Chamber Music Piano

SKU: PR.140401310

Composed by Nora Holt. Edited by Lara Downes. Sws. Score. 8 pages. Duration 2 minutes. Theodore Presser Company #140-40131. Published by Theodore Presser Company (PR.140401310).

ISBN 9781491134153. UPC: 680160684250. 9 x 12 inches. Key: G major.

NORA’ S DANCE is a jazz-influenced rag from 1921, and among the only surviving compositions by Nora Douglas Holt. A charming and exciting work rejuvenated by Lara Downes’ 2021 recording for the Rising Sun label, the rag is both a fun 2 minutes for pianists and audiences, and also a fascinating time capsule. Composed several years after Scott Joplin’s death, and several years before the Charleston pervaded popular music, NORA’S DANCE blossoms with the energy and jazz harmony starting to emerge as The Roaring 20’s, using ragtime and stride as the seed for pianistic style.
My own life in music has been driven by a quest to find strong female role models, trails to follow, shoulders to stand on. In Nora Douglas Holt, I find an inspiring example of creativity, independence, and resilience – with a dash of troublemaking. She was a free spirit, a force of nature, and she lived a fascinating and eventful life on her own terms. She reinvented herself through five marriages and at least as many careers. From her beginnings at the piano at age four, she explored many avenues of musical expression – performing, composing, music journalism, broadcasting, teaching – all with inventiveness, style, and zeal.She made the most of the Roaring ’20s, as an artist, socialite, jetsetter, muse, and patroness of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1921 she started an independent arts journal called “Music and Poetry,” where the charming piano solo Nora’s Dance was first published. I think the piece captures beautifully, in a little under 2 minutes, the energy and excitement of those heady years.In 1926, Nora left New York to travel the world, performing in nightclubs throughout Europe and Asia. She put her belongings in storage before she left, and when she came back she discovered that many of her things had been stolen, including more than 200 of her musical compositions. She never composed again.When the Depression hit, she moved out to Los Angeles, where she studied music education at USC, taught music in the LA public schools, and opened her own beauty salon. She returned to New York in the ’40s and worked as a music critic for several major newspapers, then launched yet another career, this time in broadcasting. Her popular radio concert series “Nora Holt’s Concert Showcase” broadcast to New York’s classical music audience, with a focus on Black composers and performers.Ahead of her time, larger than life, full of ideas…. I am so pleased to introduce you to the feisty and free spirited Nora Douglas Holt!

Piano

SKU: BT.MUSAM39645

The Complete Piano Player. Tuition. Book Only. Composed 1992. 232 pages. Music Sales #MUSAM39645. Published by Music Sales (BT.MUSAM39645).

ISBN 9780711906723. English.

All five books of The Complete Piano Player series are published in this single volume at a substantial savings over the price of the five individual books. Complete with keyboard chart.

Piano

SKU: FG.55011-456-2

Composed by Esa Pietila. Fennica Gehrman #55011-456-2. Published by Fennica Gehrman (FG.55011-456-2).

ISBN 9790550114562.

Thre e Strides of Light is inspired by the light and its behaviour in different circumstances, appearances and surroundings. The work is in three movements, but they are played together attacca.

The first movement starts off with a headstrong theme on the left hand. This motif has persistent momentum, like a train, and one could think of it as the rays of a setting sun. The beams are straight and relentlessly penetrate our eyes. The seven-bar repetition on the left hand supports this mental image, until the repetition ends and a new thematically central motive starts to emerge, bringing new kind of texture for the last rays and dance of the setting sun. At the end, the light vanishes into the night.

Second movemement, slow rubato, depicts the first rays of the rising sun, they drop behind a morning cloud into the day, growing, developing and becoming yet faster. Eventually the day opens up in all of it sunny glory. The music leads us towards the third movement, in which one bathes in the rays of the sun. The repetative motive of the first movement returns, but by now it has been transformed into something else. A pensive quintuplet-passage emerges, paving ground for the final themes of the work. The ending of the work is thick in sound, depicting the relentless glare of the sun and the heat sun creates. Within the entire work, one can imagine to have gone through a whole 24-hour period on the sea, in which the three strides of light are apparent in different parts of the day.

Written by Amanda Vick Lethco, Morton Manus, Willard A. Palmer. For piano. Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course. Format: instructional book. With introductory text, instructional text, illustrations and performance notes. Instructional. 9x12 inches. Published by Alfred Publishing.

Written by Amanda Vick Lethco, Morton Manus, Willard A. Palmer. Instructional book (spiral bound) and accompaniment CD for piano. With introductory text, instructional text, standard notation and fingerings. Series: Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course. 144 pages. Published by Alfred Publishing.

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.

(Volumes 1-5, Complete) Written by Kenneth Baker. For piano. Format: instructional book. With standard notation, chord names, lyrics, instructional text, illustrations, fingerings and pull-out keyboard chart. Learn to play. 240 pages. 9x12 inches. Published by Music Sales.

Chamber Music Piano

SKU: PR.140401320

Composed by Eubie Blake. Edited by Lara Downes. Arranged by Jeremy Siskind. Sws. Score. 8 pages. Duration 3:45. Theodore Presser Company #140-40132. Published by Theodore Presser Company (PR.140401320).

ISBN 9781491134177. UPC: 680160684274. 9 x 12 inches. Key: F major.

LOVE WILL FIND A WAY is one of the great hits of the 1920s – an era of remarkable cultural growth giving rise to “The Roaring '20s,” “The Harlem Renaissance,” and a fun-loving society known for the Charleston dance craze and the surge of jazz into the mainstream of American music. A song from Shuffle Along, the first all-Black Broadway musical, LOVE WILL FIND A WAY has been arranged by pianist Jeremy Siskind especially for Lara Downes’ recording that launches the Rising Sun series.
According to Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake’s 1921 Shuffle Along was the real start of the Harlem Renaissance. In Hughes’ words: “Everybody was in the audience, including me. It gave just the proper push, a pre-Charleston kick, to that Negro vogue of the '20s that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing.”As Broadway’s first all-Black hit musical, with an all-star cast including Paul Robeson and a young Josephine Baker, Shuffle Along ran for an unprecedented 504 performances in New York, then toured nationally for three years as the first Black musical to play in white theaters across the United States. The show’s appeal to a multi-racial audience, and its integration of the jazz and Broadway communities, not only changed the history of the American musical theater, but made important strides forward in American race relations.Love Will Find a Way is one of the show’s most popular tunes. This intimate, pensive arrangement by Jeremy Siskind celebrates the song’s centenary by making it a love song for our own time as much as its own – a reminder that no matter how dark the path or how gray the skies, love will always find a way.

(for the Young Beginner) Written by Nancy Faber, Randall Faber. Instructional book for piano. 72 pages. Published by The FJH Music Company.