What is a Good Piano Sound and How Do You Get it?
Discovery homeSign up for email updatessubmit a question We would like to thank William Fried for this insightful article on making a beautiful sound at the piano. Want to learn more about tone production? Check out the latest issue of Piano Magazine. Our new summer...
What is a Good Piano Sound and How Do You Get it?
So spoke my teacher in college, in an admonition I would hear many times over four years. A wonderful person and infinitely generous, but she did not mince words. “Thanks a lot, Arlene,” I muttered under my breath, before trying the passage again. She was...
Rewriting The Rite for Fun and Profit
Winter 2023; Vol. 14, No. 4
In his memoirs, the French critic Louis Laloy describes a preview performance, at his country home in Bellevue, of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as piano duet, with Stravinsky and Debussy at the piano. Stravinsky, playing the top and visibly perspiring with the effort, at...
What Do Études Have to Do with Musical Expression?
Summer 2022; Vol. 14, No. 2
By William Fried Back when I was in conservatory, if a pianist was looking to test mettle and show off technique, he or she might learn a Ligeti étude. These fearsome constructions by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti were modeled after Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano...