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 […]
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 […]
The Funeral March of a Marionette (Marche funĂšbre d’une marionnette) is a short piece by Charles Gounod. It was written in 1872 for solo piano and orchestrated in 1879. It is perhaps best known as the theme music for the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which originally aired from 1955 to 1965. In 1871-72, while […]
“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 […]
Students always find this piece fun with its finger snaps. There are three versions in Piano Maestro and it’s in several piano books including Halloween Songbook (Easy Piano). There was a a new Addams Family animated movie out in 2019, so your students are going to be snapping all over the place when this Halloween […]
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 […]
iOS: Learning to play the piano can be difficult, and even moreso if you donât have someone there to help you fix your errors and learn good tempo. Simply Piano can do both of those things, and all it takes is your iPhone or iPad. Best of all, itâs free. Like many âpiano-learningâ apps, […]
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