5 Things

Five Things You Might Not Know About Florence Price

Written By Lia Jenson-Abbott
Florence Price

Don’t miss Lia Jenson-Abbott’s Inspiring Artistry contribution about Florence Price’s Down a Southern Lane, which includes information on how to effectively teach the piece, all the way from preparation to performance.

1.  At age 18, Florence Price graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with two degrees:  Teachers Diploma in Piano and Soloists Diploma in Organ.1

It is extremely difficult to earn a single music degree at a major conservatory. Students who pursue double degrees have an even more ambitious workload to undertake, thus, it is rare for students to pursue two degrees simultaneously. That Florence Price achieved two degrees concurrently in three years is nothing short of astonishing and further underscores her work ethic and her abilities.

The Soloists Diploma was the highest attainable certificate awarded by the Conservatory.

Rae Linda Brown2
Price’s Class at New England Conservatory

2. While we know about her classical compositions, many may be surprised to learn that Florence Price also composed popular music for radio commercials and theater under the pen name, “VeeJay.”3

When Florence Price arrived in Chicago, she devoted more time to composition. As a composer, Price was ultimately trying to support her family as well as to write music which would find a larger performing base for her music. Clearly, Price felt the financial need to work in the popular music industry along with the Classical art music realm. While this music has not been given as much scholarly critical consideration to date, it would certainly be interesting to study these works to help complete the history of her amazing compositional output. 

The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown

That Price was invited to conduct her Concerto in this star-studded venue for so large an audience is testimony to the high esteem with which she was regarded as a composer by the early 1930s.

Rae Linda Brown4

3. In 1933, Price was invited to conduct the orchestra while her former student, Margaret Bonds, played her Piano Concerto in One Movement at the Century of Progress Exhibition.5

Florence Price was a gifted composer, but also a gifted and dedicated teacher. Her student Margaret Bonds, herself a tremendous musical talent both as a pianist and as a composer, had a close relationship with Price and was instrumental in helping to disseminate Price’s music. 

4. In the spring of 1941, Florence Price moved to the Abraham Lincoln Center, where she taught close to one hundred piano students.6

While Price taught so many students due to economic necessity, the physical and mental energy needed to sustain this kind of teaching underscores a certain aspect of Price’s nature, notably her drive to have a career in music. From this evidence, one can conclude that Price obviously worked tirelessly to serve her students, her family, and her career. Given the obstacles she faced, her achievements become that much more historically exemplary. 

As the most well-trained piano teacher at the center, Price had a huge studio. She taught both beginners and advanced students, numbering at one time close to one hundred.

Rae Linda Brown7

5. In 2021, after learning about Florence Price, the students at Kaufman Music Center in New York City, were inspired to write a children’s book about Florence Price.

Over recent years, Price’s music has finally received the critical reception it has always deserved. For children to be so intrigued and genuinely compassionate about telling the story of an overlooked musical role model might underscore Price’s legacy in the most genuine and most resonant means possible. Price was a lifelong educator, with a great deal of her compositions devoted to teaching music. It is a fitting tribute to this dedicated teacher, composer, and performer, to have a new generation of children become her voice.

The book is called Who is Florence Price? Young Musicians Tell the Story of a Girl and Her Music. It was written and illustrated by the middle school students at Special Music School. It is available for purchase on Amazon.

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Sources
  1. Brown, Rae Linda, Guthrie P. Ramsey, and Carlene J. Brown. The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, 53. University of Illinois Press, 2020.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid, 90.
  4. Ibid, 157.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid, 201-202.
  7. Ibid.
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Five Things You Might Not Know About Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee

Written By Leonidas Lagrimas

Don’t miss Leonidas Lagrimas’ Inspiring Artistry contribution about Amy Beach’s Improvisation Op. 148, No. 1, which includes exposition on how to effectively teach the piece, all the way from preparation to performance.

Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee

The piano music of Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee has been steadily gaining popularity over the past several decades, to the point where her work is regularly featured on recital programs, festival lists, at new music conferences, and even on the Royal Conservatory’s Celebration Series. A major reason for her music’s popularity is its seamless combination of sound pedagogical writing, innovative compositional techniques, and her unique yet accessible harmonic language. Plus, much of her music is just plain fun for students and concert artists alike to play!  Read on for more about this fascinating female composer and her music.

