12/30/2012

Stress in Piano Playing - Richard Beauchamp - 1999

Stress in Piano Playing

What do pianists do?

Richard Beauchamp

Notes of a talk prepared for a BAPAM conference in Edinburgh in 1999 - aimed at physiotherapists and doctors

Some causes of Stress | Prevention of Injury | Sitting and posture | Practice technique | Building stamina | Playing technique | Minimising stress | Post injury programme | Categories of technique

What, and how much, do pianists practise?

Teaching Piano in Groups - Christopher Fisher - 2010

Teaching Piano in Groups provides a one-stop compendium of information related to all aspects of group piano teaching. Motivated by an ever-growing interest in this instructional method and its widespread mandatory inclusion in piano pedagogy curricula, Christopher Fisher highlights the proven viability and success of group piano teaching, and arms front-line group piano instructors with the necessary tools for practical implementation of a system of instruction in their own teaching.

Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age" - John Daverio - 1997

In Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," John Daverio presents the first comprehensive study of the composer's life and works to appear in nearly a century. Long regarded as a quintessentially romantic figure, Schumann also has been portrayed as a profoundly tragic one: a composer who began his career as a genius and ended it as a mere talent. Daverio takes issue with this Schumann myth, arguing instead that the composer's entire creative life was guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature. A close analysis of the interdependence among Schumann's activities as reader, diarist, critic, and musician reveals the depth of his literary sensibility. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness--which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856--and his musical creativity. Schumann's character as man and artist thus emerges in all its complexity. The book concludes with an analysis of the late works and a postlude on Schumann's influence on successors from Brahms to Berg.

In this first full-scale biography since the 1950s, esteemed biographer Maynard Solomon draws on a half-century of new information to provide an in-depth account of Mozart's family life, his passions, and his personality.

This book is the first comprehensive guide to Holst's orchestral suite The Planets. It considers the music in detail and places the work in its historical context, describing the circumstances of its composition and its meteoric rise to popular acclaim. Starting with Holst's particular interest in astrology, Greene reveals a profound statement of human character and Holst's own psychological journey toward the mystical state. Using parallels in the verbal and visual arts, Greene weaves here a fascinating tale of musical communication.

The Rhapsody in Blue (1924) established Gershwin's reputation as a serious composer and has since become one of the most popular of all American concert works. In this richly informative guide David Schiff considers the piece as musical work, historical event and cultural document. He traces the history of the Rhapsody's composition, performance and reception, placing it within the context of American popular song and jazz and the development of modernism. He also provides a full account of the different published and recorded versions of the work and explores the many stylistic sources of Gershwin's music.

This illustrated dictionary, written by the prolific Victorian composer Sir John Stainer (1840-1901) - best remembered today for his oratorio The Crucifixion - and W. A. Barrett, was first published by Novello in 1876. It provides definitions for 'the chief musical terms met with in scientific, theoretical, and practical treatises, and in the more common annotated programmes and newspaper criticisms', ranging from short explanations of the Italian words for tempi, through descriptions of ancient instruments to expansive articles on such topics as acoustics, copyright, hymn tunes, the larynx and temperament.

Charles Ives's massive Concord Sonata, his second sonata for piano, named after the town of Concord in Massachusetts, is central to his output and clearly reflects his aesthetic perspective. Geoffrey Block's wide-ranging 1996 account of the work thus provides an ideal introduction to this fascinating composer. As well as a discussion of the Sonata's reception history from 1920 to the time of publication, and a chapter on its compositional genesis, this handbook includes a detailed narrative of the motivic content as well as a historical and analytical survey of the work's borrowings, both certifiable and newly proposed. The programmatic element of the Sonata is explored in the context of Ives's personal vision of four literary subjects associated with the town of Concord between 1840 and 1860: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts.

