Sonic Crossroads

For students ages 12 to 18, a week-long exploration of performance, improvisation and composition at the piano in the cultural capital of Vienna, Austria! Join us for a week full of new sounds - your own! - and new sights, with visits to Schönbrunn Palace, Albertina Museum, the State Opera and more! Students will have the opportunity to perform at the end of the week, including their newly created work! Check out the full course description and complete the interest form to secure your spot today! 

I was in the neighborhood hardware store the other day (I looove going to neighborhood hardware stores) and it struck me - this is kind of what this Listening class is like. It may not be super fancy-tech - sometimes the internet is glitchy or the zoom sound isn't great (just like the dusty aisles of a local store) - but there's always a surprise around the corner, and sometimes it's just exactly what you're looking for and you didn't even know it.

This was particularly true for the clips I pulled up in the…

This post shares content from the Listening Around the World class and also a piece included on the Piano Exams repertoire list. After listening to the bell rhythm and feeling that rhythm in both duple and triple groupings, we also listened to this piano piece by Joseph Uzoigwe from the set "Talking Drums":

The piece was performed live in the class, which enabled me to demonstrate some patterns in a variety of tempos. But we appreciate the ability to share Kevin Madison's performance here! Like so much of…

In the most recent class we followed up with some rhythm drills to practice patterns heard in some of the listening examples. This class focuses on listening but one of the most important strategies for conveying elements of a style or piece of music is through experiential learning. And so there was a lot of slow repetition of patterns and also experimenting with how to group the patterns into regular beats. Specifically we worked with this bell rhythm of Agbekor music (in Ghana):

X - x - xx - x - x - xX -…

I'm used to presenting listening material like this as geographically distinct modules, but I'm enjoying the freedom of making connections between musical attributes rather than adhering to any geographical borders.  And so, it doesn't seem like much of a leap to switch from Parisian polyphony (see the last post) to the polyrhythm (layers of rhythm) of West African drumming. 

The following short but informative film introduces the complex organization of music of the Malinke in Baro, Guinea (West Africa)…

Actually the impetus for this latest listening class was to provide some additional content for some theory lessons I was teaching. I thought Why not spend some time online listening to different kinds of polyphony rather than just learning chord inversions and voice-leading rules? This approach also provides many opportunities to look at maps and learn some social and cultural context. 

So the first links I pulled up were actually from the 12-century Parisian masters, Leonin and Perotin. They are so often…

I usually like to start a class like the Listening class with some introduction to sound qualities. What are we listening to when we hear and recognize different instruments? How do instruments - and the human voice - produce sound? These questions lead one to a consideration of timbre, or tone color, and the physical properties of sound based on what is dubbed the Harmonic Series. 

I recently found this wonderful performance by Batzorig Vaachig and his daughter, demonstrating Mongolian throat-singing:

…

In conjunction with the new online classes, I am providing a brief synopsis of some material covered each week here in these posts. 

In yesterday's group class we took a tour of various keyboard instruments with stops in Poland, India and the UK.

Continuing our exploration of early European polyphony (compositions with more than one melodic line), we took a turn from Paris of the 12th century into Italy in the 14th century with a work by the blind Italian master, Francesco Landini. Landini is often depicted…

Knowing how much my students like to watch piano video tutorials, I thought I'd share a unique one that was posted on a new music community site recently. "Haiduceasca" is a traditional song form from Bessarabia (Moldova/Romania) and is translated here as "Outlawry Song."

UPDATE: Unfortunately the aforementioned piano tutorial has been taken offline. But here is the rest of the blog post.

Below seems to be the exact inspiration for the piano arrangement (even the same tonal center):

As one can imagine…

The newest publication from Sonic Crossroads is a beginning level lesson book for piano by Kathryn Woodard that doubles as a children's song book. I'm A Big Red Bird is a simple, pentatonic tune that can be played on the black keys, and the first lessons in the book explain how without the need for notation. Further lessons explore starting on different keys - "How do you make it sound the same? And how many keys can you start on?" It even encourages the student to play a duet with a piano partner - a…