AKA “Throwback Thursday”. And no, this is NOT a picture from my past 🙂
Old Picture of the Day: Piano Lessons: “Piano Lessons
This photograph was taken in 1899, and shows a young girl taking “Piano Lessons”
More about this picture here:
Monthly Archives: August 2015
August 6 ~ Today in Music History
• 1834 ~ Hermann Mendel, German music lexicographer
• 1909 ~ Karl Ulrich Schnabel, German pianist and composer
• 1912 ~ Marina Koshetz, who followed her famous Russian diva mother Nina to the opera and concert stage and into the movies, was born. Koshetz was born in Moscow, trained in France and came to the United States as a teen-ager. She made her debut substituting for her mother Nina Koshetz on radio’s “Kraft Music Hall.” Using her father’s surname, she began appearing in films in the early 1930s as Marina Schubert. Among her early films were “Little Women,” “All the King’s Horses” and “British Agent.”
Marina concentrated more on her voice in the 1940s. Adopting the professional name Marina Koshetz, she went on to sing with the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Koshetz made her Los Angeles recital debut at the old Philharmonic Auditorium in 1947.
• 1921 ~ Buddy (William) Collette, Musician. reeds, piano and composer
• 1939 ~ After becoming a success with Ben Bernie on network radio, Dinah Shore started her own show on the NBC Blue radio network. Dinah sang every Sunday evening. Dinah also had a successful TV career spanning over two decades.
• 1940 ~ Columbia Records cut the prices of its 12-inch classical records. The records were priced to sell at $1. Within two weeks, RCA Victor did the same and ended a record-buying slump brought on by disinterested consumers.
• 1958 ~ Randy DeBarge, Musician, bass, vocals with DeBarge
• 1966 ~ The Beatles’ “Revolver” LP was released.
• 1973 ~ Stevie Wonder came close to losing his life, following a freak auto accident. Wonder, one of Motown’s most popular recording artists, was in a coma for 10 days. Miraculously, he recovered and was back in the recording studio in less than eight weeks.
• 1976 ~ Gregor Piatigorsky, Russian-born cellist, died
More information about Piatigorsky
• 1981 ~ Stevie Nicks’ first solo album, Bella Donna, was released. The lead singer for Fleetwood Mac scored a top-three hit with Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around from the album. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were featured on the track. Nicks went on to record a total of 11 hits for the pop-rock charts through 1988.
How to Practice the Piano: Selecting Repertoire
Great blog post! Thanks, Andrea 🙂
Note values
I have copies of the above sheet music in the music studio, if anyone wants to play this!
Having trouble counting various note values?
In music notation, a note value indicates the relative duration of a note, using the color or shape of the note head, the presence or absence of a stem, and the presence or absence of flags/beams/hooks/tails.
A rest indicates a silence of an equivalent duration.
Read the article at Note values.
August 5 ~ Today in Music History
• 1397? ~ Guillaume Du Fay, French composer. Considered the leading composer of the early Renaissance.
More information about Du Fay
• 1694 ~ Leonardo Leo, Italian composer and organist
• 1811 ~ Ambrose Thomas, French composer, primarily of operas
• 1890 ~ Erich Kleiber, Austrian conductor
• 1924 ~ The comic strip Little Orphan Annie debuted in the New York Daily News. Annie and her little dog, Sandy, were creations of cartoonist Harold Gray. His work would come to life in the Broadway and film adaptations of Annie a half-century later, with great success.
• 1926 ~ Jeri Southern (Genevieve Hering), Singer
• 1940 ~ Damita Jo (DuBlanc), Singer
• 1942 ~ Rick Huxley, Bass with Dave Clark Five
• 1943 ~ Sammi Smith, Singer
• 1947 ~ Rick Derringer (Zehringer), Singer, songwriter with The McCoys, record producer
• 1953 ~ Samantha Sang, Singer
• 1957 ~ Dick Clark’s American Bandstand caught the attention of network executives at ABC-TV in New York, who decided to put the show on its afternoon schedule. Many artists, acts and groups of the rock ’n’ roll era debuted on American Bandstand – Simon and Garfunkel, Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker – catapulting Clark into the spotlight as one of TV’s most prolific producers and hosts.
