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OneSearch is Ball State Libraries' integrated discovery tool for books, scores, articles, recordings, and other library materials. It also indexes selected trustworthy online resources and incorporates subscription databases such as Academic Search Complete. On the Libraries' home page, you will see a simple search box:
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After searching for your topic, you may find more resources than you need. You can narrow your results by using the filters listed to the left of the search results. For both physical and online books owned by Ball State University Libraries, check "Library Catalog." For physical books, the location (Music Collection) and call number (beginning with "M") indicate the books' location in Bracken Library. To specify online books (ebooks) only, check "eBook Full Text Online." Some eBooks require log in with Ball State University authentication to view the book. |
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Classification and Call Numbers
The Music Collection at University Libraries uses Library of Congress Classification, or LCC, for organizing books and scores on the shelves. This system, maintained by the national library of the United States and utilized by libraries across the country and around the world, groups together items on similar subjects. Each item is then assigned a unique call number which combines alphabetical and numerical characters. These features are designed to make browsing library collections easier for users and librarians alike. Tip: Enter the first part of a call number into OneSearch to see all items in a given section.
Call Numbers for Piano Research:
ML 385 - 429 Biography
ML 397 Pianists (collective)
ML 410 Composers
ML 417 Pianists (individual)
ML 424 Manufacturers of instruments
ML 650 - 747 History and criticism. Piano
ML 650 General works
ML 652 - 697 Construction and repair
ML 700 - 747 Music and playing
ML 1070 Player piano and similar instruments
ML 3530 Ragtime music
MT 68 Improvisation. Accompaniment. Transposition
MT 220 - 258 Instrumental techniques. Piano
MT 220 General works
MT 221 Physiology of the hand
MT 222 Systems and methods
MT 225 - 240 Studies and exercises
MT 239 Performance of popular music
MT 745 - 758 Instrumental techniques for children. Keyboard instruments
MT 950 Music to accompany instruction in ballet, folk dancing, gymnastics, etc.
Recommended Books
The recommended books below represent a wide sampling of topics related to the piano and include histories, biographies, and studies into performance and repertoire. Perhaps one or more of these topics will inspire your next research project. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Hover over the info icon to see a description.
Reflections from the Keyboard: The World of the Concert Pianist by
A thoroughly revised collection of interviews with some of today's best known pianists, such as Claudio Arrau, Emmanuel Ax, Alfred Brendel, Misha Dichter, Ruth Laredo, Murray Perahia, Peter Serkin, and Andre Watts, along with past greats like Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz. Dubal interviews each pianist on matters of technique, performance, and interpretation.
Call Number: ML397 .D82 1997Publication Date: 1997
From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland by
It's difficult to imagine Franz Liszt performing in Peoria, but his contemporary and foremost rival, Sigismund Thalberg, did just that. During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans in more than a hundred cities--from Portland, Maine to Dubuque, Iowa to Mobile, Alabama--were treated to performances by some of Europe's most celebrated pianists. From Paris to Peoria deftly chronicles the visits of five of these pianists to the America of Mark Twain. Whether performing in small railroad towns throughout the Midwest or in gold-rush era California, these five charismatic pianists--Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubinstein, and Hans von Bulow--introduced many Americans to the delights of the concert hall. With humor and insight, R. Allen Lott describes the glamour and the drudgery of the touring life, the transformation of American audiences from boisterous to reverent, and the establishment of the piano recital as a viable artistic and financial enterprise. Lott also explores the creative and sometimes outlandish publicity techniques of managers seeking to capitalize on prosperous but uncharted American markets. The result of extensive archival research, From Paris to Peoria is richly illustrated with concert programs, handbills, caricatures, and maps. A companion website, www.rallenlott.info, includes a comprehensive list of repertoires and itineraries, audio music examples, and transcriptions of selected primary sources. Certain to delight pianists, musicologists, and historians, From Paris to Peoria is an engaging, thoroughly researched, and often funny account of music and culture in nineteenth-century America.
Call Number: ML397 .L78 2003Publication Date: 2003
Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847; The Weimar Years, 1848-1861; The Final Years, 1861-1886 by
Franz Liszt–child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, co-founder with Chopin and Schumann of the Romantic movement in music–has been the subject of literally hundreds of biographies, but it is only in the last few decades that the importance of Liszt the composer, as opposed to Liszt the Romantic hero, has been recognized. This new perspective has created the need for a fresh, full-scale approach, biographical and critical, to the evaluation of the man and his music. For more than ten years Alan Walker, a leading authority on nineteenth-century music and the author of important studies of Chopin and Schumann, has traveled throughout Europe discovering unpublished material in museums and private collections, in the parish registries of tiny villages in Austria and Hungary, and in major archives in Weimar and Budapest, seeking out new information and corroborating or correcting the old. He has left virtually no source unexamined–from the hundreds of contemporary biographies (many of them more fiction than fact) to the scores of memoirs, reminisces, and diaries of his pupils and disciples (the list of his students from his Weimar masterclasses reads like a Burke’s Peerage of pianists). Dr. Walker’s efforts have culminated in a study that will stand as definitive for years to come. A feat of impeccable scholarship, it also displays a strong and compelling narrative impulse and a profound understanding of the complicated man Liszt was.
