A no-frills how-to manual for piano.
Kim, a faculty member at the Michigan State University’s Community Music School, teaches the basics of the piano in this debut guide.
Many people would love to know how to play piano but are intimidated by the instrument’s numerous, unmarked keys and the opacity of its sheet music. The author seeks to demystify both in this book, which covers the basics of the piano’s layout and musical notation for aspiring ivory-ticklers. After starting with an explanation of the keys and their scales, Kim goes on to take readers through the concepts of basic rhythm, finger numbering, time signatures, pitch, and intervals. She also explains the various symbols that one might encounter in piano sheet music, as well as the major and minor chords. The book is set up so that a student may take an active role, both by practicing the songs and by answering questions by filling in blanks included in the book. Each section ends with playing suggestions, short quizzes, and a simple musical selection that demonstrates a specific lesson. Readers will be pleasantly surprised at how quickly they’re able to try their hands at classic compositions, such as “Ode to Joy,” “Jingle Bells,” “Brother John,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Silent Night.” The author wastes no time on pleasantries, diving into the information without so much as an introduction, and overall, she writes in a simple, direct prose, generally using as few words as possible. There are occasional typos (“That is called as The Grand Staff”), but they don’t hinder comprehension, particularly as there’s relatively little text. This work is bare-bones, covering exactly what the reader needs to know and not a sentence more. For this reason, Kim manages to fit a large amount of information into this relatively thin work. Her pedagogical style may not be a perfect fit for all learners, but aspiring players seeking to teach themselves directly from the page couldn’t find more straightforward instruction.
A no-frills how-to manual for piano.Pub Date: March 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4787-8461-6
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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