of Beethoven's 33 pieces that comprise the Diabelli Variations (Op. 120) is caringly examined and assessed for its ingredients, actions, personality, and influence on the whole. Counterpoint abounds, not only in the fugal variations, which are closely parsed, but throughout the Diabelli, revealing the noticeably Baroque character of the technical compositional devices Beethoven employs. Throughout his study, Kanwischer integrates comparisons with Bach's immortal Goldberg Variations. Both sets stand alone as among the greatest keyboard variations in the Western canon. During their creation, both composers were nearly the same age, at the zenith of their art, and in similarly felicitous frames of mind.Kanwischer underscores twenty essential similarities, from the use of melody and melodic outline and the comparability among variations in size, parallel design, ebullient outlook, increasing contrasts, daring virtuosic flights, Shakespearean blend of comic and tragic, and their respective cumulative rises to spiritual transcendence. From Bach's Goldberg to Beethoven's Diabelli takes readers on a journey of discovery that is lively and stimulating. It considers not only questions of influence but those of insight and understanding, offering a work useful not only as a reference but as a guide to performers, music instructors and devotees. This work also includes 70 visually annotated interpretive musical examples as aids to understanding.

The Keyboard Play-Along Series will help you play your favorite songs as played by your favorite artists quickly and easily. Just follow the music in the book, listen to the CD to hear how the keyboard should sound, and then play along using the separate backing tracks. The melody and lyrics are also included in the book in case you want to sing, or to simply help you follow along. The audio CD is playable on any CD player. For PC and Mac users, the CD is enhanced so you can adjust the recording to any tempo without changing pitch! This volume contains 8 songs: Break on Through to the Other Side * Hello, I Love You (Won't You Tell Me Your Name?) * L.A. Woman * Light My Fire * Love Me Two Times * People Are Strange * Riders on the Storm * Roadhouse Blues.

Presenting a fresh approach to French organ music, David Ponsford analyses the repertory from the reign of Louis XIV by genre. The colourful French organ was so consistent in design that the very titles of pieces that were constituent parts of organ masses, Magnificats and suites prescribed the registrations: plein jeu, fugue, duo, recit, trio, fond d'orgue and grand jeu. Particular examples from published livres d'orgue and important manuscript collections are analysed chronologically, so that influences from Italian as well as French sacred and secular music can be traced. This analysis reveals the dynamic development of compositional styles in which each composer developed, modified or reacted against the exemplars of his predecessors. Composers discussed include Louis Couperin, Francois Couperin, Raison, Clerambault and Marchand. The reader will gain an enhanced understanding of performance practices such as notes inegales, fingering and ornamentation, and the influence of French composers on J. S. Bach.

These two volumes each contain six captivating duets in a variety of styles including blues, jazz, ragtime and more! Both the primo and secondo parts are written at the same level of difficulty.

A piece a week Piano Grade 4 is ideal to be used alongside the Improve your sight-reading! graded piano books to support and improve the reading skills so fundamental to successful sight-reading. These fun, short pieces are specifically written to be learnt one per week. By continually reading accessible new repertoire, the crucial processing of information and hand-eye coordination are established and improved, developing confident sight-reading. The ability to sight-read fluently is a vital skill, enabling students to learn new pieces more quickly and play with other musicians. The best-selling Improve your sight-reading! series, by renowned educationalist Paul Harris, is designed to develop sight-reading skills, especially in the context of graded exams.

Practice, practice, practice to play like Chopin or the Piano Man The piano will help you add a touch of fun to your life, impress your friends at parties, and even reduce stress. It even makes you better at math (really!). Piano Exercises For Dummies is at your service as you learn to make those 88 black and white keys sing. You'll get a quick overview of the basics before diving into practice routines and sample songs that you can use to improve your skill, whatever your level. This book gives you online access to audio files of the exercises along with digital access to the sheet music shared in the book. Learn from an experienced pianist, composer, and arranger, and start making beautiful music, the Dummies way! Refresh your knowledge of the piano basics so you're poised and prepared to play the right way Play enjoyable practice exercises and songs designed to teach specific skills and techniques in all genres Go online to access all the audio files, anytime, anywhere Bring a little more joy into your life by stepping up your piano know-how Piano Exercises For Dummies is for new and experienced pianists alike, and useful for improving your skill in any musical style.

(Piano Collection). This new volume in Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics presents 26 preludes, 21 nocturnes and 19 waltzes a large amount of music at a value price. There are new urtext editions of seven pieces included, not edited by Joseffy in his original Schirmer editions: Prelude in A-flat Major (1834), Nocturne in C-sharp minor (1830), Nocturne in C minor (1837), and Waltzes in A-flat Major (1830), E-flat Major (1830), E-flat Major (1840), and A minor (1843).

This is the story of one woman's accidental career as a cocktail lounge piano player. Connecting the people she has met with the places she has played and the pianos she has known Robin Meloy Goldsby discovers the human side for better or worse of her audiences a mobsters and moguls the down-and-out the downright scary and ordinary people dealing with life in extraordinary ways.

Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design, performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life, whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments, Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi's multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy, composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this project, whilst continuing to pursue the book's broader themes.