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Books > Music > Musical instruments & instrumental ensembles
The comprehensive go-to guide for building keyboard skills Being
able to play a tune on the piano can bring you a lifetime of sheer
aesthetic pleasure and put you in serious demand at parties!
Whatever your motivation for tinkling the ivories, the latest
edition of Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies gives you
the essentials you need both to build your playing skills and
expand your knowledge of music theory, from deciding what keyboard
suits you best to musing on the science of what makes music so
emotionally compelling. This indispensable resource combines the
best of Piano For Dummies, Keyboard For Dummies, Music Theory For
Dummies, and Piano Exercises For Dummies and includes practice
strategies, as well as access to streaming and downloadable audio
to help guide your progress. In addition to becoming acquainted
with the latest in music theory, you ll learn to develop your
sight-reading skills and performance techniques until you can
reproduce pieces flawlessly on request! Choose and care for your
keyboard Practice until perfect Compose your own songs Hook up to
speakers, computers, and more Learning to play the keys is a
never-ending journey of new discoveries and joy, and there s no
better companion on your voyage than this friendly, erudite, and
comprehensive guide. P.S. If you think this book seems familiar,
you re probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and
design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same
as the previous release of Piano and Keyboard AIO For Dummies
(9781118837429). The book you see here shouldn t be considered a
new or updated product. But if you re in the mood to learn
something new, check out some of our other books. We re always
writing about new topics!
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Rhapsody
(Book)
David Bednall
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R424
Discovery Miles 4 240
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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This powerful piece, dating from 2010, shows off the full resources
of any organ it is played on. Its driving rhythms and exhilarating,
often bitonal, harmonies recall such French organist-composers as
Langlais and Messiaen, and while there is often an improvisatory
feel, the music is far from formless, and its carefully planned
structure contributes crucially to its success.
Schoenberg's Op.23 for solo piano, written between 1920 and 1923,
represented a move from his atonal music of the preceding twelve
years to 12-note music. In this analysis of the five pieces which
make up Op.23, Kathryn Bailey discusses the ways in which
Schoenberg clearly explores new ideas in these pieces in the
context of his old style. Op.23 marked the development of a new way
of organizing pitches and establishing centres of gravity in the
absence of tonality; but it was also an extension of what had gone
before. While moving on from Op.23 was not a big step for
Schoenberg, it represented a climacteric in the history of musical
composition. It was a long time before anyone outside of
Schoenberg's circle would be able to see past the revolutionary
idea of composing from a single pre-determined arrangement of the
12 notes of the chromatic scale to notice that in most ways this
New Music answered the same conditions and fulfilled the same
expectations that music had for generations.
Sun Dance is a slightly modified version of the fifth movement from
the composer's Organ Dances, originally conceived for organ solo,
strings, and percussion. The music is for the most part celebratory
in character, its spiky rhythms driven along by the pervasive
alternation of 3/8 and 4/4 metrical groupings, although the
composer also has fun with 7/8 and 5/8 patterns.
Maestros in America: Conductors in the 21st Century provides short
biographical and critical essays of over 100 American
conductors-and conductors in America-in the twenty-first century.
Roderick L. Sharpe and Jeanne Koekkoek Stierman made their
selections based on three categories of persons: American-born;
naturalized US citizens; and foreign conductors holding a permanent
appointment in the US. In addition, all individuals included had to
have been active as conductors at the start of the new millennium.
These criteria allowed the authors to incorporate up-and-comers as
well as those more established, offering an extensive cross-section
of the upper echelons of the conducting profession focused on the
present, recent past, and future. Each entry is a biographical
essay containing essential facts of the conductor's life and work,
as well as assessment and commentary gleaned from articles,
interviews, reviews, and, in some cases, personal observation. The
entries conclude with the conductor's website, a list of further
reading, and selected recordings. These sketches of currently or
recently practicing conductors provide insight into the state of
orchestral music-making in the US as it is, has been, and may
become, highlighting the efforts these conductors made to ensure
its survival. Complete with two appendixes and an index, this
important reference will be beneficial to music students and
faculty, reference librarians, orchestral administrators, and music
lovers alike.
The renaissance flute, with its rich history, stunning repertoire,
and mellow tone, has attracted a significant following among
flutists, whether they specialize in modern flute or historical
instruments. Yet, actually delving into the study of renaissance
flute has proven a challenge - there exists a confusing array of
editions of renaissance music, specialized (and often expensive)
facsimiles of manuscripts and early prints, and in unfamiliar
notations, while at the same time there is a dearth of resources
for beginners. Confronting this challenge with the first ever
practitioners' handbook for renaissance flute, Kate Clark and
Amanda Markwick offer flutists of all levels a clear and accessible
introduction to the world and repertoire of the instrument. In The
Renaissance Flute: A Contemporary Guide, Clark and Markwick cover
all aspects, from practicalities such as buying and maintaining the
instrument, to actual music for solo and group performance, to
theory designed to improve the understanding and playing of
renaissance polyphony. This approach enables students to immerse
themselves at their own pace and build on their skills with each
chapter. With nearly 40 full pages of exercises, and a companion
website with recorded examples and filmed instructions from the
authors, The Renaissance Flute provides professionals and newcomers
alike a new entryway into the world and practice of renaissance
music.