1. She is of Armenian descent.

Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee is a first-generation Armenian American, and her father was a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Much of her work reflects her own multiculturally ethnic background and upbringing, as well as the folk music of her Armenian heritage. Teachers looking to explore a composer who utilizes folk rhythms, melodies, and harmonies in the style of Bartok should investigate Goolkasian Rahbee’s compositions.

Students in Yerevan, Armenia getting autographs from Dianne.

2. She began composing in her 40s.

Goolkasian Rahbee was a Juilliard-trained pianist whose pedagogical lineage traces back through Leschetizky and Paderewski. Proving that it’s never too late (or too soon!) to explore new interests and follow your dreams, Goolkasian Rahbee took up composition in her 40s and was largely self-taught. She started out composing pieces for her own private piano students before finding success in piano pedagogical publications. 

3. Her Preludes feature aleatoric, or chance, music elements for young students.

Teachers seeking opportunities for their youngest performers to explore creativity and chance music on the piano would do well to explore Goolkasian Rahbee’s Preludes. In particular, her Prelude, Op. 138 (“Escape to Innerspace”) is written in a free meter, allowing students to explore a fixed set of pitches and apply whatever rhythms, meters, and phrasings they wish. Students are also free to make decisions involving repeats, fermatas, and pedaling. 

4. Goolkasian Rahbee often “samples” familiar tunes in her original works.

Goolkasian Rahbee’s “Tinkle Winkle” from her Modern Miniatures, Vol. 1 is a bitonal take on the familiar “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” melody. Her arrangement on “Mary Had a Little Lamb” from the same collection gives the familiar nursery rhyme a canonic treatment. Her sampling isn’t limited to children’s music either!  The hauntingly familiar melody from Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 inspired her Prelude, Op. 5 no. 1.

5. She maintains a prolific YouTube presence.

If you are interested in discovering some of Goolkasian Rahbee’s vast output for piano, check out her YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@GoolkasianRahbee/videos. This channel features hundreds of student, amateur, and professional recital performances of her piano works, from beginner through concert artist level. 

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Five Things You Might Not Know About Practicing the Piano

Written By Sheryl Iott

We would like to thank Sheryl Iott for collaboration on this post. We encourage you to watch Sheryl’s archived webinar titled, “Music Cognition: Patterns, Predictions and Practice,” by clicking here. Want to watch, but not yet a subscriber? Subscribe now for only $7.99/mo or $36/year.

1. Practice doesn’t make perfect.

Not even perfect practice! What practice does is establish a series of habits—motions in response to thoughts (or the lack thereof). Mindful practice and observation of the results of intentional effort can create a faster and more secure learning pathway.

2. Practice doesn’t require playing.

In fact, a lot of really effective practice happens using various mental practice/rehearsal strategies. Many might be familiar with mental practice for memorization—mental practice is one of the best ways to learn, check, and reinforce our memory—but mental practice can also be implemented in other ways. For example, in between repetitions of something that you are drilling, you might plan/imagine the passage and your actions, execute, and then observe and evaluate what you did, how it felt, and what its result was. Mental imagery practice actually reinforces many components of learning that contribute to performance security as well as the flexibility required to adapt on the spot to a different instrument, changes in acoustics based on the size or seating of an audience, and subtle differences in interpretation from collaborators during performance.

3. Music reading is important, so you probably shouldn’t teach it at the first lesson.

Unless a student has had experience reading music already, first lessons are better spent doing things like exploring the instrument, learning rote songs, playing call and response rhythms, and honing a relaxed and appropriate physical approach. A solid musical foundation, based in the development of audiation, lays important groundwork for music reading, just like a rich and varied speaking vocabulary helps young people learn to read.

4. The right side of your brain does more than “run” the left side of your body, and vice versa.

Everyone knows that much of the motor signaling to your body comes from the opposite hemisphere of the brain. But both hemispheres of the brain are always active in any activity, no matter what you are doing. There are also various roles played by each hemisphere, such as the left side of the brain’s preference for processing isolated pieces of information, narrow/focused attention, and prioritizing the expected, including quick selection of what seems to be the best solution based on what it already knows, compared with the right side of the brain, which deals better with the sense of the whole (the “Gestalt”), breadth/flexibility of attention, seeing things within their context, embracing of new experiences, and remembering/distinguishing between various things that may be quite closely related.