Even in Beethoven's day the 'Moonlight' Sonata was a popular favourite. This book provides an accessible introduction to the Sonatas Opp. 27 and 31 (including The 'Moonlight' and 'The Tempest'), aimed at pianists, students, and music lovers. It begins with the works' historical background - the emergence of a 'piano culture' at the end of the eighteenth century, Beethoven's aristocratic milieu in Vienna, and his oft-quoted intention to follow a new compositional path. An account of the sonatas' genesis is followed by a discussion of their reception history, including a survey of changing performing styles since the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of the Sonata quasi una Fantasia is examined in relation to the cult of artistic sensibility in early-nineteenth-century Vienna. And the study concludes with a critical introduction to each sonata.

Music in the Galant Style - Robert Gjerdingen - 2007

Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."

This book presents a theory of metrical conflict and applies it to the music of Schumann, thereby placing the composer's distinctive metrical style in full focus. It describes the various categories of metrical conflict that characterize Schumann's work, investigates how states of conflict are introduced and then manipulated and resolved in his compositions, and studies the interaction of such metrical conflict with form, pitch structure, and text. Throughout the text, Krebs intersperses his own theoretical assertions with Schumannesque dialogues between Florestan and Eusebius, who comment on the theory at hand while also discussing and illustrating relevant aspects of "their" metrical practices.

The Sourcebook for Research in Music, in this revised and greatly expanded second edition, is an invaluable guide to the researcher in navigating the vast proliferation of materials in music research. The editors emphasize English-language and recent sources, and also include essential materials in other languages. An opening chapter of introductory materials, including a list of common bibliographical terms with definitions, German and French bibliographical terms, and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems, is followed by seven bibliographical chapters, covering lists of sources as well as collective annotations that introduce and identify specific items. A reference tool containing varied information relating to research in music, the Sourcebook will serve as a classroom text and as a resource for individual music researchers, librarians, faculty members, students, performing and teaching musicians, and musical amateurs.

A classic and invaluable reference work for over thirty years. Soon after its initial publication, the Harvard Dictionary of Music by Willi Apel was firmly established as a standard and essential resource for everyone concerned with music.

This 1845 biography of Mozart by the music journalist Edward Holmes was the first to be published in English. It is based on a study of the available printed materials and primary sources including letters by Mozart (which Holmes translated for this volume) and some of the autograph manuscripts.

Barbara Heyman has worked diligently and intelligently to produce a book which will be the foundation of all Barber scholarship forever, to which all writers on American music will be turning constantly and for which we shall be immensely grateful. I was completely absorbed in the reading of it.

The essays brought together in Franz Liszt and His World advance our understanding of the composer with fresh perspectives and an emphasis on historical contexts. Rainer Kleinertz examines Wagner's enthusiasm for Liszt's symphonic poem Orpheus; Christopher Gibbs discusses Liszt's pathbreaking Viennese concerts of 1838; Dana Gooley assesses Liszt against the backdrop of antivirtuosity polemics; Ryan Minor investigates two cantatas written in honor of Beethoven; Anna Celenza offers new insights about Liszt's experience of Italy; Susan Youens shows how Liszt's songs engage with the modernity of Heinrich Heine's poems; James Deaville looks at how publishers sustained Liszt's popularity; and Leon Botstein explores Liszt's role in the transformation of nineteenth-century preoccupations regarding religion, the nation, and art.

Benjamin Britten was arguably the greatest English composer of his time. His music crossed boundaries of genre and form to include opera, ballet, orchestral and chamber music, and film and incidental music. The result of twenty years of research, ^IBenjamin Britten^R provides up-to-date and comprehensive details about Britten's life and music, including works, performances, and recordings--an effort never before undertaken. Certain to be of use to any scholar of British music or 20th century composition, this reference work is an invaluable addition to the literature on this important artist.

