Traditional Piano Research Articles

Research on the Integration and Development of Internet Piano Teaching and Traditional Piano Teaching

Under the background of the comprehensive deepening of quality education in China, piano has become the main choice for most parents to improve their children's artistic temperament, which also promotes the development of piano education in China. In the context of Internet, the disadvantages of traditional piano teaching mode are gradually exposed, which seriously restricts the improvement of piano teaching level. In the new era, the development of all sectors of society is inseparable from the application of Internet technology, not to mention the field of education and teaching. Piano teaching is also deeply influenced by Internet technology and gradually embarks on the road of upgrading and transformation, in the process of which, however,relevant personnel need to realize that there are still many advantages that can not be ignored in traditional piano teaching. We can not blindly pursue internet teaching and completely abandon traditional teaching. Only by organically combining the two can we really promote the reform of piano teaching. In view of this, this paper mainly analyzes the drawbacks of traditional piano teaching and Internet piano teaching. Meanwhile, the advantages and strategies of their integration are discussed to enlighten relevant personnel.

The origins and major trends in development of jazz piano stylistics

The origins and major trends in development of jazz piano stylistics

A Comparison between Suzuki Method and Traditional Piano Method on Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Case Study

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurological disorder that has a growing diagnostic rate among children. Children with ASD first show signs during infancy or childhood, and the progression varies greatly between individuals. An increasing number of parents decide to engage their children in artistic development, with piano being a popular choice. Though observational studies have noted the heightened sensitivity to sound and enhanced recall abilities of children with autism when learning instruments, there is little consensus on which piano teaching method is the most effective in developing musical skills. The goal of this study is to assess the effects of two piano-instruction methods on an autistic child’s music performance, which is assessed by categories, including tone quality, technique, interpretation and artistry. This paper presents the case of a 9-year-old child diagnosed with autistic disorder living in New Jersey. The Suzuki method and the traditional method are utilized to improve the piano abilities of this child. The different results in piano performance following the application of the two teaching methods in a three-year-period (2017/1-2019/12) may suggest the modality of different teaching methods on this child. This study may lay the groundwork for future research on selective piano teaching techniques for children with autistic disorder.

2:3:4 Harmony within the tritave

In the Pythagorean tuning system, the fifth is used to generate a scale of 12 notes per octave. In this paper, we use the octave to generate a scale of 19 notes per tritave; one can play this scale on a traditional piano. In this system, the octave becomes a proper interval and the 2:3:4 chord a proper chord. We study harmonic properties obtained from the 2:3:4 chord, in particular composition elements using dominants, inversions, major and minor chords, and diminished chords. The Tonnetz (array notation) turns out to be an effective tool to visualize the harmonic development in a composition based on these elements. 2:3:4 harmony may sound pure, yet sparse, as we illustrate in a short piece.

Piano Performance Technical Analysis of The People United Will Never Be Defeated by Rzewski

Abstract The piano variations The People United will Never be Defeated by Rzewski contains many modern piano performance techniques and skills. The difficulties of these techniques and skills in these enormous variations are far beyond the boundaries of traditional piano performance techniques and skills. This analysis will give a specific classification for these modern piano performance techniques and skills in order to provide a more comprehensive guide for the piano performers.

About compositions for piano and orchestra by Ch.-M. Widor. Background

About compositions for piano and orchestra by Ch.-M. Widor. Background

Hybrid duo

As members of the LP Duo, for the past 14 years we have experimented with various possibilities of playing on two pianos. Our artistic curiosity and the desire to gain new knowledge and freedom led to our involvement with the Quantum Music project and the creation of a new instrument - the hybrid piano. In this paper we elaborate on our experience with using the new hybrid pianos within the Quantum Music project, but also discuss our ensemble as an artistic embodiment of duality, entanglement and other quantum phenomena. Hybrid piano is a combination of a traditional piano and digital synthesizer with analogue controls that allows different processing of acoustic and digital signals in real time and enables the pianists to continue to use concert pianos whilst equipping them with new colours and new, hitherto unexlplored expressive possibilities.

Alio modo: sulle trascrizioni bachiane di György Kurtág

The use of pre-existing music in new works is a widespread practice in Gyorgy Kurtag’s output, considering the number of ‘recompositions’ that he has been writing since the Seventies. Among these, works such as the Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky op. 28 and the Hommage a R.Sch. op. 15d have repeatedly been a subject of interest for musicologists, due to their complex construction and to the richness of their implications, whereas Kurtag’s more traditional piano transcriptions from Machaut to Bach have been neglected so far. Nonetheless, these transcriptions deserve our attention not only for their relatively large extent, but also for their intentional seeming naivety in a late postmodernist climate; moreover, Gyorgy and Marta Kurtag never miss the chance to play a selection of them in their concerts. This article, therefore, examines Kurtag’s transcriptions focusing particularly on the Bachian corpus mainly composed in the winter of 1985 after some choral preludes. Thanks to a close investigation of the rewriting techniques employed, Kurtag’s transcribing process proves to be constantly driven by an analytical insight, and thus aimed to an enhancement of the Bach’s fabric. Furthermore, these transcriptions show a subtle closeness between Kurtag’s and Bach’s approaches to the creative practice, which both of them conceive as a creatio alio modo, rather than ex nihilo.

