Instrumental Duet Instrumental Duet,Piano - Level 5 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.534483

Composed by Germaine Tailleferre. 20th Century,Concert,Standards. Score and parts. 65 pages. Musik Fabrik Music Publishing #3534799. Published by Musik Fabrik Music Publishing (A0.534483).

This work was written in the first months of 1942 while Tailleferre was living in Grasse, in the socolled
« Free Zone » of occupied France during the Second World War and was completed just as
Tailleferre was forced to flee France with her daughter. As the wife of Jean Lageat, who had been the
secretary of the French socialist Léon Blum during the « Front Populaire » period just before the War
and who was at that time in the US working against the Vichy Government, and as someone who was
not unvocal about her political views, this could not have been a comfortable situation. Tailleferre left a
record of what she experienced during this period in an article written for the American music journal «
Modern Music » which she wrote shortly after arriving in America in the Spring of 1942 :
« Notwithstanding their staunch spirit of resistence, the people under German rule today are
increasingly bowed down under their burdens. By achieving the physical decline of the French, the
Nazis hope that spiritual collapse will ensue. However, after two years of quasi-famine, France remains
pround and great, although the necessity of liberation grows daily more urgent.....For an artist to work
under these conditions is almost impossible. The mere effort of subsisting wastes time and absorbs
energy ; The means to work are also lacking.....Musical composition is made practically impossible
through lack of music paper. For more than a year, I sought in vain to find paper in Lyon, Marseilles
and Nice on which to copy an orchestral score...Two years of experience under German rule have
taught me that all expressions of pride, dignity, spirit , aspiration of the human will can be made only
claudestinely. It is a historical truth that the human mind makes its greatest progress under freedom ».
Under such circumstances, it is a miracle that this work exists at all. The three movement work was
dedicated to the famous Marguerite Long, for whom Tailleferre had already written several short works
for piano solo, and François Lang, a pianist who was closely linked with the Group des Six and who
had performed in the première of the 1934 Concerto Grosso for Two Pianos, 8 Solo Voices, Saxophone
Quartet and Orchestra and for whom Tailleferre wrote two cadenzas for concerti by Mozart and Haydn.
The work opens with sunny, optimistism in a mood similar to the opening movement of the Concerto
Grosso, but quickly the mood changes to more dramatic themes. The second movement seems to
subjectively express a rupture with the past and a tragic melancholy. The final third movement is
extremely dramatic and almost frightening with it’s force.
When Tailleferre left France in the Spring of 1942, having been warned by a neighbor that she was
going to be arrested if she didn’t leave immediately, she left the score in a two-piano version, probably
due to the fact that there was no music paper to be had to copy the score. When she returned to France
in 1946, she learned that François Lang had been deported to Auschwitz where he died. Musical life in
France had been completely changed by the War years. Tailleferre put the work aside and forgot about
it, perhaps wanting to forget the hardships that she had lived through and the loss of many of her friends
associated with these years.
Tailleferre's version for two pianos is published by Musik Fabrik and the work may be performed in
that version. It is clear however, that the work was intended to be orchestrated and the editors hope that
the present orchestration will allow the work to finally be presented as Tailleferre conceived during
some of the darkest years of the Twentieth century.

2 Pianos,4 Hands,Piano Duet - Level 5 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.1175185

By Paul Posnak & Anita Castiglione. By George Gershwin. Arranged by Paul Posnak. 20th Century,Classical,Jazz,Standards. Score. 10 pages. Paul Posnak #775326. Published by Paul Posnak (A0.1175185).

Arrangement for 2 pianos, 4 hands of Swanee by George Gershwin.


