This book contains nine pieces from ABRSM's Grade 4 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 4 syllabus, performed by Yulia Chaplina, Mei Yi Foo, Nikki Iles, Dinara Klinton, Charles Owen, Robert Thompson and Richard Uttley.

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."

This volume contains valuable practice material for candidates preparing for the ABRSM Grade 1 Piano exams. The book is written in attractive and approachable styles and representative of the technical level expected in the exam.

Join the superhero world of Lang Lang and come on a piano adventure with The Lang Lang Piano Method Level 2. Level 2 builds on the first book by introducing: eighth notes (quavers) simple hands together and thumb-under technique. 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

(Faber Piano Adventures ). Book B of the Fabers' method for the young beginner moves the student into staff-reading. Music notation is explored through stepwise directional reading, pattern recognition, and changing hand positions, all in the context of engaging songs, games and creative exploration at the piano. Maintaining the child-centered philosophy of the series, the "friends at the piano" from the A Books introduce students to the music of two new composer friends Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Classic themes share the stage with contemporary pop and jazz sounds for young ears to absorb and enjoy. The Book B CD presents a vibrant mix of sounds, from boogie to Beethoven. It serves as a listening CD which educates and as an accompaniment CD for play-along.

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.

Book 2 opens with a new My Own Song improvisation on CDEFG. Unit 1 introduces phrasing and legato touch, and also presents harmonic 2nds and 3rds with staccato touch. The following two units are dedicated to the introduction of 4ths and 5ths. Also in Unit 3, sharps are introduced in a diatonic setting starting on D, and flats are introduced as blues notes. Most pieces in the second half of Book 2 coordinate hands playing together. This book works very well for transfer students.

Jazz, Rags & Blues, Books 1 through 5 contain original solos for late elementary to early advanced-level pianists that reflect the various styles of the jazz idiom. An excellent way to introduce your students to this distinctive American contribution to 20th century music. Available separately (item #18115), the CD includes dynamic recordings of each song in Books 1-3 of this series.

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. Lesson Book 4 concepts include: tarantellas; eighth note triplets; arpeggiated chords; first and second inversion triads in C; triads in all positions; major scales in parallel motion; two-part writing; seventh chords and inversions of seventh chords; E harmonic minor scale in contrary motion; primary chords in E minor; sixteenth notes; dotted eighth notes; primary chords in B-flat Major and G Minor; repeated-note warm-ups; and harmonic minor scales in parallel motion.
For reinforcement of each principle as it is introduced, supplementary material is carefully coordinated, page for page, at each level of instruction. Coordinating supplemental books for Level 4 include: Classic Themes * Duet * Ear Training * Merry Christmas * Musical Concepts * Recital * Repertoire * Sight Reading * Technic * Theory and Top Hits! Solo, Christmas and Duet books.

Continuing the expansion of note-reading skills begun in Levels 1Aa2A, this book includes melodic and harmonic 7ths and octaves to aid the student with moving freely around the keyboard. New items include the introduction of C and G major scales, as well as three-note V7 chords in C and G. Dotted quarter and eighth-note rhythm patterns are added to other rhythms of gradually increasing complexity. Each piece on the CD was recorded at a performance tempo and a slower practice tempo.

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.

Lesson Book 2 starts as pre-reading, then moves to reading on the staff. After a review, the new concepts taught are: Dotted quarter note and 4/4 time, 4/4 time, Mezzo-forte, Staff and note reading, Steps and skips, Grand staff. New notes taught are F and G in the LH and RH, completing the Middle C position.

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.

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.

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 in Recital 1B are the folk tunes "Camptown Races" and "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow," and imaginative originals like "The Elephant and the Flea" and "March of the Extra-Terrestrials."