Beth's Piano Studio
3790 Kersdale Place
Grove City, Ohio 43123
614-420-6367
bakloes@gmail.com
Featured Composer for November
Amy Beach
Amy Beach was an American composer and pianist at the end of the Romantic era. She was the first woman to succeed without European training.
She could sing forty songs accurately by the age of one, and started composing at the age of four, while staying with her grandfather who had no piano! She began lessons with her mother at the age of six and was giving public recitals featuring music of Beethoven, Chopin, and Handel as well as her own compositions at the age of sixteen.
As a young girl, Beach would ask her parents to play music based on a color. For Beach, each key may have had a certain color. She did not have a color for every major key, and could only associate color with two minor keys.
When she was eight, the family moved to a city near Boston, and were advised there to enroll Amy in a European conservatory, but decided to continue with local training. At the age of fourteen, she studied harmony and counterpoint for a short time, but this was her only formal instruction as a composer. She collected every book she could find on theory, composition, and orchestration. She taught herself after that.
Amy married at the age of eighteen with the agreement never to teach piano, and to limit performances to two public recitals a year with profits donated to charity. She continued to study and compose on her own. These restrictions were common at the time for married women.
After her husband died (he was 24 years older than Amy) she continued to compose and also began to perform again both in the United States and in Europe. Although known primarily as a composer, she always considered her herself to to be primarily a pianist.
Waltz
Polka
Minuet
Gavotte
Featured Composer for October
Aram Khatchaturian
The featured composer this month is Aram Ilyich Khatchaturian from the Contemporary era.
Khatchaturian lived in Russia during the 1900’s. He did not study music until he was 19. He is considered to be one of the most original contemporary composers, and is known for his unique style which includes energetic rhythms, rich melodies, and use of folk songs.
He wrote works for orchestra, brass band, voice, various instruments in small groups, theater, ballet, and piano. One of his best-known works is “Sabre Dance” from the ballet “Gayaneh”.
Most of his piano works are in two volumes “Album for Children”, and include some of his best-known piano pieces. “Adventures of Ivan”, is an eight-piece set witch tells about Ivan singing, being ill, going to a party, riding on a hobby horse, and other events in Ivan’s life. Two other well-known piano pieces are “Toccata” and “Sonatina”.
Ivan Sings (from “The Adventures of Ivan)
Little Leopard on a Swing
Ivan is Busy (from “The Advntures of Ivan)
On the Trampoline
Featured Composer for September
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria during the Classical era. He began studying keyboard when he was four years old, composing when he was five, and performing at the age of six. He had the ability to improvise in many styles and sight-read as well as an adult. He taught himself to play the violin and the organ as well.
His father was also a composer, and his sister, Nannerl, played the keyboard and composed as well.
Mozat wrote many keyboard pieces as well as sonatas for violin and keyboard, symphonies, and many great operas. Unlike any other composer in music history, he wrote in every medium of musical composition of that time and excelled in all of them.
Mozart had many financial difficulties and health problems and died at the age 35, leaving his final work, Requiem, unfinished.