The Dissonant Duet: An Autoethnography of a Teacher-Student Relationship

In reading the research available on the topic of teacher-student relationships in learning, it is evident that over the past four centuries very little has changed in traditional, individual music lessons. Through an exploration of the research literature, we came to realize that it is difficult to describe the socioemotional aspects of learning using traditional research methods, and there are many aspects of learning that are beyond explanation in quantitative, realist-styled studies of the efficacy of learning techniques, learning outcomes, evaluation, motivation, literacy, and technical competency. While we began with our inquiry with an interest in studying traditional piano pedagogy, a complex journey led us to using autoethnography as a way to share and demystify a taboo story from the piano studio that extends beyond music learning. Ours is a sensitive story to tell, and the risks involved in discussing this topic in pedagogical contexts have kept many learners silenced for decades. Through this process, we have learned that when autoethnography is considered as a form of pedagogy, it is an evocative way to reveal and describe subjective, yet crucial, aspects of learning.

The arrangement of students extracurricular piano practice process with the asynchronous distance piano teaching method

That the students do their extracurricular piano practices in the direction of the teacher’s warnings is a key factor in achieving success in the teaching- learning process. However, the teachers cannot adequately control the students’ extracurricular practices in the process of traditional piano education. Under the influence of this lack of control, the students who do their extracurricular practices forgetting the teacher’s warnings acquire various false steps and unfortunately this is a frequently encountered situation in the piano education process. The present study aimed to provide a solution to this important problem by using the asynchronous distance piano teaching method, so the process of students' extracurricular piano practices could be more in the teacher's control and to determine the effect of this method on the students' piano performances. In this study, the experimental model was used. The lesson was carried out with the same teacher, in the same way and at the same time for both experimental and control groups. While their extracurricular practice time was equal, their method was different. The experimental group practised with the asynchronous method and the control group with the traditional method. After their extracurricular practice process, carried out with different methods, their performances were recorded 3 times in a row with a camera. The records were evaluated using the performance evaluation form. The data achieved in the experimental setting were interpreted with the independent t-test according to p<.05 level of significance and the piano performances of the experimental group students who had their extracurricular activities with asynchronous distance education method and those of the control group students who had their extracurricular activities with the traditional method were compared. As a result of the research, a significant difference (t=2.80), in favour of the experimental group, was found. Based on the research results and the observations made in the experimental setting, it was concluded that students had an effective development as the teacher wanted and the method could be successfully applied. Key words: Distance piano teaching, traditional piano teaching, extracurricular piano practices.

Playing vibrotactile music: A comparison between the Vibrochord and a piano keyboard

A novel vibrotactile musical input device called the Vibrochord, which is designed to deliver patterns of vibration to the skin, not to the ear, through the use of a vibrotactile display called the Emoti-Chair, is evaluated using proposed evaluation frameworks. Findings show that the mixture of frameworks used in this study provided valuable insight into the design of this novel musical device. Results obtained through the implementation of a mixture of these frameworks show that the Vibrochord facilitated an increased accuracy rate over the traditional piano keyboard, when inexperienced vibrotactile musicians tried to repeat vibrotactile patterns or “melodies”.

Design and Implementation of a MCU Based Electronic Piano Performance System

In this paper, an electronic piano performance system is given. Within the system, a traditional piano keyboard is retained, and a micro-controller unit (MCU) C8051F340 is applied to scan the key value, velocity of the keyboard and send the scanned data to principal computer (PC) via universal serial bus (USB) interface. In addition, application software for PC has been developed to simulate the sound function of a traditional piano, which can identify multiple key values and distinguish between light and heavy sound simultaneously. Finally the design results have proved the validity and utility of our performance system by virtue of lower cost and more accurate and adjustable tones.

European Piano Schools : Russian , German and French classical piano interpretation and technique

The goal of this research is to characterize representative performances by famous pianists in order to determine main influential trends in performance, derived specifically from traditional piano practices referred to as National Piano Schools. Previous research (Lourenco, 2005, 2007) has shown strong musical correlation of particular characteristics, namely the aesthetic, the technical, the historic and the repertoire. The concept of piano interpretation school is a useful concept for analyzing the universe of piano performance. Piano pedagogy literature of each European National Piano School has been analyzed together with an empirical audio analysis of recordings through a check-list survey. Overall the main National Piano Schools consist of three essential branches: the Russian school; the German school; the French school. The identification of National Piano Schools provides a powerful framework of study and an awareness of Europe's elusive music heritage and it main influences. Furthermore, as pianists use their whole body to enhance their communication of the music's spiritual, emotional and dramatic essence, this study also aims to contribute into research on performance practice.