There are even differences in musical processing, with the left brain more effectively processing basic/metrical rhythms, and focusing on the sequencing of time, whereas the right brain does better with melody/tone/timbre/pitch processing, more complex rhythms, harmony and intonation.

Since we want to involve all of these components in music learning, and add to that the importance of a firm neural network for hands-together playing for pianists, hands-together learning alternating with hands-separate practice is crucial at even the earliest stages of learning new repertoire. We can go about this through careful structuring of various hands-together practice, such as playing one hand while tapping the rhythm of the other; scaffolding practice where we only play the downbeat or strong beats of one hand against the complete other part; or other chunking strategies such as playing blocked chords instead of patterned accompaniments, etc.

5. Musicians can, and do, multitask.

While we are playing, whether we are reading a new piece or playing something familiar, we take in or remember the next chunk of information and send that information to the part of our brain that triggers the physical response. As we are executing that physical response, our brain is processing the next chunk of information, ideally while our sensory inputs are analyzing the result of our physical execution. Since each of these components utilizes a different cognitive “system,” we are, in fact, multitasking. What this means for us in practice is that the larger and more coherent our “chunks” are, and the more reliably our physical responses are programmed in response to those chunks through mindful and observant practice, the better each of those systems will work in coordination with each other.

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Five Things You Might Not Know About Lita Spena

Written By Florencia Zuloaga

We would like to thank Florencia Zuloaga for collaboration on this post. We encourage you to watch Florencia Zuloaga’s archived webinar here: “Compositores Mujeres de latinoamerica y la península ibérica“ in Spanish with Ester Vela and Gabriela Calderon Cornjego.

Lita Spena

1. Lita Spena (1904-1989) was a student of acclaimed Italian piano pedagogue Vicenzo Scaramuzza.

Vincenzo Scaramuzza was a pianist and pedagogue who left his native Naples, Italy and relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina in the early 1900s. After a successful career as a performer, he established himself as one of the leading pedagogues in Argentina. His pedagogical legacy includes pianists Martha Argerich, Enrique Barenboim, Bruno Gelber, and Sylvia Kersenbaum, among many others. Scaramuzza’s pianistic genealogy is quite prolific as well, branching into younger generations: Daniel Barenboin (son of Enrique), Ingrid Fliter (student of Elizabeth Westercamp), Nelson Goerner (student of Carmen Scalccioni), and Horacio Lavandera (student of Antonio De Raco), among many others.

Vicenzo Scaramuzza
An excerpt from Stravinsky’s Les Noces

2. Spena played at the Argentine premiere of Stravinsky’s Ballet Les Noces (“The Wedding”).

The Argentine premiere was in 1926 at the Teatro Colón, the country’s most renowned opera house. The Neoclassicist influence of Stravinsky’s compositional style is evident in Spena’s own piano works, which showcase the use of unprepared dissonances, contrapuntal practices often regarded as a “return to Bach,” and formal structures and textures reinstating a Classical approach.

3. The closing movement in Spena’s Piano Sonata is titled “Toccata.”

Lita Spena’s Sonata is the first documented piano composition based on the toccata genre written by an Argentine composer. Spena’s toccata features the prototypical use of engine-like motion characteristic of this genre. By using a toccata as the closing movement of a larger work, Spena follows the precedent set by French composers Debussy (Pour le Piano) and Ravel (Le Tombeau de Couperin).

“Toccata” from Lita Spena’s Piano Sonata

4. Spena was a member of the chamber group Trio Argentino, with Celia Torrá on violin and Blanca Cattoi on violoncello.

Furthermore, Spena and Torrá were among the first female composition students at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater, which was founded in 1924. Spena and Torrá both wrote piano sonatas during the 1930s; in both cases, they dedicated their piano sonatas to Athos Palma, who was appointed professor of Harmony at the National Conservatory during that period.