Gavotte in B minor - Eleven Etudes in the Form of Old Dances, Op.19 - Viktor Kosenko

Viktor Stepanovych Kosenko (1896--1938) was one of the most important Ukrainian composers and pianists of the first half of the twentieth century. His Eleven Etudes in the Form of Old Dances, Op. 19, of 1927--29 offer an organic synthesis of the late-Romantic piano tradition, neo-Classical impulses in their use of Baroque dance-forms, and elements of Ukrainian folk-music. This recording of a neglected monument in the piano literature is the first step in the discovery of a composer who was once a cultural icon in his native Ukraine but is now as good as unknown outside its borders.

This volume features hundreds of the most humorous, outrageous, enlightening and insightful quotes. This volume brings together hundreds of the wittiest, cleverest, and sometimes most horrid remarks ever made about music. Sometimes pithy, sometimes provocative, sometimes profound - but always amusing, these quotes by, for and about famous (and not-so-famous) musicians are sure to brighten anyone's day.

В поисках утраченного смысла : Болеслав Яворский о ХТК И.С.Баха - Р.Э.Берченко - 2005

In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart's piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora'k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be'la Barto'k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy. Here then is a superb journey through one of music's richest and most diverse forms, with Michael Steinberg along as host, guide, and the best of companions.

The work of composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) ranges from late-romantic salon pieces to evocations of flamenco to stark neoclassicism. Yet his work has met with a variety of reactions, depending on the audience. In his native Spain, he is considered a leader in the avant-garde and the greatest composer in the Spanish cultural renaissance that extended from the latter part of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In the United States his music was imported as part of the "Latin" music craze of the 1930s and 40s and arranged by pop artists and used in MGM musicals. Similarly enigmatic are the details of Falla's life. He never sustained a lasting, intimate relationship with a woman, yet he created compelling female roles for the lyric stage. Although he became incensed when publishers altered his music, he more than once tinkered with Chopin and Debussy. Despite insisting that he was apolitical, he ultimately took sides in the Spanish Civil War. All his life, his rigorous brand of Roman Catholicism brought him both solace and agony in his quest for spiritual and artistic perfection.

Camille Saint-Saëns is a memorable figure not only for his successes as a composer of choral and orchestral works, and the eternally popular opera Samson et Dalila, but also because he was a keen observer of the musical culture in which he lived. A composer of vast intelligence and erudition, Saint-Saëns was at the same time one of the foremost writers on music in his day. From Wagner, Liszt and Debussy to Milhaud and Stravinsky, Saint-Saëns was at the center of the elite musical and cultural fin de siècle and early 20th Century world. He championed Schumann and Wagner in France at a period when these composers were regarded as dangerous subversives whose music should be kept well away from the impressionable student. Yet Saint-Saëns himself had no aspirations to being a revolutionary, and his appreciation of Wagner the composer was tempered by his reservations over Wagner the philosopher and dramatist, suspicious as he was of what he called "the Germanic preoccupation with going beyond reality." Whether defending Meyerbeer against charges of facility or Berlioz against those who questioned his harmonic grasp, Saint-Saëns was always his own man: in both cases, he claimed, it was "not the absence of faults but the presence of virtues" that distinguishes the good composer.

Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This comprehensive view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.

Bridging the gap between scholarly and popular images of Mozart, this volume provides comprehensive coverage of all of his important works; the reception of his music since his death; the contexts which inform his work and his significance as a performer. It paints a rounded yet focused picture of one of the most revered artists of all time and enhances readers' appreciation of his extraordinary output.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy who toured the capitals of Europe as a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills, in his adulthood he wrote some of the finest music in the European tradition.
Julian Rushton offers a concise and up-to-date biography of this musical genius, combining a well-researched life of the composer with an introduction to the works--symphonic, chamber, sacred, and theatrical--of one of the few who have composed undisputed masterpieces in every genre of his time. Rushton presents a vivid portrait, ranging from Mozart the Wunderkind--travelling with his family from Salzburg to Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and Milan--to the mature composer of perennially fascinating operas such as "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." During the past half-century, scholars have thoroughly explored Mozart's life and music, offering new interpretations based on their historical context, and providing a factual basis for confirming or more often debunking, fanciful accounts of the man and his work. Rushton takes full advantage of these biographical and musical studies as well as the definitive New Mozart Edition to provide an accurate account of Mozart's life and, equally important, an insightful look at the music itself, complete with illustrative musical examples.
An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars, this new addition to the prestigious Master Musicians series puts forward an authoritative interpretation of one of the defining figures of European culture.