• 1975 ~ Singer Stevie Wonder signed the recording industry’s largest contract: $13 million over a seven-year period. Wonder stayed with his original label, Tamla/Motown, while other major Motown artists, including Diana Ross, Gladys Knight and The Four Tops had left the label over creative differences and financial accounting disputes.
Piano Puzzlers!
The Piano Puzzlers book is available in the O’Connor Music Studio library if you’d like to give any a try. Piano Puzzlers as heard on American Public Media’s “Performance Today.” Includes 32 tunes with songs by Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, Porter, Rodgers, Fats Waller, Lennon & McCartney, and others disguised in the styles of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Janacek, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, and Copland.
Includes an introduction by Fred Child, host of “Performance Today” as well as background info by Bruce Adolphe. “Bruce Adolphe has taken a common musician’s party game and elevated it to high art and truly funny musical slapsticks. The Piano Puzzlers are a unique combination of extraordinary insight into the styles of many composers subtle, expert workmanship and great, great fun!”
From http://jasonmorris.blogsome.com/2008/08/08/piano-puzzlers/
If you’re a music geek (like me), I have a program for you. Now, let me be clear, to fully qualify as a music geek…you must have a fond appreciation for classical music (no, Poison, Quiet Riot, and Zepplin do not count as classical music). So, if you’re a “music geek” without an appreciation for classical music…well, I hate to burst your bubble…but, you’re not truly a music geek. Instead, you’re a music appreciator, but not a geek. So, if you just listen to indie music and scowl at anything on a label larger than Matador…don’t bother following the link I’ll provide…the fun will be lost on you…And, you probably won’t have a chance.
Every Wednesday night, on my way home from WNL, I turn on my local NPR station to listen to Piano Puzzlers on Performance Today. It’s absolutely incredible. A pianist/composer (Bruce Adolphe) takes a familiar folk or pop tune and sets it inside a classical masterpiece (or in the style of a particular composer). Sometimes it’s easy…sometimes it’s ridiculously difficult. There are days when I say, “got it” on the first pass. Then there are days when I say, “what the heck?” And, more often than not, I’m able to get either the popular/folk tune or the composer.
This is sad to admit, but there are nights when I’ll slow down on the drive home or sit in the car in the driveway to finish an episode. In fact, I get a little worked up if someone stops me after WNL…as I might miss the beginning of Piano Puzzlers (it usually hits around 8:20pm on our local station).
Take a listen to some of the archives and see if you can figure it out! It’s really cool…but probably only appreciated by music geeks (the kind of people that listen to NPR for their musical programs and not just the snipets of cool indie rock between segments on All Things Considered…which is a great show too).
August 4 ~ Today in Music History
• 1910 ~ William Howard Schuman, Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, President of Julliard School of Music, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, educator and music administrator
• 1921 ~ Herb (Mitchell) Ellis, Guitarist, singer with Soft Winds
• 1927 ~ Radio station 2XAG, later named WGY, the General Electric station in Schenectady, NY, began experimental operations from a 100,000-watt transmitter. Later, the FCC regulated the power of AM radio stations to not exceed 50,000 watts on ‘clear channels’ (where few, if any, stations would cause interference with each other).
• 1927 ~ Singer Jimmie Rodgers recorded his first sides for Victor Records in Bristol, TN. He sang Sleep Baby Sleep and Soldier’s Sweetheart.
• 1929 ~ Gabriella Tucci, Italian soprano
• 1938 ~ Simon Preston, British organist
• 1939 ~ Frankie Ford (Guzzo), Singer
• 1940 ~ Timi (Rosemarie) Yuro, Singer
• 1943 ~ David Carr, Keyboards with The Fortunes
• 1978 ~ Frank Fontaine passed away. He was an American stage, radio, film and television comedian and singer.