5. Titled “Little water trail,” the closing movement in Spena’s Piano Preludes features fast, undulating figures written in parallel fourths.

This figuration is similar to Czerny’s Op. 140 No. 4 and Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum No. 17. Beethoven’s Diabelli Variation No. 23 is another example of composers paying homage to this unmistakable technical figuration. Such undulating figures are a representation of the resplendent, dazzling effects of running water, and the continuous rhythmic pattern continues almost uninterrupted for the duration of the prelude, making it a miniature “tour de force.”  The compositional approach of pairing instrumental virtuosity with programmatic titles that refer to water has great precedent in the piano literature; some examples include Ravel (Jeux d’Eau), Debussy (Jardins sous la pluie), and Liszt (Au bord d’une source, Fountains of the Villa d’Este).

Lita Spena’s Piano Preludes: IV. Caminito de Agua
Sources

Dezillio [et al.], Romina. Lita Spena. Sonata Para Piano. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: EDAMus. Editorial del Departamento de Artes Musicales, 2020. http://assets.una.edu.ar/files/file/artes-musicales/2020/2020-una-ms-edamusromina-dezillio-litaspena-sonatapiano.pdf.

García Muñoz, Carmen. “Spena.” In Diccionario de La Música Española e Hispanoamericana, edited by Emilio (dir) Casares Rodicio, 10:56. Madrid: SGAE, 2002.

Lian, Marcelo G., “The Pedagogical Legacy of Vicente Scaramuzza: The Relationship Between Anatomy of the Hand, Tone Production, and Musical Goals” (2013). Student Research, Creative Activity, and Performance – School of Music. 66. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicstudent/66

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5 Things You Might Not Know About Zoltán Kodály

Written By Megan Hall

Don’t miss Megan’s Inspiring Artistry contribution about J.S. Bach’s Invention in C Minor, which includes exposition on how to effectively teach the piece, all the way from preparation to performance.

Zoltán Kodály

1. Kodály wrote for piano and organ!

Besides his many successful works for choir, Kodály wrote 7 Pieces for Piano, Op. 11, a Méditation sur un motif de Claude Debussy for solo piano, and several works for the organ such as Organoedia, a complete mass for solo organ. The 7 Pieces for Piano use a variety of scales and time signatures; No. IV is an arrangement of a popular Szekely folk song. The Szekely people are Hungarians who are somewhat isolated by mountain ranges, so it is likely that Kodály learned this song while on his travels with Béla Bartók. Together, these two ethnomusicologists embarked on a mission to learn and record the many folk songs of Hungary.

2. Kodály did not invent solfa hand signs.

Contrary to popular belief, the hand signs used to show degrees of solfège were not invented by Kodály, but by Sarah Ann Glover, an English music teacher in the 1800s, and popularized by John Curwen. These kinesthetic learning tools use a different hand symbol for each degree of solfège, and help students internalize the relationships and distances between pitches.

3. Kodály wrote a book with over three hundred solfege singing exercises in it!

The 333 Elementary Exercises are short, bite-size examples that are ideal for teaching sight-singing. The first examples in the book use only do and re, while the latest examples use extended pentatonic scales. Each section begins with simple rhythms (mostly quarter notes) and then expands into more difficult rhythms such as dotted rhythms. Kodály educators often follow these sequences in their classrooms, starting with simple songs that use only quarter notes and only two different degrees of solfège, slowly building up to pentatonic scales. Because the use of fa and ti involve half-steps, they tend to be the most difficult for children to hear and sing, and are traditionally taught last.

4. Kodály was a Doctor of Philosophy.

He studied at the Liszt Academy as a young man but also earned degrees in Hungarian and German and a doctorate in linguistics, all from the University of Hungary. Now there are many universities across the world that offer degrees in Music Education with a Kodály emphasis! Many colleges and universities in the United States also offer summer Kodály training programs—these programs are geared toward teachers of elementary music but are excellent for teachers and students in all musical areas.

5. Kodály’s statue faces the site of a former children’s playground.

His love of children and passion for music education prompted the city of Pécs, Hungary, to erect a statue facing a childrens’ playground so that he can forever oversee the children playing. This statue shows Kodály in his later years, thin and somewhat frail, but still deeply caring for the children of his country.

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