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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 ...

Stile Antico

Saturday, April 21, 8:00 PM

Church of St. Mary the Virgin

Chambermusiciantoday.com

NEW YORK - Miller Theatre's Early Music series, which regularly presents concerts at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan, concluded its season with a concert by the English vocal ensemble Stile Antico. It was the group's last concert of their Spring American tour, and featured a program that was described from the stage as a "whistle stop tour through the music of the Renaissance." Indeed, in a single evening the group covered a wide range of repertoire that encompassed the entire chronology of Renaissance polyphony.

The program included a number of works that choral music aficionados would consider its ...

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 ...

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 ...

Looking towards Mont Blanc, from Mont Chèry, France

Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage Suisse (published 1855) are not fictional imaginings conjured up at home but his responses, in music, to the alpine landscape and landmarks of Switzerland, which he visited with Marie d’Agoult during the period 1835-1839. While owing a great deal to the romantic poetry of Goethe and Byron (in particular Childe Harold), these are also musical ‘postcards’, and the landscape and places they describe can still be viewed and visited today.

Having just enjoyed another holiday in the French Alps, quite close to the places of Liszt’s peregrinations, it is easy to see how the landscape inspired him. Driving down ...

Maybe it is because I’m more or less at the mid-point of a Brahms cycle with the Surrey Mozart players, but right now, I feel like I’m orbiting planet Brahms. 2012 is looking like a Brahms year for Ken, and I like that a lot.

I’ve been accumulating some morsels of Brahmsian prejudice that I’ve wanted to share here.

1-    I really don’t like the Schoenberg arrangement of the opus 25 no. 1 Piano Quartet. I like Schoenberg. I like the G minor Piano Quartet. I like Schoenberg’s arrangements of the Emperor Waltz and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, but I’ve never warmed to what Schoenberg reputedly called Brahms’s Symphony no. 5. I heard it again on the radio last week, ...

Gene Pritsker is a musician who understands the importance of frequent experimentation when devising new approaches to music. He has authored over four hundred compositions, dizzying in their stylistic range and audacious in their scope. Orchestral works, rock songs, chamber operas, electronic soundscapes… Pritsker seems to look at all music as one genre, in which all other possible styles, sounds and traditions are meant to be used as building blocks and palette colors, combined in various configurations to create a boundless whole. This result is almost always more interesting, and representative of how most new music will be born in the 21st century, as genres and barriers begin to vanish, and as styles begin cross-fertilizing ...