Customer Reviews

Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's quite a good book of "teaching literature", but for me an advanced pianist, and as a guide to "performance literature", it is quite unsatisfactory. For instance, even Bach's English Suites are not mentioned in this book at all! Especially if you've read some piano liturature books like in German (eg. Handbuch der Klavierliteratur by K. Wolters), you would feel this book relatively inferior. But it provides good information for the piano instructors indeed, like which repertoire is a good preparative study for another repertoire, etc. Acutally I would still suggest this book, because it is sufficiently informative for the basic piano instructors in my country.

Amazing amount of information, great for teachers and performers! It grades the music from levels 1-10 so if your a teacher you can find the perfect song for your student. Explains all the required understanding of the performer and teaching tips for the piece. It's an invaluable resource for any pianist!

I can't believe how much I use this book. Don't know how I got along without it. At 57 I still take piano lessons, just to keep me going back to the piano with something new. I love looking up all the new music in this book and seeing the difficulty level and recommendations for other similar works. Every composer is included and I am very impressed with the detail about all of their compositions.

I agree, the one thing lacking in this otherwise comprehensive manual is the advanced literature. No Chopin Etudes or Liszt Rhapsodies, here. Overall a good resource for the piano teacher. This one's for the pedagogues like me.

Magrath has collected a wealth of information, essential for anyone teaching classical piano at the pre-college level. It's a wonderful way to find unique pieces for students, and it also helps guide teachers in building their repertoire libraries.

Not just a teacher's resource. This book is very helpful for the adult amateur (to early advanced standing) searching for new pieces to explore. Nicely arranged by musical periods. A nice complement to Maurice Hinson's Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire (which does list advanced works).

I bought this book new through Amazon Prime, and the shipping time was so fast. The book came as purchased, in brand new condition.