Recommended Reading

Club meetings and events are often an opportunity to share information about books and other resources which members might find useful.

A few items of interest that were recommended are:

From Alton Chan

The Great Pianists ( From Mozart to the present) by Harold C. Schonberg.

The Pianists Guide To Pedalling By Joseph Banowetz.

From Ann Grayburn

The House of Music by Kadiatu Kanneh- Mason.

A fascinating insight into this family, the lives of these amazing musicians, their background and what it takes to become a professional musician. 

From Mark Ware

Here’s a few I enjoyed and would recommend any of them

Piano-specific

  • The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self by William Westney – most “how-to” books don’t work for me, but this is in a different class
  • Speaking the Piano, Susan Tomes. (Plus I liked two of her other books: Out of Silence: A Pianist’s Yearbook, and Sleeping in Temples. Some might also like her The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces, but it didn’t do a lot for me)
  • Playing the Piano for Pleasure: The Classic Guide to Improving Skills through Practice and Discipline by Charles Cooke – old-fashioned but still worth reading
  • Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music by James Rhodes – I suppose more of a misery-lit memoir than anything, but focussed on how playing the piano saved his sanity
  • Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures by Noah Adams
  • Play It Again, by Alan Rusbridger – brilliant account of an average Grade-8-ish amateur learning (and then performaing) the Chopin G Minor Ballade (oh, and doing a few other things at the same time, like editing the Guardian through one of its most stressful moments!). I suspect most members will already have read it or know about it, but it’s hard to imagine any amateur pianist not loving this one
  • The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier, by Thad Carhart 

Music more generally

  • The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross – only my favourite ever book about music! (His follow-up book, Listen to This, is also good but not a patch on The Rest is Noise)
  • Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet by Edward Dusinberre – I suspect this is more interesting if you’ve ever played in a string quartet and/or have a particular thing about Beethoven quartets, but it’s very well written