by Penelope Roskell, pianist and Professor of Piano and Piano Pedagogy at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

If we reflect on the language that we use in our teaching, we will probably notice that many of the words we use imply a rather serious, one might even say tedious view of life: practise hard, exercises, repetition, accuracy, evenness, examinations – no wonder so many students find piano playing boring compared to the fun of playing with friends or computer games!

I think we all need to remind ourselves frequently of the possible alternative words: ease, beauty, flow, flourish, caress, communication, fun, delight, and, most importantly perhaps, playfulness. I personally don’t remember ever having heard ...

New York, NY—On June 7, the concept of a “classical concert” as we know it will be turned on its ear.  Performances by Attacca Quartet, Flutronix, and Cadillac Moon Ensemble will be influenced by input from the audience during the concert.   Armed with their own cell phones, the audience will shape and direct the compositions being performed.

This unique performance will happen on Thursday, June 7, 7:30 p.m., in the auditorium of the Good Shepherd School, 620 Isham Street, in Manhattan’s tree-lined Inwood neighborhood.  A suggested donation of $10 is requested.

The first half of the concert is traditional—with a twist.  After a conventional performance of ...

Franz Peter Schubert was born in the Habsburg capital of Vienna on January 31, 1797. He died there on November 19, 1828, having lived only 31 years, 9 months, and 19 days.

In his all-too-brief life, Schubert created a body of music the size and quality of which leaves us shaking our heads in wonder. In the last sixteen years of his life, from the age of 15 to 31, Schubert produced, among other works: 9 finished and “unfinished” symphonies; 10 orchestral overtures; 22 piano sonatas; 6 masses; 17 operas; 637 songs; over 1000 works for solo piano and piano four-hands; around 145 choral works; 45 chamber works, including fifteen string quartets and one string quintet.

The tiny (about 5′ 1″), pudgy, be-spectacled ...

This is not a post about how to transcribe piano music for a full orchestra, or ensemble, but rather some thoughts on how imagining certain instruments and visualising sounds can help shape piano music, creating an exciting and contrasting sound world.

I often remind my students that the piano can be “any instrument you want it to be”: a trumpet, a cello, a bass drum, shimmering violins, mellow woodwind, a pure soprano voice. And beyond, to the sounds of the natural world: rain dripping, ice creaking, birdsong, fluttering wings, sighing trees, a dog barking, a horse’s hooves. Some students just look blankly at me – and then at the piano. “It’s just a piano”, they seem to be thinking. “How ...

Destabilize a triad with an augmented fourth in the bass, and you're ready to tell one hell of a story. As a composer, that's what I think of when I think of Marc Blitzstein. That, and the tightly-woven web of friendship and talent that made up the generation of serious composers still most-revered by American concert music audiences.

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One rainy November 1980 day Karlos Moser, then head of the opera program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was an undergraduate music major, and I were working through some songs that I had contributed to a review he was concocting. Karlos had cast my older brother Kevin as Ben Hubbard in his production of Blitzstein's Regina during the late 70s. It had been my introduction ...

Chinese composers, writing in the second half of the twentieth century, faced a problem: how to write new music in a foreign style (European art music) that is still characteristic of the composer’s culture? That exact same issue was faced by American composers in the first half. To make matters worse, the classical tradition is a conservative and seemingly inflexible one, which certainly proved difficult for American composers to work with, but must have seemed impossibly daunting for that first generation of Chinese musicians, who were really some of the first artists from a completely non-Western society to take a crack at writing European-style concert music. But however daunting it may have been, the last sixty years has seen ...