Piano Music | Composers

☎️ +44 (0) 7454766539
📮 contact@pianolessons-london.co.uk

🏆 LinkedIn
👍 Facebook Page
☀️ Twitter profile
📷 Instagram
📸 Flickr Profile

📖 POEM: BLEST PAIR OF SIRENS

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,
Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Vers,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierce,
And to our high-rais'd phantasie present,
That undisturbed Song of pure concent,
Ay sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
To Him that sits theron,
With Saintly shout, and solemn Jubily,
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,
And the Cherubick host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,
Hyms devout and holy Psalms,
Singing everlastingly;
that we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise. …

John Milton
From AT A SOLEMN MUSICK

📖 POEM: THE COMPOSER

All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.

From Life to Art by painstaking adaption,
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.

Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;

You alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out yoour forgiveness like a wine.

W. H. Auden

📖 POEM: MUSIC
For D.D.S. (Dmitri D. Shostakovitch)

A flame burns within her, miraculously,
While you look, her edges crystallize.
She alone will draw near and speak to me
When others are afraid to meet my eyes.
She was with me even in my grave
When the last of my friends turned away,
And she sang like the first storm heaven gave,
Or as if flowers were having their say.

Anna Akhmatova

📖 POEM: TO MUSIC

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
Feeling for whom? O you transformation of feelings into what? - into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out, -
holy departure:
when the innermost point is us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Rainer Maria Rilke

📖 POEM: (MUSIC)

Take me by the hand;
it's so easy for you, Angel,
for you are the road
even while being immobile.

You see, I'm scared no one
here will look for me again;
I couldn't make use of
whatever was given,

so they abandoned me.
At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.

Rainer Maria Rilke

📖 POEM: From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in the silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Below, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter mailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind -
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

Rainer Maria Rilke

📖 POEM: From ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefor, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

John Keats

📖 POEM: SONG

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountains tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing.
To his music, plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.

Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and greif of heart
Fall asleep, or, hearing, die.

John Fletcher

📖 "Wenn unsere edle Tonkunst trotz allem Unfuge, der mit ihr getrieben wird, nicht aufhört, erhebend and beseligend zu wirken, so beweist sie ihre tiefe und ewige Herrlichkeit. Mit der Liebe ist es auch nicht anders!"
Ferdinand Hiller, in Carl Reinecke's Aus dem Reich der Töne (1907)

📖 "Ich kann den Geist der Musik nicht anders fassen, als in der Liebe."
Richard Wagner, in Carl Reinecke's Aus dem Reich der Töne (1907)

📖 "Die Musik ist die herrschende Kunst der Gegenwart; nicht nur, daß dieselbe in den weiteren Kreisen Eingang gewonnen hat, man erkennt in ihr zugleich einen wichtigen Teil der Erziehung, und ein erhöhtes und gründlicheres Interesse an der Tonkunst gilt als eine nicht abzuweisende Forderung für den Gebildeten."
Franz Brendel, in Carl Reinecke's Aus dem Reich der Töne (1907)

📖 "Die Musik ist eine schöne, herrliche Gabe Gottes und ein Vorbild und Gleichnis der himmlischen Musik, wie die heiligen Engel Gottes mit dem ganzen himmlischen Heer ihren Schöpfer in einer lieblichen Harmonie stetig ohn' Unterlaß rühmen und preisen und das Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sebaoth singen."
Michael Praetorius (German composer, organist and theorist, 1571-1621)
In: Carl Reinecke's Aus dem Reich der Töne (1907)

📖 "Wie ist doch die Musik so etwas Wunderbares, wie wenig vermag doch der Mensch ihre tiefen Geheimnisse zu ergründen! - Aber wohnt sie nicht in der Brust des Menschen selbst und erfüllt sein Inneres so mit ihren holdseligen Erscheinungen, daß sein ganzer Sinn sich ihnen zuwendet und ein neues, verklärtes Leben ihn schon hienieden dem Drange der niederdrückenden Dual des Irdischen entreißt?"
ETA Hoffmann in Carl Reinecke's Aus dem Reich der Töne (1907)

Discover & Learn & Play Piano Music / List of Composers

This list of composers is in alphabetical order. It is, of course, not at all the complete curriculum and includes only some of the repertoire used in piano lessons and performances. Click on the composers' names to get to the individual pages.

📖 "You must become acquainted by degrees with all the principal works of the important masters."
Although:
📖 "We should need to live a hundred lives just to become acquainted with all the good works that exist."
Robert Schumann Advice to Young Musicians

🎹 Anthologies of Easier Piano Pieces

🎹 Anthologies of Relaxing Music

🎹 Isaac Albeniz

🎹 Louis Auber

🎹 George Auric

🎹 Anton Arensky

🎹 Thomas Arne

🎹 Thomas Attwood

🎹 Johann Sebastian Bach

🎹 Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

🎹 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

🎹 Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach