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!

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.

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.