Fully explains through musical example, the concept of expressive musicianship as taught by Anton Horner, William Kincaid and Marcel Tabuteau. This book clearly illustrates how to teach students to play or sing with expression, musicianship and style and will help to make your performances "come alive".
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
revealing the beauty of music:
this tiny 150 pages book has a clear message concerning the arsis-thesis concept in phrasing, which has a profound effect on my performance of classical music. After a few hours of study my comprehension of movement in music had grown a lot, and piano playing has become a lot more fun. This book is the ideal antidotum against the unconscious influence of the growing habit to put emphasis on the beat in contemporary music. Unfortunately the book is glued together is an amateuristic fashion: mine fell apart... more info
Valuable concept, dated presentation:
The original copyright on this book is 1982. The writing style is even older and highly academic, making it difficult to extract much of the wisdom the book has to impart. I appreciated the book's insistence that accenting the downbeat tends to produce non-musical playing, and I learned from his discussion of the musical importance of the "arsis" within the thesis-arsis construction of any phrase. But it seems to me that, beyond these contributions, the note-grouping method is subject to a basic... more info
Excellent Approach For Creating Forward Motion:
Despite my reviewer name (Yogadad, I am a passionate yogi), I have actually been a full time piano teacher since 1981 and teach about 45 lessons a week. While I am passionate about playing and teaching classical music I also studied jazz quite intensely at Berklee College of music and took some lessons with Jazz pianist Hal Galper. The reason I mention Hal, is because the approach to note grouping in this book is very similar in concept to Hals approach to creating melodic lines with forward motion. He... more info
A guide to expressive playing/singing:
This book was loaned to me by a colleague. At first I thought the title was rather unexciting, and that this may be a dull, uninformative book. This has proved to be very incorrect.
Thurmond's main point is that musicians can be taught to play/sing expressively, specifically with respect to rhythm.
Most amateur musicians have a tendency to play to the downbeat too forcefully and the preceding upbeat without proper emphasis, Thurmond theorizes. This postulate slowly is applied to larger and larger parts... more info
