The Pianist S Craft

No pianist can experience the full flowering of her art without eventually grappling with those great musical minds who composed specifically for piano. In The Pianist's Craft, Richard Anderson collects from his fellow pianist-scholars 19 articles on the teaching, preparation, and performance of works by the greatest composers in the standard piano repertoire. This collection ranges in subject matter from Inge Rosar's meditation on playing Bach on the modern keyboard to Gary Amato's assessment of Haydn's sonatas, from Christie Skousen's review of tone production in Chopin to GwenolynMok's foray into recreating Ravel's works on an Erard piano, the same used by Ravel himself. Readers will find essays as well on Mozart's piano compositions, Beethoven's sonatas, the influence of Schubert's lieder on his piano works, and works by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bart k, Gershwin, and Crumb. The contributors--all recognized nationally and internationally for their contributions as performing artists, teachers, recording artists, and clinicians--write thoughtfully about the composers whose work they have studied and played for years. Each author addresses issues unique to the individual composer they have chosen to explore, examining questions of phrasing, tempo, articulation, dynamics, rhythm, color, gesture, lyricism, instrumentation, and genre. Valuable insight is provided into teaching, performing, and preparing these great works. In The Pianist's Craft these great artists and teachers answer questions for readers that are otherwise only addressed in conferences, master classes, and private lessons. In this collection of essays, key points of information and instruction are offered with over 200 musical examples included as illustration. The Pianist's Craft is intended for teachers and students of the intermediate and advanced levels of piano, instructors and performers at the university level, and those who love piano and piano music generally.

In The Pianist’s Craft 2, pianist and scholar Richard P. Anderson gathers together a new collection of essays by renowned performing artists and teachers and discusses the preparation, pedagogy, and performance of selected works by an entirely different set of composers whose works are standard in the piano literature. In this volume, readers will find an invaluable collection of contributions on C.P.E. Bach, Antonio Soler, Felix Mendelssohn, Gabriel Fauré, Erno Dohnányi, Francis Poulenc, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Alberto Ginastera, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage. The contributors—all nationally and internationally recognized as performing artists, teachers, recording artists, and clinicians—write thoughtfully about the composers whose work they have studied and played for years. Each author addresses issues unique to an individual composer, examining questions of phrasing, tempo, articulation, dynamics, rhythm, color, gesture, lyricism, instrumentation, and genre. Valuable insight is provided into teaching, performing, and preparing these great works—information otherwise available only in conferences, master classes, and private lessons. This collection, with more than 250 musical illustrations, is intended for teachers and students of the intermediate and advanced levels of piano, instructors and performers at the university level, and those who love piano and piano music.

In The Craft of Piano Playing, master pianist Alan Fraser offers readers an original and comprehensive approach to piano technique, offering over 100 illustrations and a series of unique exercises to guide the reader. Drawing on his many years as a performer and teacher, his long-standing collaborations with pedagogue Phil Cohen and virtuoso Kemal Gekich, and his professional training in the Feldenkrais Method, Fraser introduces his truly innovative piano technique by • Teaching how to move your hands with greater sensitivity, power, and accuracy, and honing the skeletal alignments to help you access your innate, structural potency; • Linking your physical technique to musical expression, creating an "absolutely natural way of moving at the piano that is powerful, flexible, and musical" (Piano News, Germany); and • Keeping your hands healthy while avoiding the threats of tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, focal dystonia, and RSI. This revised second edition joins the DVD of the same name, his study guide, and his latest book, Honing the Pianistic Self-Image, in Alan Fraser's growing line of piano pedagogical materials. This edition includes new chapters, such as "Arm Rhythm" and "The Body's Support of Natural Finger Shape," updated material reflecting evolutions in Fraser's technical and pedagogical thinking, a "cleaner and leaner" literary style, and more extensive, better-organized tables of contents, with cross-references to corresponding chapters in the DVD. For more information please visit www.maplegroveproductions.com, www.craftofpiano.com, or www.alanfraser.net

"The Hinson" has been indispensable for performers, teachers, and students. Now updated and expanded, it's better than ever, with 120 more composers, expertly guiding pianists to solo literature and answering the vital questions: What's available? How difficult is it? What are its special features? How does one reach the publisher? The "new Hinson" includes solo compositions of nearly 2,000 composers, with biographical sketches of major composers. Every entry offers description, publisher, number of pages, performance time, style and characteristics, and level of difficulty. Extensively revised, this new edition is destined to become a trusted guide for years to come.

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. In the end, he strikes a contemplative note. Western music was built around the piano from the classical era until recently, and for a good part of that time the instrument was an essential acquisition for every middle-class household. Music making was part of the fabric of social life. Yet those days have ended. Fewer people learn the instrument today. The rise of recorded music has homogenized performance styles and greatly reduced the frequency of public concerts. Music will undoubtedly survive, but will the supremely physical experience of playing the piano ever be the same?

Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private, artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations, trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related art-industries reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to professional artistry.

McCandlish Phillips, whose by-line has been familiar to readers of The New York Times since 1955, has looked into just about every corner of the city and has written about nearly every aspect of its life. New York is not the same city today as it was yesterday. You cannot set foot in the same New York twice. Yet you can capture its momentary essence in City Notebook. One of the best metropolitan reporters of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s has brought together his best pieces on the City’s life. You will learn, for example, about the “rainbow rain” that sometimes falls on the City, about the Great Bee Roundup, the Case of the Garrulous Parrot, the Small World of Melvin Krulewitch, and the fate of the Gowanus Canal. The reality of New York is made up of millions of such instances, a mosaic of people, places, and things. The ones in this book have been chosen because they are compulsively fascinating, utterly irreplaceable, or just very funny. Gay Talese has called McCandlish Phillips “one of the best reporters” on The Times. People who know his byline relish his crisp style and dry wit.