Piano Duet Repertoire: Music Originally Written for One Piano, Four Hands by Cameron McGraw

Abstract

Reviewed by: Piano Duet Repertoire: Music Originally Written for One Piano, Four Handsby Cameron McGraw Carol Lubkowski Piano Duet Repertoire: Music Originally Written for One Piano, Four Hands. By Cameron McGraw. 2d. Edited and expanded by Christopher Fisher and Katherine Fisher. (Indiana Repertoire Guides.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. [xxv, 307 p. ISBN 9780253020857 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9780253020963 (e-book), $75.] Bibliography, indexes. Piano Duet Repertoire: Music Originally Written for One Piano, Four Handsis a reference guide to music for piano duet. It provides basic information on pieces dating from the 1600s through the early twenty-first century, organized for ease of access to both known and new works. This second edition updates its predecessor with hundreds of recent or revised composer listings and adds approximately one thousand pieces, two indexes, and a foreword. It also significantly improves the content and formatting of the previous edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). Organized alphabetically by composer, each entry provides composers' names, dates, and nationalities. Biographi cal notes for some of the composers range from a couple of sentences to one or two paragraphs. Information on each piece, listed in alphabetical order, includes titles, opus numbers, names of movements, publisher information, composition dates, and difficulty levels. Descriptive notes for selected pieces are mostly brief, but when pieces require extended techniques, have many movements, or contain other unusual aspects, the authors provide more details. This new edition primarily augments and enhances the previous edition, with significant improvement of the overall layout. With indentation and better use of labels for each element, the content is more readable and easier to scan quickly. Other formatting improvements include left-alignment of composers' names, making them much more visible and easier to parse, and the labeling of difficulty levels in place of the mysterious letter codes that previously appeared in parentheses at the end of the entry. Also better represented are contemporary and women composers: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel now has her own entry and a listing of her works—separated from her brother Felix—and Clara Schumann appears separately from her husband, although her biographical note is regrettably [End Page 620]brief and uninformative. George Crumb, Ervin Schulhoff, and other twentieth-century composers are also represented. However, the second edition removes some elements of its predecessor. Gone now is information on the location of manuscripts and the corresponding index of holding libraries. While the entries still list publishers of each piece, the volume no longer includes the index of publishers with their contact information, no doubt to avoid the inevitable inaccuracies as addresses and distributor information can quickly become outdated. The foreword, added for this second edition, is by the Anderson & Roe Piano Duo (Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe). While not lengthy or revelatory, it is an entertaining and personable look at the genre and the roles it has played in musical life over the past two centuries. Rather than substantially addressing artistic or musical concerns, these musicians focus on the social and practical aspects of playing piano duets, discussing the genre's "modest domesticity, pedagogical potential, or latent sensuality" (p. ix). Anderson & Roe conclude with a few words on the value of Piano Duet Repertoirein the course of their career. The preface, unchanged from the first edition, provides a brief but informative historical overview of the duet literature. Cameron McGraw concentrates on the rise rather than the decline of this repertoire, and encourages new and continued interest in these pieces. After giving a nod to a few isolated instances of duets in the seventeenth century, McGraw begins his short survey with the late eighteenth-century and pieces by Niccolò Jomelli, Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He then plunges into a lengthy discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piano duet literature. McGraw primarily attributes this increase in prominence and respectability not to the work of Mozart or Haydn, but to the four sonatas written by Charles Burney in 1777–1778, asserting that with these publications, four-hand works were "no longer a novel curiosity" (p. xiii). He attributes the further development of the repertoire to nineteenth-century improvements to the instrument and to the growth of a "prosperous middle-class, eager for...