Includes hundreds of chords and chord progressions in all styles in
all 12 keys. For beginning to intermediate guitarists. Contains
progressions in all styles, including rock, blues, jazz, folk,
alternative, country and more.
Commissioned for the 40th birthday of the organist Paul Walton,
Walton's Paean is a work of great verve, with compelling rhythms,
exciting harmonies, and catchy melodies propelling the celebratory
music forward. Through the boisterous excitement, legato passages
emerge as the piece hurtles towards the resounding finale. There is
also a little joke in the occasional references to the music of
Paul Walton's namesake, William.
In The Score, The Orchestra, and the Conductor,
internationally-renowned conducting instructor Gustav Meier
presents his practical approach to preparing an orchestral score
for rehearsal and performance. Well-illustrated with numerous music
examples, charts, figures, and tables, Meier's methods, grounded in
the rich body of his collected experience as a music director and
teacher of conducting students, are explained in great detail.
Meier covers all aspects of conducting from experimenting without
the orchestra to creating signals that produce the desired sound.
The methods he describes offer specific and readily applicable
advice for virtually every musical and technical decision that
occurs in the important phase between when a conductor first
decides upon a specific score and the first rehearsal with an
orchestra. And from ear training to working with musicians to
programming, he also offers his expertise on the day-to-day aspects
of conducting and musical performance. The Score, The Orchestra,
and the Conductor will be an indispensable and often-read
contribution to the library of every music director and conducting
student.
How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined
artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How
can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can
teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right?
These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to
answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a
studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music
(Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely
because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt
connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose
essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these
philosophers, it is the density of musical structure-the intricate
interplay among purely musical elements-that allows music to
capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author
contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically
nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to
illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms
this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a
piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational
autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute
music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic
aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own
right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics,
deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy
of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.
(Unlocking the Masters). From Mozart to Debussy to Olivier
Messiaen, the works of 50 composers are closely examined in The
Great Instrumental Works . It is a book for anyone who enjoys the
lively arts of opera, drama, film, literature, and popular song and
who wants to find out what is really going on in the symphonies of
Mozart, the string quartets of Beethoven, the orchestral works of
Debussy and Ravel, and the contemporary pieces of Olivier Messiaen
and Arvo Part. The author, Father Owen Lee, is an internationally
known commentator on music and the arts, and writes with a style
that has been called "rich, dense, and profound" (Citizen's
Weekly), "highly readable" (Choice), and "often irreverently
amusing" (Opera News). With Father Lee as a guide, the intricacies
of classical forms and key relationships are rendered not only
intelligible but meaningful, the music itself becomes
life-enhancing, and its great composers come vividly to life.
Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads,
published in ten parts from 1882 to 1898, contained the texts and
variants of 305 extant themes written down between the thirteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Unsurpassed in its presentation of texts,
this exhaustive collection devoted little attention to the ballad
music, a want that was filled by Bertrand Harris Bronson in his
four-volume Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. The present
book is an abridged, one-volume edition of that work, setting forth
music and text for proven examples of oral tradition, with a new
comprehensive introduction. Its convenient format makes readily
available to students and scholars the materials for a study of the
Child ballads as they have been preserved in the British-American
singing tradition.
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Steinway & Sons
(Paperback)
Laura Lee Smith; Foreword by Michael Feinstein
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R586
R529
Discovery Miles 5 290
Save R57 (10%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
John Lenwood McLean - sugar free saxophonist from Sugar Hill,
Harlem - is widely known as one of the finest, most consistent
soloists in jazz history. From early in his career Jackie's
powerful, unsentimental, sometimes astringent sound and inventive
style made audiences and critics sit up and listen. Steeped in -
but eventually moving well beyond - the influence of his mentor and
friend Charlie Parker, he built an attractive, instantly
recognisable musical personality. As author Derek Ansell says, his
career trajectory is far from the typical jazz story of the tragic
artist in which early brilliance leads to later decline. McLean's
story is one of glorious triumph over the drug addiction that
affected so many of his friends and might have destroyed him. Able
to produce uniformly fine recordings through the darkest periods of
his personal life, he saw his reputation as a musician steadily
grow and became not only a living legend as an improviser but a
much respected educator whose students carry on his legacy.
Fortunately, McLean's discography is large and Derek Ansell is a
surefooted guide through the recordings, presenting them in the
context in which they were made and indicating the special gems
among a vast body of recorded work that is one of jazz's greatest
treasures.
It's never too early to encourage good sight-reading in young
players. Now revised to support ABRSM's Initial Grade, this book is
designed to lay the foundations at the most fundamental level,
through the proven, systematic formula of the highly acclaimed
Improve your sight-reading! series by renowned educationalist Paul
Harris. Step by step a complete picture of each piece is built up,
firstly through rhythmic and melodic exercises related to a
specific technical issue, then through prepared pieces with
associated questions, and finally 'going solo' with a series of
meticulously graded sight-reading pieces. Also includes supporting
audio available online for students to check their performances
against.
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