• 2000 ~ Jerome Smith, founding guitarist of KC & The Sunshine Band, died after being crushed in a construction accident. He was 47. KC & The Sunshine Band reached the top of Billboard Magazine’s charts in 1975 with Get Down Tonight. Before Smith left the group, it had five No. 1 songs, including Boogie Shoes and That’s the Way (I Like It), and three Grammys.
Louis Teicher, 83, Half of a Virtuoso Pop Piano Duo
Louis Teicher, who died Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 83, was half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, which toured for four decades and released 150 albums, some as suitable for elevators as for concert halls.
Scott W. Smith Collection
Arthur Ferrante (standing) and Louis Teicher in 1964.
duo pianists and Juilliard alums
Yet for their fans — and there were enough to purchase 88 million of their records — they were “the grand twins of the twin grands,” virtuoso showmen in the tradition of Liberace and perhaps Liszt.
Ferrante & Teicher were perhaps best-known for their hit instrumental versions of 1960s movie themes, including “The Apartment,” “Exodus,” and “Midnight Cowboy.” In the 1970s, they sent an average of three albums annually up the charts.
Their glistening, Muzak-friendly stylings, some of which today sound of a piece with the cascading strings of Mantovani, did not always appeal to critics, who found them hackneyed or camp.
“Passionless … lifeless … numbing,” sniffed the Washington Post in 1978. The irony in this was that, in the earlier decades, the duo was seen as cutting-edge. In the 1950s, they used prepared piano to create space-age sounds. They continued touring until 1989, and survived to see their music revived by retro-hip audiophiles in recent years.
Born August 24, 1924, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Teicher was a child prodigy who began studying at the Juilliard School of Music at age 6. Teicher received his piano diploma at 16, and after further studies he joined the Juilliard theory faculty at 20.
Inspired by the two-piano repertoire they’d studied under Carl Friedberg, Teicher and Arthur Ferrante, also a precocious Juilliard graduate, decided to become a duo in 1946.
“We became professionals out of necessity,” Teicher told the Juilliard Alumni News in 2004. “It was the Depression era, and you did whatever you could to pick up some money.”
They booked their own concerts at colleges and universities in Canada and America. Supplied with grand pianos by Steinway, they maintained a fleet of trucks to transport them around the country and sometimes even slept in the van.
They made their mark with a classical repertoire. A 1948 concert at the Town Hall was attended by an audience of 1,400, who heard them play Liszt’s “Concerto Pathétique” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” But the crowd went nuts for their rendition of the latin-charged “Tico Tico,” then a popular nightclub hit. Their future lay in such crowd-pleasing fare.
They first modified their pianos, Teicher told the Juilliard Alumni News, in order to simulate the percussion in Ravel’s “Bolero.” Later they used chains, cotton balls, and glass, and sometimes strummed the strings to achieve various effects. They seemed to herald what they subtitled their 1956 disk “Soundproof: The Sound of Tomorrow Today.” Though appearing often on the easy-listening, summer pops orchestra circuit, they were smuggling the avant-garde in the back door. They were booked on all the 1950s variety shows.
Humor was an important part of their arsenal, both in terms of repertoire and costume. They dressed in identical flamboyant outfits — “straight from a Liberace fire sale” said one wag — and horn-rim spectacles. It was a kind of running joke that audiences couldn’t tell them apart. Each night, they said, fans backstage would ask whether pianists in a duo required lesser skills than soloists.
Ferrante & Teicher charted 22 gold and platinum records, beginning with the theme from “The Apartment” (1960), and claimed to have played 5,000 concerts attended by 18 million people. If their names evoke blank stares from today’s audiences, it is because, for all their wit, their music was as evanescent as smoke in a summer breeze. Some of their signature pieces can be seen on YouTube.
Teicher died of a heart attack at home in Sarasota, Fla., according to a statement from the duo’s manager, Scott Smith.
He is survived by his wife, Betty, his children Richard, Susan, and David, and several grandchildren.
