Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature [Paperback]

Jane Magrath (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1995

This reference book is an invaluable resource for teachers, students and performers for evaluating and selecting piano solo literature. Concise and thoroughly researched, thousands of works, from the Baroque through the Contemporary periods, have been graded and evaluated in detail. Includes an alphabetical list of composers, explanations of works and much more.

Product Details

• Paperback: 584 pages
• Publisher: Alfred Pub Co (June 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882846558
• ISBN-13: 978-0882846552
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #34,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Reference

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for certain applications., July 15, 2002

By 

Michael A. Brooks (Lexington, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature (Paperback)

This book would be particularly useful for piano teachers or for adult students of piano who are trying to expand their repertoire. It would be less useful for an advanced pianist (which I am not), as the rating scale is too simplistic and many well-known, but very difficult, works are not included.

There is a great selection of pieces from both well-known and very obscure composers, and includes virtually every significant teaching piece that one might think of. Each piece is graded in difficulty from 1-10. The grading is not as detailed as that used by Wolters, where each piece is given a separate grade for both technical and musical difficulty, but the grading is quite accurate and helpful in selecting pieces that you can actually play, if you're not a top-notch pianist. The biggest advantage of this book over other piano repertoire books is the very extensive coverage of twentieth-century music, including even some pieces for prepared piano, so it's a good place to look for some new stuff to play to annoy your friends and neighbors.

A minor weakness of the book is the lack of headings at the top of each page, which makes it sometimes irritating to use as a reference, since you may have to page forward or backwards several pages to figure out where you are in the alphabetical listing of composers. The typesetting and page layout make it look a bit amateurish, although it is carefully edited and doesn't contain a lot of typographical errors.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Source, August 29, 2005

By 

mscristofori "mscristofori" (Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature (Paperback)

This is an outstanding source book for the piano teacher. I have to respond to earlier reviewers in criticizing the collection because it contains only elementary music. If someone purchases this guide thinking they are going to have a list of elementary piano repertoire, they will be very disappointed. The book contains standard teaching literature that is considered elementary through early advanced. Magrath even titles the book "Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature". The term "standard teaching and performance literature" implies that this is not a source of advanced literature. Although, for the average piano student in the United States, this source will cover literature that would be appropriate for them through high school (except for the very precocious). Each piece or collection is given a level of difficulty number, a brief synopsis and the publisher is listed. If you are a piano teacher, you will welcome many of the obscure or forgotten pieces that are classified in the book. There are many excellent teaching pieces that are not normally seen in the best selling collections.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on solo literature for the piano, July 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature (Paperback)

As a music teacher, I found this book to be a perfect guide to the selection of piano literature from elementary through advanced repertoire. The coverage is comprehensive, representing four periods of music history. It's a pretty solid guide for the experienced piano instructor as well as an important handbook for thw beginning instructor. It is also a dependable sourcebook for the advancing piano student. Highly recommended.