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18th Century Pianos: Design, Style, Music

Although the earliest pianos were invented at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, it was not until the 1780s that the piano began to usurp the harpsichord as the keyboard instrument of choice (Rowland, 1993, p.13). There were two distinct schools of piano building – English and Viennese – and it was only late in the […]

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Review: The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation by John Mortensen

“If I have one regret about my traditional education, it’s that it wasn’t traditional enough. We have forgotten that in the eighteenth century – those hundred years that form the bedrock of classical music – improvisation was a foundation of music training. Oddly, our discipline has discarded a practice that helped bring it into being. […]

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Chapter 3: A Case for Partimento Pt. 2 – Improvisation

The Benefits of Improvisation A linguistic parallel may be applied to outline the relationship of different musical fields of study. When learning a foreign language, a student may be taught grammar, aural, literacy, pronunciation, and translation skills. But a language may only be said to have been learnt if the student can speak it. Subsequently, […]

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Historical Performance: Brahms Op. 117 No. 1 by Adelina de Lara (1951)

The recordings made by Adelina de Lara, Ilona Eibenschütz and Etelka Freund are interesting case studies to consider. These are women whose professional performing careers were “curtailed by marriage” (Kim, 2012, p.52). This removal from performing life kept, to some degree, their performing practices away from the changing musical culture of the 20th century. Therefore, […]

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Analysis Blog Historical Performance Music Analysis

Historical Performance: Two Recordings of Quilter, Go, Lovely Rose

1934 Mark Raphael – Voice; Roger Quilter – Piano 2014 Mark Stone – Voice; Stephen Barlow – Piano Go, Lovely Rose is the third song in Quilter’s Op. 24 ‘5 English Love Lyrics’. This opus, and Op. 25 were “no more than loose collections of solo songs written by Quilter over a period of seven […]