“Although we were two individuals, at the twin pianos our brains worked as one,” said Mr. Ferrante, who also survives him. “I will miss him dearly, and as pianists it’s ironic how we both ended up living on keys” — in Florida.
http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/louis-teicher-83-half-of-a-virtuoso-pop-piano-duo/83189/
By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun | August 5, 2008
August 3 ~ Today in Music History
• 1778 ~ La Scala, one of the world’s great opera houses, opened on this day. They premiered William Tell by Gioachino Rossini
• 1823 ~ Francisco Asenjo Babieri, Spanish composer
• 1884 ~ Louis Gruenberg, Polish-born American composer
• 1902 ~ Ray Bloch, Conductor and orchestra leader
• 1917 ~ Charlie Shavers, Trumpeter with the John Kirby Sextet and composer of Undecided
• 1918 ~ Les Elgart, Lead trumpet, bandleader for Les and (brother) Larry Elgart
• 1921 ~ Richard Adler, Broadway Composer, lyricist
• 1926 ~ Tony Bennett (Benedetto), Grammy Award-winning American singer of popular music
• 1941 ~ Beverly Lee, Singer with The Shirelles
• 1949 ~ B.B. (Morris) Dickerson, Bass and singer with War
• 1951 ~ Johnny Graham, Guitarist with Earth, Wind and Fire
• 1963 ~ The Beatles made their final appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England. The group was about to leave its hometown behind for unprecedented world- wide fame and fortune.
• 1963 ~ The Beach Boys’ Surfer Girl, was released on Capitol Records. It became one of their biggest hits. Surfer Girl made it to number seven on the hit music charts on September 14, 1963
• 1963 ~ Comedian Allan Sherman’s summer camp parody, Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp) was released on Warner Brothers Records. The melody was based on the Dance of the Hours from Ponchielli’s opera La Giaconda. This dance was also performed in the original Disney movie Fantasia.
• 1971 ~ Paul McCartney formed a new band called Wings. Joining McCartney in the group were Denny Laine, formerly of The Moody Blues, Denny Seilwell and McCartney’s wife, Linda.
• 1998 ~ Alfred Schnittke, one of the most original and influential composers to emerge from the Soviet Union, died. He was 63.
• 2001 ~ Jeanne Loriod, the leading performer of an electronic instrument used in film scores and symphonic works to produce mysterious glassy tones, died in southern France. She was 73. Loriod, who played the ondes martenot – invented by the French musician Maurice Martenot – died of a stroke in Juan-les-Pins, Le Monde newspaper reported.
She was the younger sister of pianist Yvonne Loriod, who was married to composer Olivier Messiaen. The three musicians often collaborated.
The ondes martenot – which translates as “Martenot waves” – produces electronic waves from a system of transistors, a keyboard and a ribbon attached to a ring on the performer’s forefinger.
Loriod’s career took her all over the world. She performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic, among others.
Composers such as Tristan Murail, Jacques Charpentier and Michael Levinas wrote works for her, according to Le Monde. Loriod had also been planning to collaborate with the pop group Radiohead, the paper wrote.
• 2008 ~ Louis Teicher died at 83. He was half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, which toured for four decades and released 150 albums, some as suitable for elevators as for concert halls.
J.S. Bach’s Ornament Table
The following ornament table is a transcription of the one appearing in the Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, written by Johann Sebastian Bach for the keyboard instruction of his eldest son.
A scan of the original manuscript appears at Dave’s J.S. Bach Page.
The German title translates as “Explanation of various signs, showing how to play certain ornaments correctly.”{1} Bach gives the sign for each ornament on the upper of the paired staves, while the lower shows its execution directly beneath.
(This blog has) simply modernized the clefs in my transcription, since Bach’s manuscript uses soprano clefs, as several composers continued to do throughout the 18th century in place of the treble clef now used in all keyboard music.
After the transcription graphic showing the table, there appear clickable buttons which are keyed to AU sound files; you can click on any of the ornaments and hear a sound file play its execution.
Read the original blog post with the ornament table and listening files at J.S. Bach’s Ornament Table.
MaryO'Studio 