Call Number: ML410.L7 W27 1983 V.1-3Publication Date: 1997
The Evolution of Mozart's Pianistic Style by
Mario R. Mercado explains Mozart's pivotal involvement in the profound transformation of keyboard practice in the late eighteenth century as the piano supplanted the harpsichord and the keyboard instrument exchanged its former continuo role for a new solo role. After an intriguing look at Mozart's extraordinary childhood filled with the singular experiences and opportunities that helped form his early career, Mercado examines Mozart's early piano works and the new pianistic idioms that shaped their style. Paying particular attention to the Concerto in E-flat Major K. 271, written in 1777, which in its new level of keyboard virtuosity represents a decisive advance in pianistic style, Mercado then scrutinizes the piano genres the composer cultivated during his early maturity the solo sonata and ensemble sonata as well as smaller solo works and the concerto. With his last two piano concertos and a group of small solo works from the final decade of his life, Mozart took the forms of his era to their limit, creating a musical transition to the nineteenth century.
Call Number: ML410.M9 M553 1992Publication Date: 1992
Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon by
Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.
Call Number: ML417.S4 S87 2021Publication Date: 2021
Piano-Playing Revisited: What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments by
A guide to how historical instruments influenced the composers of keyboard music, and a way to look at their scores with fresh eyes and ears. Today's pianists are expected to play music of three centuries on a single instrument: Steinway's design from the late 1800s. Other types of pianos, such as Mozart's Walter or Chopin's Pleyel, are increasingly being copied or restored, but they are played almost exclusively by specialists in "Historical Performance." David Breitman has been introducing Oberlin Conservatory students to historical keyboards since 1991, and in this book he focuses on the music he cares about most deeply and the problems he has found most perplexing. He begins by acknowledging the dilemma of confronting historical repertoire with modern instruments, then shows how to apply insights from period instruments to practical problems on any piano, including the relationship between melody and accompaniment and the use of the pedal. The central portion of the book discusses the pianos and piano music of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, as well as the special place of the clavichord in eighteenth-century keyboard culture. A wide range of musical examples demonstrates how composers were influenced by the instruments they knew, and how that understanding can help today's performers. The book concludes with a passionate plea for individual creativity and autonomy, authentic voices for our own time.
Call Number: ML650 .B69 2021Publication Date: 2021
The Cambridge Companion to the Piano by
This collection of specially commissioned essays offers an accessible introduction to the history of the piano, performance styles, and its vast repertoire. Part 1 reviews the evolution of the piano, from its earliest forms up to the most recent developments, including the acoustics of the instrument. Part 2 explores the varied repertory in its social and stylistic contexts, including contemporary music, with a final chapter on jazz, blues and ragtime. The Companion also contains a glossary of important terms and will be a valuable source for the piano performer, student and enthusiast.
Call Number: ML650 .C3 1998Publication Date: 1998
A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--From Mozart to Modern Jazz, and Everything In Between by
A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff--pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization--unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna's coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.
Call Number: ML650 .I83 2011Publication Date: 2011
After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Print and eBook) by
Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists' improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. Pianists will find food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. Audiences will encounter a vivid account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly during them. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.
Call Number: ML700 .H26 2008 and EBSCOhost EbooksPublication Date: 2007
The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age by
The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy. Students of Olivier Messiaen such as Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey sought to create a cooperative committed to exploring the evolution of timbre in time as a basis for the musical experience. In The Spectral Piano, Marilyn Nonken shows how the spectral attitude was influenced by developments in technology but also continued a tradition of performative and compositional virtuosity. Nonken explores shared fascinations with the musical experience, which united spectralists with their Romantic and early Modern predecessors. Examining Murail's Territoires de l'oubli, Jonathan Harvey's Tombeau de Messiaen, Joshua Fineberg's Veils, and Edmund Campion's A Complete Wealth of Time, she reveals how spectral concerns relate not only to the past but also to contemporary developments in philosophical aesthetics.
Call Number: ML707 .N66 2014Publication Date: 2014
The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier by
An essential resource for scholars and performers, this study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, in comparative and reciprocal context. Howat explores the musical language and artistic ethos of this repertoire, juxtaposing structural analysis with editorial and performing issues. He also relates his four composers historically and stylistically to such predecessors as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, the French harpsichord school, and Russian and Spanish music. Challenging long-held assumptions about performance practice, Howat elucidates the rhythmic vitality and invention inherent in French music. In granting Fauré and Chabrier equal consideration with Debussy and Ravel, he redresses a historic imbalance and reshapes our perceptions of this entire musical tradition. Outstanding historical documentation and analysis are supported by Howat's direct references to performing traditions shaped by the composers themselves. The book balances accessibility with scholarly and analytic rigor, combining a lifetime's scholarship with practical experience of teaching and the concert platform.
Call Number: ML724 .H69 2009Publication Date: 2009
Playing Beyond the Notes: A Pianist's Guide to Musical Interpretation by
Playing Beyond the Notes: A Pianist's Guide to Musical Interpretation demystifies the vague and complex concept of musical interpretation in Western tonal piano music by boiling it down to basic principles in an accessible writing style. Its intended audience is performing pianists, independent piano teachers, and piano pedagogy students, and the over 200 repertoire excerpts in the book cover the intermediate to advanced piano literature. Rather than dealing with issues pertaining to performance practice, specific composers, or genres, this book focuses solely on musical interpretation. Each chapter tackles a different interpretive principle, explaining clearly, for example, how to play effective ornaments and rubatos or how to understand transitional sections of pieces. The author supplies a helpful checklist of questions at the end of each chapter. The book aims to help pianists understand concrete ways to apply interpretive concepts to their own playing and to give teachers practical ways to teach interpretation to their students. The book is supplemented by a companion website that hosts over 100 audio recordings to enhance the reader's experience.
Call Number: MT220 .S62 2013Publication Date: 2013
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.