Read more
With The Contemporary Piano, Shockley provides a comprehensive resource for composers writing music that uses extended techniques for the piano and for pianists interested in playing repertoire that makes use of techniques and/or implements unfamiliar to them.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Notation and Some Piano Basics
Chapter 2: The History and Mechanism of the Piano
Chapter 3: On the Keys and on the Pedals
Chapter 4: Pizzicato, Strumming, Scraping, Rubbing
Chapter 5: Muting
Chapter 6: Harmonics
Chapter 7: The Piano is a Big Box and the Pianist is a Noise-Making Animal
Chapter 8: Bowing
Chapter 9: Preparations
Chapter 10: The Toy Piano
Appendix A: Repertoire
Appendix B: Materials for Piano Preparation
Appendix C: Grand Piano Interior Architecture and Stringing
About the author
Alan Shockley is the director of composition and theory and an associate professor in the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach. As a composer, he has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Italy's Centro Studi Ligure, and France's Centre d'Art Marnay Art Centre (CAMAC), among others, and he has received grants from the American Music Center, Pittsburgh ProArts, the Mellon, and the Heinz Foundations. A dedicated scholar and educator, Shockley has taught at Princeton University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Pittsburgh. Shockley's essays on and reviews of contemporary music and on intersections between music and modernist fiction can be found in journals and collections published by many major presses, and his book, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel was released in 2009.
Summary
With The Contemporary Piano, Shockley provides a comprehensive resource for composers writing music that uses extended techniques for the piano and for pianists interested in playing repertoire that makes use of techniques and/or implements unfamiliar to them.