Haydn Studies deals with many new aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh. It concentrates principally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presents many radical new readings of the composer's work. Contributions by both established Haydn scholars and others who are new to the field combine to give a stronger sense than is generally understood of the composer's immense significance.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. A lifelong devotee, Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence—a gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

Audiences as well as other artists have responded to Franz Schubert's music with passion, both during his time and in the past two centuries. Musicians, painters, writers, and filmmakers have all found a connection with him, integrating his music into their own works in ways that have given their works greater depth. Our Schubert: His Enduring Legacy examines Schubert and the ways audiences and artists—both his contemporaries and their descendents—relate to him, analyzing some of the uses of Schubert's music and providing an intimate portrait of the man.
Divided into two parts, part one focuses on Schubert's own time, discussing many aspects of Schubert's life and the effects they had on his compositions, such as the special importance and personal function Schubert's songs held for the composer and their effect on his other works; his association with his contemporaries; and the subtleties of his political activism. Part two considers Schubert's legacy, investigating the composer's ability to arouse passion in other artists through the intervening years to the present. This fascinating study includes several photos as well as a select bibliography and discography that include the works discussed.

The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach provides an introduction to and comprehensive discussion of all the music for harpsichord and other stringed keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Often played today on the modern piano, these works are central not only to the Western concert repertory but to musical pedagogy and study throughout the world.
Intended as both a practical guide and an interpretive study, the book consists of three introductory chapters on general matters of historical context, style, and performance practice, followed by fifteen chapters on the individual works, treated in roughly chronological order. The works discussed include all of Bach's individual keyboard compositions as well as those comprising his famous collections, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, the English and French Suites, and the Art of Fugue.

A greatly expanded edition of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece by a world-class pianist and writer on music. This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is basic to any study of Classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language. For this expanded edition, now available in paperback for the first time, Rosen has provided a new, 64-page chapter on the later years of Beethoven and the musical conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The author has also written an extensive new preface in which he responds to other writers who have commented on his ideas.

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."
Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet, puckish Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time.
Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood composer and gain new perspectives on one of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.

18th-Century Piano Music focuses on the core composers of the 18th century repertoire. The book begins with an overview of the keyboard instruments that were in use during the period, and a chapter on performance practice. Then, the book proceeds through each major composer, beginning with Bach, and then progressing through the French Masters, Scarlatti, C.P.E. and J. C. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Early Beethoven. Each chapter is written by a well-known scholar in the field, and includes history, musical examples, and analysis.

The year 2000 has been declared a "Bach Year," marking the 250th anniversary of the great composer's death. Around the world, there will be major celebrations in honor of his astonishing body of work. This major biography of Bach, now completely revised and boasting 25 per cent more material, is published to coincide with these events. In the new edition of this widely acclaimed study, biographical chapters alternate with commentary on the works, to demonstrate how the circumstances of Bach's life helped to shape the music he wrote at various periods. We follow Bach as he travels from Arnstadt and Muhlhausen to Weimar, Cothen, and finally Leipzig, these journeys alternating with insightful discussions of the great composer's organ and orchestral compositions. As well as presenting a rounded picture of Bach, his music, and his posthumous reputation and influence, Malcolm Boyd considers the sometimes controversial topics of "parody" and arrangement, number symbolism, and the style and meaning of Bach's late works. Recent theories on the constitution of Bach's performing forces at Leipzig are also present. The text and the appendixes (which include a chronology, personalia, bibliography, and a complete catalogue of Bach's works) have been thoroughly revised to take account of the research undertaken by Bach scholars, including the gold mine of new information recently uncovered in the former USSR. An authoritative account of the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach, this volume will be essential reading for everyone interested in the classical composers.

