Product Description

This reference book is an invaluable resource for teachers, students and performers for evaluating and selecting piano solo literature. Concise and thoroughly researched, thousands of works, from the Baroque through the Contemporary periods, have been graded and evaluated in detail. Includes an alphabetical list of composers, explanations of works and much more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182957 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 584 pages

Customer Reviews

Advanced Literature not Included, otherwise recommended
I agree, the one thing lacking in this otherwise comprehensive manual is the advanced literature. No Chopin Etudes or Liszt Rhapsodies, here. Overall a good resource for the piano teacher. This one's for the pedagogues like me.

Excellent Source
This is an outstanding source book for the piano teacher. I have to respond to earlier reviewers in criticizing the collection because it contains only elementary music. If someone purchases this guide thinking they are going to have a list of elementary piano repertoire, they will be very disappointed. The book contains standard teaching literature that is considered elementary through early advanced. Magrath even titles the book "Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature". The term "standard teaching and performance literature" implies that this is not a source of advanced literature. Although, for the average piano student in the United States, this source will cover literature that would be appropriate for them through high school (except for the very precocious). Each piece or collection is given a level of difficulty number, a brief synopsis and the publisher is listed. If you are a piano teacher, you will welcome many of the obscure or forgotten pieces that are classified in the book. There are many excellent teaching pieces that are not normally seen in the best selling collections.

Excellent for certain applications.
This book would be particularly useful for piano teachers or for adult students of piano who are trying to expand their repertoire. It would be less useful for an advanced pianist (which I am not), as the rating scale is too simplistic and many well-known, but very difficult, works are not included.

There is a great selection of pieces from both well-known and very obscure composers, and includes virtually every significant teaching piece that one might think of. Each piece is graded in difficulty from 1-10. The grading is not as detailed as that used by Wolters, where each piece is given a separate grade for both technical and musical difficulty, but the grading is quite accurate and helpful in selecting pieces that you can actually play, if you're not a top-notch pianist. The biggest advantage of this book over other piano repertoire books is the very extensive coverage of twentieth-century music, including even some pieces for prepared piano, so it's a good place to look for some new stuff to play to annoy your friends and neighbors.

A minor weakness of the book is the lack of headings at the top of each page, which makes it sometimes irritating to use as a reference, since you may have to page forward or backwards several pages to figure out where you are in the alphabetical listing of composers. The typesetting and page layout make it look a bit amateurish, although it is carefully edited and doesn't contain a lot of typographical errors.