Capturing the Viennese sound with Bösendorfer and Austrian Audio
How do you capture the grandeur of a concert grand? Imagine the technological wizardry it takes to compress the whispers and roars of nine or more feet of handmade master craftsmanship into just two tiny ear buds. This magnificent ins...
Welcome to a truly innovative tool that will greatly accelerate your learning of any piece. After months of development, I'm excited to announce a new kind of app that will enable you to learn the language of music at a speed that had never before been possible.
It's built directly into the Key-Not...
How do you prepare for rehearsals with fellow musicians? When playing chamber music or concertos, it’s essential to know everyone else’s part well enough to come in on cue and play together. Pianists play from a full score (or at least a piano reduction in the case of concertos), enabling us to see ...
It's an extraordinary honor for an artist to have a work written for them by a major composer, and I'm thrilled to present "Les contrastes Étude," Op. 93, No. 1 by Nimrod Borenstein.
The piece was directly inspired by the challenging topic I presented at the World Congress for Family Law & Children...
Today I'd like to share a special presentation with you. This was given by my former piano professor and mentor Dr. Steven Smith for the 2021 Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association conference.
The topic is "Bending Time: Understanding and Teaching Rubato."
The term rubato comes from the Italian r...
Musical interpretation is, in a word, storytelling. In a story, there are characters—in music, themes. In a story there is development—in music, variations on a theme, ornamentation, harmonic tension. In a story, there are scenes; in music, sections. In a classical story, the hero rescues the fair m...
Doe, a deer…
Solfège is a system for singing notes. If you’re familiar with the famous Rogers and Hammerstein song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, you already know the solfège note names: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti.
A Brief History
The first and last syllables have variants which are a ma...
Music is a language. Like spoken language, music is rhetorical. The language of music has grammar and punctuation. It has phrases and sentences, loud and soft, fast and slow, accents and dramatic silences. In speech and music alike, timing is everything.
As in speech, in music we need to distinguis...
Piano scales are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most piano students. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to build any major scale at the piano; starting from any note.
We’ll focus on major scales since they’re best suited as a starting point. (There are three types of minor scale but only one...
With up to seven sharps or seven flats in a key signature, it can seem daunting to try to remember the order—yet there’s a simple shortcut that makes it easy.
You just need to remember three simple things: 1. Sharps raise notes, while flats lower notes. 2. The first sharp and first flat. 3. Acciden...
Why does a piano keyboard look the way it does? The answer has to do with music modes. The modes are types of scales. A scale is simply a specified sequence of intervals from one note to the same note an octave higher, say, from A to the next higher A.
In order to understand this point it is useful...
An acoustic phenomenon that helps make a piano sound beautiful is sympathetic resonance. If we play a note on the piano, other, compatible notes vibrate in sympathy as long as there are no dampers to, well, put a damper on them. This video lesson demonstrates this phenomenon and two ways you can use...
