Rough Ideas by the British American pianist Stephen Hough is a new collection of easily readable essays on a wide range of topics from practice, performance, and repertoire, to Catholicism and spirituality. This informative and provocative tome provides a fascinating look into the mind of one of today's finest classical pia...

Robert Schumann's oeuvre owes structural and inspirational credit to the works of numerous German romantic authors. However, some aspects of his literature-inspired compositional style are more often discussed than others.1 Numerous authors have written about the highly fragmented nature of Schumann's piano cycles, including Kreisleriana,...

In a letter of July 1910 to Jacques Durand, Claude Debussy announced that, as an artist, he was "accustomed to living among apparitions." Exactly what form those apparitions took is anybody's guess, but some may well have appeared in the form of arabesques, and not always friendly ones at that. Despite the fact that arabesques are so innocuous ...

Question: I've read that Frances Clark often used classics, literature, and social sciences that don't seem related to piano teaching in her pedagogy classes. Would you comment on this and, if possible, give some examples? Answer: This is true and it's something about which I could write many articles or perhaps even a book someday. Frances was a w...

Throughout their long history, fairy tales have fascinated people the world over. Their multi-generational appeal contradicts the notion that they are solely for children. Composers have been inspired by fairy tales to write music in various genres, including a wealth of piano pieces at varying levels of difficulty. Studying such pieces can bring m...