During Morty Manus's tenure as owner and president of Alfred Music Publishing Company, he guided its growth from a small print and pop song catalog to the world's largest educational music publisher. Upon completion of a business degree from City College of New York, Morty joined the company his father had owned since 1928. In 1975, Alfred moved th...

When I first started teaching, I was determined not to make my students fill out the dreaded practice log. As a young teacher, I still had fresh memories of my own student days, and times spent scrambling right before a lesson to reconstruct (or perhaps invent?) my practice times for the week. Even as a kid, it seemed like a pointless exercise to m...

"They don't make them like they used to," my grandmother often said, shaking her head. She was referring, of course, to some deed—or misdeed—of mine, compared to her own generation, who were much too busy and exhausted from getting up at dawn to plow the fields and walk barefoot to school to ever get into any kind of trouble. I listened silent...

This issue continues Clavier Companion's survey of piano methods.1 Each article in this series has three sections—an introductory synopsis by the Associate Editor, two articles written by teachers who have used the method extensively in their studios, and a response from the authors of the method surveyed in the previous issue. We hope that you fin...

Because of the textural, technical, and interpretive demands of music from the Romantic era, students usually do not encounter it until their early intermediate years. Most likely some of the first Romantic compositions a student will study will be by Robert Schumann, whose bicentennial is being celebrated this year. In this issue Sharon Stosur, El...

Respected as a celebrated concert artist throughout his lifetime, Sergei Rachmaninoff 's compositions were not as universally appreciated until more recent years, and were in fact sharply criticized at times. In this issue, Robert Palmieri provides an illuminating retrospective as he observes Rachmaninoff 's passionate public struggle aga...

For centuries, music notation has been a "black and white" subject. To read this music, musicians have decoded black and white print and transferred it into colorful sound. Even when making notations in our printed music we have usually grabbed an ordinary pencil, thus adding a shade of gray to the page. When things get really bad we might actually...

For centuries, improvising introductions to keyboard works, also known as preluding, helped inspire musicians and prepare audiences for what was to come. (The German verb präludieren and the French verb preluder can simply mean "to improvise.") Preluding had practical functions as well, allowing performers to warm up, test tuning, or adapt to unfa...

So many of you experienced a winter similar to or much worse than the one we had here in Oklahoma, with blizzards, winter storms, and unexpected changes in our plans. It was a horrible winter weather year! Winter seems so far away now, but it certainly impacted our personal situations and teaching during this past year. Where I live, we often desce...

When I was about twelve years of age, my parents took me to a restaurant that featured a live jazz trio. I was amazed to see the pianist playing without written music. Unaware of the awkwardness I might cause by interrupting a performing musician, I approached the stage and asked him how he did it. His succinct reply changed my life. Without missin...

​The next time you are sitting with a group of teachers, count the number of times someone says, "I have a student who..." When I am on the road giving workshops and teachers approach me at the break, these words begin the phrase I hear most often. The speaker usually goes on to describe some problem with a student that he or she has so far been un...