Showing titles in Instruction & Technique

Keyboard Conversations with Jeffrey Siegel combine the virtuosity and poetry of a world-class pianist with entertaining commentary to create a magical concert experience. His lively, engaging insights and captivating performances make listening an enthralling experience for all music lovers.

One of the '60s most popular teen idols, Annette Funicello was more than America's favorite Mouseketeer. She knew Walt Disney, he chose her for his Mickey Mouse Club. She dated Paul Anka, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon. She made movies with such stars as Mickey Rooney and Fred MacMurray. Then she left it all behind to raise a family. In 1992, she reentered public life to share her battle with multiple sclerosis. In this touching memoir, Annette Funicello tells us that, despite it all, life is more perfect than she'd ever dreamed it might be - and once again proves to be "America's Sweetheart."

There are few art forms as visceral and emotional as opera - and few that are as daunting for newcomers. A Mad Love offers a spirited and indispensable tour of opera's eclectic past and present, beginning with Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607, generally considered the first successful opera, through classics like Carmen and La Boheme, and spanning to Brokeback Mountain and The Death of Klinghoffer in recent years.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn to read music, develop your musicianship, and impress friends with your new skills, this is the book for you! How to Read Music for Beginners by Steve Tirpak actually lays out the complete blueprint to becoming fluent in the language of music. Packed with a lifetime's worth of knowledge and teaching experience, this no-fluff guide will have you maximizing your time, setting you on the path to develop excellent musical habits right from the start. It’s time to learn the secrets that will unlock your musical potential!

Not so long ago, studio-quality recording, mixing, and music production was only available to the rich and famous artists. However, these days it’s now possible to produce professional sounding music from your own home. All you need is a decent computer and inspiration. This audiobook will tell you the rest! If you are a first timer, this book will lead you in the right direction in the least amount of time. Or if you have some experience you will definitely find some new insights into how to produce your best music.

Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your piano. This works for your own musical ideas, too: when you dream up a great riff or chord progression, you naturally want to sit down and play it right away. Ear training helps you do just that.

Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your piano. This works for your own musical ideas, too: when you dream up a great riff or chord progression, you naturally want to sit down and play it right away. Ear training helps you do just that.

In The Indispensable Composers, Tommasini offers his own personal guide to the canon - and what greatness really means in classical music. What does it mean to be canonical now? Who gets to say? And do we have enough perspective on the 20th century to even begin assessing it? To make his case, Tommasini draws on elements of biography, the anxiety of influence, the composer's relationships with colleagues, and shifting attitudes toward a composer's work over time.

Taking a cognitive approach to musical meaning, Arnie Cox explores embodied experiences of hearing music as those that move us both consciously and unconsciously. In this pioneering study that draws on neuroscience and music theory, phenomenology and cognitive science, Cox advances his theory of the "mimetic hypothesis", the notion that a large part of our experience and understanding of music involves an embodied imitation in the listener of bodily motions and exertions that are involved in producing music.

Autistic people and musical individuals often have perfect pitch, a gift they were born with. The musical gift may be accompanied with learning differences such as reading comprehension problems, trouble with mathematics, and significant difficulties in learning how to read music. This book was written by a music therapist and an autistic researcher, and is endorsed by leading experts in the field of autism and special-needs education.

Your voice is your identity. It can tell people everything about who you are, how you feel about yourself, and what you believe in. Now you can gain perfect command of your voice with Vocal Awareness. Created by Arthur Joseph, an international voice specialist, Vocal Awareness is a complete system for mastering your voice and integrating it into your life. Your voice has the power to instantly reach out and connect with people.

The award-winning creator of the acclaimed documentary The Music Instinct: Science & Song, explores the power of music and its connection to the body, the brain, and the world of nature. Only recently has science sought in earnest to understand and explain this impact. One remarkable recent study, analyzing the cries of newborns, shows that infants' cries contain common musical intervals, and children tease each other in specific, singsong ways no matter where in the world they live.

Vocal leader James Sills believes that group singing has the power to change lives. It is a joyful expression of our humanity that gives us purpose, encourages us to be fully present, and helps us to foster social bonds. In Do Sing, James invites us to look back on our singing journey. Was there a time when you stopped singing or were told you couldn't sing? Do certain songs trigger happy memories?

Derived from a popular series of lecture-recitals presented by Carol Montparker over the past several years, The Composer's Landscape features eight insightful essays on the piano repertoire. Each chapter focuses on a single composer: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. Montparker uses landscape as a metaphor for the score, whether it's a well-tended garden of Mozart or the thorny thickets on a Schumann page.

Whether you’re a bathroom singer who’s happy to sing to bath fittings or someone who’d like to woo millions with your voice, you can sound your best if you know the right tricks. And no, singing is not just about having the right voice texture; it’s also about knowing what and how to sing. Armed with some practical strategies and the fire to find your own voice, you can unearth your unique voice and create magic with it.

Mental health is on everyone’s minds these days. People are looking for a something to help but don’t know what to do. Pioneering a program to meet this need head on, the author found a way to reach students and give them the tools they need through a medium they already experience daily: music. This is a practical guide for using songwriting for personal fulfillment that backs up its assertions with research-based evidence from multiple fields of study: physics, psychology, anthropology, music therapy, evolutionary biology, and the wisdom of centuries of music makers.

This audio course focuses on developing pitch and note recognition skills through ear training exercises. It covers a wide range of topics, from the basics of musical pitch and the musical alphabet to more advanced topics such as scales, chords, and their application in different musical genres. The course is designed to be informative, engaging, and helpful for both beginner and experienced musicians. It provides a comprehensive and practical learning experience that can be revisited as needed to reinforce key concepts.

The Musician's Map is a complete guide to building success in music. Whether you're just thinking about learning music, or you're already in the process of building a career; this book will help you. Musician's Map provides practical advice for musicians just starting out and musicians looking to get ahead and further their career. This book is a step-by-step guide that will save you years of time, thousands of dollars, and will make you a better musician.

Making music and playing drums does not start at the tip of your drumstick, not even with the motion before you strike a drum. It really starts with the desire, actually with the compulsion, to make music and to play. Play as You Are is an open invitation to explore a different approach to playing music and a sharing of the author's experiences.

White Limozeen (1989) was a commercial recovery after Dolly Parton's first major failure two years previously with the release of Rainbow. This book is a case study in how an album is sold and a persona constructed. The album had a complex relationship to the country music genre at a time when the genre was in the middle of major sonic and cultural shifts, and it represents how country music saw itself. This question of identity was especially relevant since White Limozeen was produced by Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass prodigy who was in the middle of his own genre-widening experiments.