Download or read book A Natural History of the Piano written by Stuart Isacoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.
Download or read book How the Piano Came to be written by Ellye Howell Glover and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How the Piano Came to Be written by Ellye Howell Glover and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Glover's entertaining history of the piano takes us from its early predecessors to its modern form, exploring the social, cultural, and technological factors that shaped its development. From the harpsichord to the grand piano, Glover traces the evolution of this beloved instrument and its enduring appeal. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book How the Piano Came to Be written by Ellye Glover and published by Litres. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How the Piano Came to Be" by Ellye Howell Glover. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book How the Piano Came to Be Classic Reprint written by Ellye Howell Glover and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2017-11-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from How the Piano Came to Be From the dried sinews stretched across the shell of a dead tortoise to the concert-grand piano of the present day is a far flight. Yet to this primitive source, it is said, may be traced the evolution of the stringed instrument which reached its culmination in the piano. The latter has been aptly called the household orchestra, and in tracing its origin one must go far back into the annals of the past. If we accept the Bible as history, and it is the greatest of all histories, the stringed instrument is of very ancient date. It is recorded that the ambassadors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Download or read book The Music of Life written by Elizabeth Rusch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning biographer Elizabeth Rusch and two-time Caldecott Honor–recipient Marjorie Priceman team up to tell the inspiring story of the invention of the world’s most popular instrument: the piano. Bartolomeo Cristofori coaxes just the right sounds from the musical instruments he makes. Some of his keyboards can play piano, light and soft; others make forte notes ring out, strong and loud, but Cristofori longs to create an instrument that can be played both soft and loud. His talent has caught the attention of Prince Ferdinando de Medici, who wants his court to become the musical center of Italy. The prince brings Cristofori to the noisy city of Florence, where the goldsmiths’ tiny hammers whisper tink, tink and the blacksmiths’ big sledgehammers shout BANG, BANG! Could hammers be the key to the new instrument? At last Cristofori gets his creation just right. It is called the pianoforte, for what it can do. All around the world, people young and old can play the most intricate music of their lives, thanks to Bartolomeo Cristofori’s marvelous creation: the piano.
Download or read book Physics of the Piano written by Nicholas J. Giordano and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does a piano sound like a piano? A similar question can be asked of virtually all musical instruments. A particular note-such as middle C-can be produced by a piano, a violin, a clarinet, and many other instruments, yet it is easy for even a musically untrained listener to distinguish between these different instruments. A central quest in the study of musical instruments is to understand why the sound of the "same" note depends greatly on the instrument, and to elucidate which aspects of an instrument are most critical in producing the musical tones characteristic of the instrument. The primary goal of this book is to investigate these questions for the piano. The explanations in this book use a minimum of mathematics, and are intended for anyone who is interested in music and musical instruments. At the same time, there are many insights relating physics and the piano that will likely be interesting and perhaps surprising for many physicists.
Download or read book The Lives of the Piano written by James R. Gaines and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1983 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the Piano written by Ernest Closson and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ernest Closson's History of the Piano was first published in English in 1947, three years after the appearance of the original edition in French. Closson (1870-1950) was founder and director of the Museum of the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels, which boasts one of the richest collections of keyboard instruments in the world, and he was therefore well qualified to write a book on their evolution. The greater part of the work is concerned with the development of the piano itself, from the delicate instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence in the early years of the eighteenth century, to the sturdy modern 'grand'; but there are also chapters on related instruments such as the clavichord, the harpsichord, the virginal and the spinet. When Closson's book first appeared the subject was poorly documented and the opportunities for seeing and hearing old keyboard instruments were extremely limited, but today interest in them is widespread and they are very much more accessible (and better cared for). The issue of a revised edition of Closson's work, incorporating emendations made by the author since the publication of the French and English editions, corrections and additional material made in the light of subsequent research and documentation, a greatly expanded bibliography, and new plates and line-drawings of actions--though preserving the distinctive flavour of the original book--should therefore be most welcome. This book remains a clear and readable summary of the development and refinement of stringed keyboard instruments, valuable to anyone who has any experience at all with the piano or with its antecedents." --Dust jacket.
Download or read book The Piano written by Cyril Ehrlich and published by Oxford : Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century the piano has occupied a dominant place in music and society. Here, Ehrlich traces the instrument's fascinating history from the fortepiano of Mozart's time, and the Victorian's "household orchestra and god," to the most sophisticated modern products of the Japanesemanufacturers. Updated and revised by the author to include recent developments, this book will captivate musicians, historians, and all lovers of the piano.
Download or read book Pianos and Their Makers written by Alfred Dolge and published by New York : Dover Publications. This book was released on 1911 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An internationally renowned manufacturer, designer, and inventor of piano-making machinery presents a history of the development of the 19th-century piano. Photographs of instruments, working diagrams, and portraits of important personalities accompany the text. Covers automatic instruments, including player pianos. "Invaluable data about American piano making." — Grove's.
Download or read book Giraffes Black Dragons and Other Pianos written by Edwin Marshall Good and published by Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating the results of recent research, this is a new edition of a book that received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award for the best musicological book in English published in 1982-83.
Download or read book The Piano Tuner written by Daniel Mason and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year “A gripping and resonant novel. . . . It immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor. . . . Riveting.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches readers into a world of seductive, vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in an unbreakable spell of storytelling.
Download or read book Bartolomeo Cristofori and the Invention of the Piano written by Stewart Pollens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of Bartolomeo Cristofori's working life, featuring detailed technical documentation about his instruments.
Download or read book History of the American Pianoforte written by Daniel Spillane and published by New York : D. Spillane. This book was released on 1890 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pianoforte a Social History of the Piano written by Dieter Hildebrandt and published by George Braziller Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Dieter Hildebrandt, the piano is a revolutionary figure and its story a grand adventure. One by one, the memorable geniuses make their appearance: Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. Other highlights include the great piano duels (Bach v. Marchand, Mozart v. Clementi), the dawning era of the concert tour and the music critic, and the obsessions of the leading figures.
Download or read book Piano written by James Barron and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An alluring exploration of the people and the legendary craftsmanship behind a single Steinway piano Like no other instrument, a grand piano melds engineering feats with the magical sounds of great music: the thunder of a full-throated bass, the bright, delicate trill of the upper treble. Alone among the big piano companies, Steinway still crafts all of its pianos largely by hand, imbuing each one with the promise and burden of its brand. In this captivating narrative, James Barron of The New York Times tells the story of one Steinway piano, from raw lumber to finished instrument. Barron follows that brand-new piano-known by its number, K0862-on its eleven-month journey through the Steinway factory, where time-honored manufacturing methods vie with modern-day industrial efficiency. He looks over the shoulders of men and women-some second- and third-generation employees, some recently arrived immigrants-who transform wood and steel into a concert grand. Together, they carry on the traditions begun more than 150 years ago by the immigrants who founded Steinway & Sons-a family that soared to prominence in the music world and, for a while, in New York City's political and economic life. Barron also explores the art and science of developing a piano's timbre and character before its first performance, when the essential question will be answered: Does K0862 live up to the Steinway legend? From start to finish, Piano will charm and enlighten music lovers.