The Magnetic Resonator Piano: Electronic Augmentation of an Acoustic Grand Piano

This paper presents the magnetic resonator piano, a hybrid acoustic-electronic instrument extending the traditional grand piano. Sound is produced without loudspeakers using electromagnetic actuators to directly manipulate the piano strings, expanding its vocabulary to include infinite sustain, notes that crescendo from silence, harmonics, and a variety of timbres. A feedback-based approach senses string vibrations from a single pickup on the soundboard, using filters and phase-locked loops to generate signals which reinforce the natural motion of each string. Signal-routing hardware enables coverage of all 88 notes of the piano using a standard digital audio interface. This paper describes the hardware, software, and performing interface of the instrument and presents measurements of amplitude, frequency response, and phase-locked loop performance. Sounds generated by the actuators achieve similar amplitudes to the traditional piano, and while they cannot replicate the rapid attack produced by a piano hammer, they complement the percussive nature of the piano by enabling continuous legato control of amplitude, frequency, and timbre.

Reproducibility of piano playing

Mechanically, piano playing consists in giving to the hammer a certain escapement velocity at a certain time ‐ te, ve ‐ by means of a traditional keyboard and piano action. Numerous replacement systems for the keyboard, action or even for the pianist's finger have been proposed. They implicitly raise the question of the accuracy with which the (te, ve) information must be coded or reconstructed. The precision with which pianists are able to reproduce their playing sheds some light on this question. At this end we have asked several concert pianists to play the same passage several times with the highest reproducibility level they could achieve. The experiment was done on a traditional grand piano equipped with the Yamaha Disklavier system, used as a measurement tool for the escapement velocity of the hammers. The beginnings of a fugue by Bach and a study by Debussy were recorded. Results show that the reproducibility varies highly from note to note and can be as good as approximately 1%. Additional tests ...

The Effects of Reversing the Roles of the Hands on the Development of Piano Performance Skill: A Preliminary Investigation

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of reversing the r6les of the two hands during the early stages of learning to play the piano. We transcribed the treble clef parts (traditionally the right hand) from a common piano method book to bass clef, and the bass clef parts (traditionally the left hand) to the treble clef. We then sought to determine the effects of this r6le reversal on the performance skill of beginning piano students. Twenty-four righthanded volunteer participants were randomly assigned to control and treatment groups. Each group received traditional group piano instruction for ten weeks with the only difference being the transcribed parts of the treatment group. A post-test revealed that the treatment group scored significantly higher than the control group in four out of five performance categories. Recommendations were that piano teachers consider reversing the r6les of the two hands during the early stages of piano study.

Creating an expressive performance without being able to play a musical instrument

When we enjoy a solo musical performance, two factors in particular may contribute to our appreciation: the technical skill of the performer in playing the instrument and the individual expressive interpretation of the work. The factor which predominates will vary from piece to piece according to the musical demands. In traditional piano method the skills of playing the instrument and of creating an interpretation are normally taught together. Here the author suggests that the two factors can be separated and considers how the skills of creating an interpretation might be explored independently. A computer-based system is described which enables a person to create individual expressive performances of piano music even without being able to play the piano. Some potentially limiting factors are considered.

Bebop: The Music and Its Players

When bebop was new, writes Thomas Owens, many jazz musicians and most of jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering For a nation swinging to smoothly orchestrated sounds of big bands, this revolutionary movement of 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than the lingua franca of jazz, serving as principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians. In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from early classics of modern jazz (starting with 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did everything 'wrong' in sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands. In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!' In this marvelous account, Owens comes right to present day, with accounts of new musicians ranging from Marsalis brothers to lesser-known masters like pianist Michel Petrucciani. Bebop is a jazz-lover's dream--a serious yet highly personal look at America's most distinctive music.

Piano as…text

Abstract A cultural icon, the Piano, carries with it a most imposing artistic‐social tradition. The aesthetics of postmodern music, however, has transcended both the musical and social elements associated with the Piano. Nevertheless, the use and impact of the piano in contemporary music continues unabated, its literature grows; leaving us with a paradox that admits itself only as an oxymoron: in postmodern music, the physical piano remains as the ghost of a concept which has been destroyed. This paper examines three compositions which illustrate this paradox by their simultaneous rejection of and dependence on the traditional Piano: Knocking Piece by Ben Johnston, Be Prepared by the New Percussion Quartet, and For Pianist by Christian Wolff. Drawing upon contemporary literary criticism, the goal is to illustrate the function of the piano as a text‐object, and in so doing, place the above three works within the context of the postmodern arts in general.