Australian Piano Music of the Twentieth Century - Larry Sitsky - 2005

This is the first book to comprehensively cover all of the Australian piano music of the 20th century. It is lavishly illustrated with over 300 music examples, giving a very clear picture of the various composers and styles. The composers are listed within various historical and stylistic blocks as well as within consideration of their own pianistic prowess. The large number of scores will help future researchers as well as recording and concert pianists who are searching for new and exciting repertoire

Taking account of Bach scholarship of the past twenty-five years, the first two volumes of Peter Williams's classic study of Bach's organ works are fully revised. This work is a piece-by-piece commentary on this ever-popular repertoire, demonstrating the music's unique qualities and how we might hear and play it today. The book follows the order of the Bach catalog (BWV): beginning with the sonatas, followed by the "free works" and the chorales, and ending with the doubtful works, including the "newly discovered chorales" of 1985.

Peter Wiliams approaches afresh the life and music of arguably the most studied of all composers, interpreting both Bach’s life by deconstructing his original Obituary in the light of new information, and his music by evaluating his priorities and irrepressible creative energy. How, though belonging to musical families on both his parents’ sides, did he come to possess so bewitching a sense of rhythm and melody, and a mastery of harmony that established nothing less than a norm in western culture? In considering that the works of a composer are his biography, the book's title 'A Life in Music' means both a life spent making music and one revealed in the music as we know it. A distinguished scholar and performer, Williams re-examines Bach’s life as an orphan and a family man, as an extraordinarily gifted composer and player, and an energetic and ambitious artist who never suffered fools gladly.

The connections between a great artist's life and work are subtle, complex, and often highly revealing. In the case of Beethoven, however, the standard approach has been to treat his life and his art separately. Now, Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative.

Keyboard Music Before 1700 begins with an overview of the development of keyboard music in Europe. Then, individual chapters by noted authorities in the field cover the key composers and repertory before 1700 in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Portugal. New to this edition is a chapter on performance practice by the editor, which addresses current issues in the interpretation and revival of this music.

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life.

Charles Rosen is one of the world's most talented pianists -- and one of music's most astute commentators. Known as a performer of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter, he has also written highly acclaimed criticism for sophisticated students and professionals. In Piano Notes, he writes for a broader audience about an old friend -- the piano itself. Drawing upon a lifetime of wisdom and the accumulated lore of many great performers of the past, Rosen shows why the instrument demands such a stark combination of mental and physical prowess. Readers will gather many little-known insights -- from how pianists vary their posture, to how splicings and microphone placements can ruin recordings, to how the history of composition was dominated by the piano for two centuries. Stories of many great musicians abound. Rosen reveals Nadia Boulanger's favorite way to avoid commenting on the performances of her friends ("You know what I think," spoken with utmost earnestness), why Glenn Gould's recordings suffer from "double-strike" touches, and how even Vladimir Horowitz became enamored of splicing multiple performances into a single recording. Rosen's explanation of the piano's physical pleasures, demands, and discontents will delight and instruct anyone who has ever sat at a keyboard, as well as everyone who loves to listen to the instrument.

Daniel Theaker's A Working Musician's Joke Book is a compilation of the funniest and most popular music jokes today. From groaners to gut busters, these jokes really reflect the attitudes and personalities of people who make music for a living.

What Charles Rosen's celebrated book The Classical Style did for music of the Classical period, this new, much-awaited volume brilliantly does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of the musical language, forms, and styles of the Romantic period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so it conveys the very sense of Romantic music. In readings uniquely informed by his performing experience, Rosen offers consistently acute and thoroughly engaging analyses of works by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz, and he presents a new view of Chopin as a master of polyphony and large-scale form. He adeptly integrates his observations on the music with reflections on the art, literature, drama, and philosophy of the time, and thus shows us the major figures of Romantic music within their intellectual and cultural context.

