Written by Amanda Vick Lethco, Morton Manus, Willard A. Palmer. For piano. Format: instructional book. With introductory text, instructional text, easy piano notation and fingerings. Learn To Play. Series: Alfred's Basic Piano Library. 96 pages. 9x12 inches. Published by Alfred Publishing.

Piano

SKU: HL.14001903

Composed by Per Norgard. Music Sales America. Classical. Book [Softcover]. Music Sales #KP00981. Published by Music Sales (HL.14001903).

ISBN 9788759859605. Danish.

Animals In Concert - Three pieces for Piano solo by Per Norgard. Programme Note  1. A Tortoise's Tango (1984) - dur.: 4'  2. Light of a Night - Paul meets bird (1989) - dur.: 6'  3. Hermit Crab Tango - Esperanza (1997) - dur.: 5'   The pieces can be performed together or one by one. In the1980s, quite a few finds turned up in Per Norgard's music. The material could be, say, a number of song birds' equilibrist melodic lines, the overtones of the ocean surf, or waltzing themes by the schizophrenic artist Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930). Or again, as heard here, it can be the rhythms and motifs of the tango and a Beatles song (with bird), explored in three independent piano pieces that form the Animals in Concert suite, about which the composer writes:  A Tortoise's Tango: The tortoise as tango dancer must presumably possess certain rhythmic peculiarities, which I have chosen to express by letting the tune of the tortoise shuffle broadly, tripartite through the strict four partite time of tango.  Tortoise Tango was the original title of this piece, written for Achilles (the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff), for his so called tango project, including new tangos for piano by composers from all over the world.  Light of a Night (Paul meets bird) was commissioned by pianist Aki Takahashi. It is a reworked arrangement for piano of the Beatles song Blackbird. As some of us will recall, the Beatles on The White Album let the beautiful song to the blackbird be accompanied by an (apparently) live blackbird song. It is this authentic bird-motif world that in Light of a Night weaves itself into the Beatles melody and in turn is gradually infected by it, so that a completely new third entity ensues: a kind of Bird-rock ballad (or maybe it is a Beatle-bird?).  Hermit Crab Tango (Esperanza): The tango situation is quite special for a Hermit Crab. It is a well-known fact that the hermit crab - this soft animal - must run the gauntlet among the many perils at the bottom of the sea when it must move hose. I have chosen to express the angers by a tango pattern - sharp as a cactus - through which the tune, optimistic, slips to its new shelter. I have borrowed the tune from songwriter Hanne Methling's Introduction: 'I want to get through this time!' she sings in a ecstatically ascending melody line - and I believe that these words must correspond very well to the mood of the hermit crab: 'Esperanza'- the green runners of hope wind among the latticework formed by the tango rows.

Performed by Bill Frisell. For piano (or guitar). Format: piano solo book. Jazz. 127 pages. 9x12 inches. Published by Cherry Lane Music.

Piano

SKU: HL.14040983

Piano. Composed by Theodor Grigoriu. Music Sales America. Classical. Book [Softcover]. Editions Musicales Transatlantiques #ETR001822. Published by Editions Musicales Transatlantiques (HL.14040983).

French.

The Modal Column is a cycle of paired pieces for piano, starting from the classical structure- prelude-fugue - used by Bach in Das wohltemperierte Klavier. The modes that are being used have a relatively simple octavizing structure, hence an almost infinite variety of combinations that can generate a large number of pieces, impossible to exhaust by a composer. Therein lies the idea of a column, in the sense given by Brancusi, i.e. an endless succession of modules.

In the vision of the author, the mechanism of the mode is a secondary (ancillary) aspect, the primary goal is deciphering the ethos incorporated in it.

The prelude-fugue structure hypostatizesthe musical discourse at the two possible extremes. free-constructed. While Romanian music rules in free areas, like any old music with an (especially oral) tradition, the constructed pieces start from Dutch (Flemish) or Venetian polyphony, which precedes the idea of fugue, understood as a technology of the movement (dynamics) of sound, after the models of Giovanni Gabrieli or Ockeghem.

The Modal Column is first of all the presentation of a melodic world but, as the subtitle indicates, also an investigation into the ethos of Romanian music. The forms in which the pieces are thought are simple, non-ostentatious, the whole cycle being in fact a musical workshop, whose better parts may be worth including in ampler works. Before the succinct description of the six couples in Books I and II, a few observations, necessary from a musicological point of view:

• 1. The modes are rich in nostalgia, with even graver nuances in the livelier movements.
• 2. It is well-known, that all the columns - Egyptian obelisks, ancient ornamental columns - have scenarios engraved on them. Trajan's Column describes the wars against the Dacians and their defeat. George Calinescu says, 'Trajan's Column is beautiful, but let us not forget that the Dacians are in chains on it.' The Romanian melos is millennia-old and was but little influenced by historical.