Saturday, November 4, 2023 | Uncategorized

I like to teach my beginner piano students pentascales. These are something not everyone has heard of so why do I do this? I’ll explain what pentascales are. They are the first 5 notes of the usual scales we are familiar with learning. This might be anything from C major to G minor. Pentascales are easier to learn than the full scale, and we certainly learn the whole 7 notes of each scale in good time, but for an early beginner, knowing your pentascales has many benefits. The pentascale contains 3 very important components of the key of that scale - the tonic, the mediant and the dominant note. These 3 notes make up the tonic triad and much of the music notation we read is made up of combinations of these 3 notes. Knowing these 3 notes in the most important and most used keys, makes understanding the structure of the music my students are reading easier, and therefore easier for them to learn.

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Thursday, September 7, 2023 | Uncategorized

I hope you’ve all had a fantastic summer and managed to catch some of the BBC Proms. The finale is this Saturday, and the programme this year has included some incredible pianists. I recommend catching up if you haven’t managed to watch or listen to their performances. 

A particular highlight was Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody (prom 27-televised). Some other highlights included:

Benjamin Grosvenor playing Debussy, Ravel and Liszt (prom 3)

Stephen Hough playing Rachmaninov (prom 6)

Isata Kanneh-Mason playing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev (prom 22-televised)

Alim Baisembayev playing Rachmaninov (prom 30-televised) 

Andras Schiff playing Schumann (prom 37-televised)

Martin Helmchen playing Brahms (prom 40)

Alexandre Kantorow playing Beethoven (prom 41)

Seong-Jin Cho playing Chopin (prom 42)

Not piano but another keyboard instrument and very special - Anna Lapwood playing the great Royal Albert Hall organ on 25th July (prom 15)

There’s also another piano performance tonight…

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Wednesday, July 26, 2023 | Uncategorized

Instruments such as the harpsichord and clavichord pre-date the development of the instrument we think of today as the piano. Around 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, whilst working for the famous Medici family in Florence, tried to bring together the best elements of these predecessors of the piano into an instrument initially named a ‘gravicembalo col piano e forte’. The aim was to produce an instrument where the sound was made by striking the string, like a clavichord, but allowing the string to resonate like in a harpsichord. This new instrument allowed both soft and loud dynamics, using a sophisticated hammer action with escapement mechanism, as well as dampers. The new instrument was smaller than today’s modern pianos with around 54 keys rather than our 88, and it was not initially able to match the full volume available from a harpsichord at that time. This meant that the new piano, therefore, did not become popular until much later, almost a century later, when the volume of the instrument was improved by piano makers across the world including the UK, Austria, France and the USA.

If you’re interested and would like to read more there are some great articles:

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cris/hd_cris.htm

http://www.piano.instruments.edu.pl/en/history/gravicembalo-col-piano-e-forte

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