The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain. Brown here identifies areas in which musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers, and seeks to look beyond the notation to understand how composers might have expected to hear their music realized in performance. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that, in many respects, the sound worlds in which Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms created their music were more radically different from ours than is generally assumed.

For this authoritative post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's illustrious but turbulent career under Soviet rule, Laurel E. Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. An indefatigable worker, he wrote his arresting music despite deprivations during the Nazi invasion and constant surveillance under Stalin's regime.
Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. In August 1942, his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, was performed in Nazi-besieged Leningrad by the city's surviving musicians, and was triumphantly broadcast to the German troops, who had been bombarded beforehand to silence them. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet, holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador with his unflagging artistic ambitions.

Learning to play an instrument can be fun and, at times, frustrating. This lively, accessible book helps young people cope with the difficulties involved in learning a new instrument and remaining dedicated to playing and practicing. Teens from renowned music programs - including the Juilliard School's Pre-College Program and Boston University's Tanglewood Institute - join pro musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, Paula Robison, and James Galway in offering practical answers to questions from what instrument to play to where the musical road may lead.
In this revised and expanded edition, Amy Nathan has updated the book to address today's more technologically-minded young musician. Expanded sections cover the various ways students can use technology to assist in mastering an instrument and in making practice time more productive, from using the Internet to download pieces to be learned and playing along with downloaded tunes to practicing with computer-based practice programs, CDs, and videos/DVDs of musical performances. She also addresses concerns of young composers and conductors, two groups not mentioned in the original edition. The book's updated Resource Guide suggests where to get additional help, both online and off.

Franz Liszt is most well-known for his compositions for piano and orchestra, but his influence is also strong in chamber music, choral music, and orchestral transcriptions. This new collection of essays presents a scholarly overview of all of the composer's work, providing the most comprehensive and current treatment of both his oeuvre and the immense amount of secondary literature written about it. Highly regarded critics and scholars write for both a general and academic audience, covering all of Liszt's major compositions as well as the neglected gems found among his choral and chamber works.
Following an outline of the subject's life, The Liszt Companion goes on to detail Liszt's critical reception in the German press, his writings and letters, his piano and orchestral works, his neglected secular choral works, and his major organ compositions. Also explored here are his little-known chamber pieces and his songs. An exhaustive bibliography and index of works conclude the volume. This work will both elucidate aspects of Liszt's most famous work and revive interest in those pieces that deserve and require greater attention.

The investigation that studies Beethoven's heritage written for violin and piano (Opus 12/1-3, Opp. 23, 24, 47 and 96, Op.30/1-3, and some early works), and retraced Beethoven's influences on composers, those who wrote for violinists.

Master Classes with Edna Golandsky - The Art of Rhythmic Expression - Vol.4

The Golandsky Institute Discovery Series
Master Classes with Edna Golandsky
Volume Four
Sonata in A Minor Op.143 by Schubert
Performed by Evan Closser
Master Classes conducted by Edna Golandsky at
The Golandsky Institute 2004 Summer Symposium
at Princeton University

Anyone who loves Beethoven,and is serious about piano music will love these dvd's! Barenboim has spent over 50 years of his life with these Masterworks and definitely has something to say not only to the younger generation of pianists but to those of us who delight in discovering something new in pieces we have been listening to, studying and playing for many years.Almost as good as being there with the Master!

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12/30/2012

What do pianists do?

Richard Beauchamp

Some causes of Stress | Prevention of Injury | Sitting and posture | Practice technique | Building stamina | Playing technique | Minimising stress | Post injury programme | Categories of technique

What, and how much, do pianists practise?

12/27/2012

12/26/2012

12/24/2012

12/23/2012

12/21/2012

12/20/2012

12/18/2012