I’m thankful for my piano studio, my students, and my piano đ During Covid I was especially thankful for the Internet! When I was growing up, my dad was a minister, meaning we lived in whatever parsonage the church chose to let us live in. Â The one we had in Pawcatuck, CT […]
I have just purchased a set of Christmas Shades of Sound Listening & Coloring Book for the studio. Please let me know if you do not want your student to participate in Christmas activities and I will assign alternate activities. Each week, I will print out some of the pages for your student and put them in […]
Johann Sebastian Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with Halloween. The piece is recognizable to most and has been featured in many films, including: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Black Cat (1934), Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Sunset Boulevard (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the […]
Night on Bald Mountain refers to a series of compositions by Modest Mussorgsky (1839â1881). Inspired by Russian literary works and legend, Mussorgsky composed a “musical picture”, St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain on the theme of a witches’ sabbath occurring on St. John’s Eve, which he completed on that very night, June 23, in 1867. Interestingly, […]
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. […]
Danse macabre, Op. 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by French composer Camille Saint-SaĂ«ns. It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based on an old French superstition. In 1874, the composer expanded and reworked […]
The final movement is the best known part of the symphony, thanks to its use in the Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping With The Enemy. It features a four-part structure, which Hector Berlioz described in his own program notes from 1845 as follows: “He sees himself at a witches’ Sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering […]
Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, near Ădenburg, October 22, 1811 and died in Bayreuth, July 31, 1886. He was a Hungarian composer and pianist who was a major influence during the romantic period. Liszt was an outstanding pianist at seven, composed at eight and made concert appearances at nine. In addition to being a […]
Nearly everyone can figure out the first 2 notes to this spooky piece – just play the B and C notes really low on your keyboard! It doesn’t seem logical that just two notes could cause such a sense of foreboding, but John Williams managed it. His soundtrack to Spielberg’s Jaws has been keeping people […]
Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe in 1885, was one of the most influential composers of the jazz era, bridging an important gap between ragtime, blues, and jazz. In a sense, he was the first great jazz composer. His career began in New Orleans, where he began to experiment with a unique […]
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