Masterworks Series

You have to realize how crazy the world was piano for a while.

Before 1900, no radio, television, cars, recording equipment or electricity, What else is there to do more than listen to someone play the piano?

If you lived in a city that could have had the opportunity to hear a orchestra, but not very often. Most people with experience of listening to classical music by a pianist or a small ensemble playing a wide variety of music symphonic prepared for different groups.

Many composers, Liszt, including earned a living arranging Beethoven symphonies for everything from a piano solo a string quartet, all to open the insatiable public appetite for live performance of the latest masterpieces.

And these actions took place in your living room if they were suitably rich enough to take time and resources to educate their children. The music was played by family, friends, and any person who could carry a tune, and was willing to participate.

General competence music were much higher than now, for music was one of the few activities that are respected and adored middle and upper classes. Most people could read music, or at least had the rudiments of the included in their education.

A young woman was not considered properly "turned" unless she could play the piano or sing creditably. It was a mark of social distinction, to entertain others with music.

A concert of the orchestra was an important event for the public. The ultra-rich, at the time of Beethoven, maintained their own private orchestras, but soon became too expensive, even for the rich.

And so it went on piano, and became synonymous with the musical, as it were, for the orchestra. Virtuosos like Liszt and Chopin fills that need that music plays in the complex accessible, omnipresent piano.

And the public need fed a culture among the musicians, who, of course, made livings creating, playing and organizing the masterpieces and humble works of all kinds. So their skills are passed on to their sons and daughters, and the musical culture grew with each generation in 1900. Then came several events that almost single-handedly destroyed the momentum of this musical revolution known as the Golden Age of Piano.

First came the automobile gave mobility to America at the turn century. They wanted to stay home with a piano, when you could be whizzing by on the road in his Model T?

Then came the gramophone, or record player, fully developed by around 1918. That alone will minimize the need for piano and pianists, although scattered recordings of many great artists early (Gabrilowitsch, Paderewski, etc.) that otherwise would be missed.

Then came the radio in 1926, the year he discovered how to mass-produce.

That was the death knell for the piano, now the Americans were addicted to the idea of issuing entertainment machines. Perhaps it was just the enthusiasm of machinery and equipment that swept America at the time.

From then on it was downhill, and even radio and television promised as a first step to broaden the culture of piano, which were, in fact, in the 1950s singing its swan song.

In the 1970s the golden age of piano had disappeared and the digital age was just around the corner.

Are we better off?

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2008 Walden Pond Press All rights Reserved

John Aschenbrenner is an Emmy Award Winning Composer and a leading children’s music educator, book publisher, and the author of numerous fun piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER for kids.

You can see the PIANO BY NUMBER series at http://www.pianoiseasy.com and http://www.pianoiseasy2.com

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