Foreword by the arranger:

George Gershwin, since his days as a teenage song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley, loved the medium of two pianos. A consummate improviser with a harmonically sophisticated, jazz-influenced,
orchestral approach to the treatment of melody, he was born into the great age of touring duo piano teams, such as Bauer and Gabrilowitsch, Josef and Rhosina Levine, Luboshutz and Nemenoff, and Gershwin's favorite team, Arden and Ohman. Gershwin loved the multi-voiced orchestral color, power and range of two pianists playing and improvising together. In his first major show written with brother Ira, the 1924 Lady Be Good, he incorporated the renowned team of Phil Ohman and Victor Arden into the musical theater pit orchestra, not only to add to the orchestra's sound and rhythmic drive, but also to play during breaks in the action and during Intermission. They even played encores! This successful formula was repeated for the 1926 show, Oh, Kay, and for the 1927 show, Funny Face.
Gershwin's own bravura improvisations on his songs sound, even to the trained ear, like two pianos. I have transcribed (and digitally re-recorded) a number of these improvisations note-for-note from the old LP-remastered 78 rpm records and radio broadcasts. I have tried to capture his own two-fisted orchestral keyboard style: his love of inner voices, contrapuntal runs, jazz figurations, sophisticated chordal textures, and swing.
These arrangements resulted from my appearance in 2003 as one of two soloists in several all-Gershwin concerts with The National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Marvin Hamlisch. Marvin suggested that I also play a couple of my Gershwin improvisation transcriptions, and we thought it would be a perfect touch for Lorin Hollander, the other soloist, and me to play a short two-piano piece. I was surprised to find very few two-piano arrangements of Gershwin's songs. I became inspired to fill this void in the duo piano repertoire. It is my hope that these settings will offer a worthy challenge and musical reward for intermediate and advanced piano students and amateurs, and a unique addition to the duo piano literature for professional pianists and duo piano teams the world over.

Paul Posnak.

Instrumental Duet,Keyboard - Level 4 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.1497857

Composed by Jenni Roditi. 21st Century,Classical,Contemporary. 19 pages. Jenni Roditi #1074269. Published by Jenni Roditi (A0.1497857).

Piano Duo 2 pianos/4 hands. Encircle, Between the Octaves, originally called rotate as its impetus was to generate a steadily rotating music. Encircle was later chosen as a more evocative word. The harmony surprised me as it suggested shifts and colourations that I would not have expected to conjure. Two upper rotating parts with melodic narrative are supported by bass and baritone lower parts. The final section adds a dance-like short form to end what could otherwise have run and run and run. 

Names of all the movements in the suite Between the Octaves in the right order are Initiate, Surrender, Thread, Curve, Encircle, Ritualise, Ignite. The whole suite follows a long line from movement 1 to movement 7. However, individual pieces are well suited to be played alone too. Piano Duo is ideally two Steinway grands, otherwise, whatever is available. An enjoyment of the tensions and relationships generated between the two instruments: grand-upright, upright-electronic keyboard is to be explored as a positive. Each piece creates its own world in the suite and can be part of smaller subgroups taken from the suite, in any combination, but the order of the pieces needs to be maintained if more than one is played. 

Here is a taste of the background to the musical world of this 53 minute compositional suite. During a reflective time I read the following: The whole philosophy of dharma art (Buddhist art) is that you don't try to be artistic, but you just approach objects as they are, and the message comes through automatically. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, from 'True Perception The Path of Dharma Art.' Shambhala 2008, p.133.) The 'objects as they are' became the 'octaves as they are'. As the pieces were composed the octaves had a centring and clarifying role that allowed other material to circulate around or play against them. They acted as pivots, repetitions, drones, ostinati, pointillist nodes, pedals, melodic features, struts, harmonic turnpikes, breathing spaces, bass lines: musical imperatives. The octaves called the musical shots most of the time. When the music pulled a semitone up or down and away from the octaves (as it did quite often) it was especially telling in the context of the ringing spaces the octaves were creating. I became interested in the subtle dislocation that two pianos could provide. By dislocation I mean a degree of tension between the natural acoustics of the two instruments in the room and the players idiosyncrasies as musicians.  The whole point of this work was to examine the nature of my syntax, grammar, and compositional thinking. The title demanded one thing above all: what notes am I going to use between these octaves?? My choice of notes was derived in most instances from the tempo, pitch, and rhythm of the initial octaves at the beginning of each piece alongside the individual word titles that I set out to explore as musical images. The audio was developed from Sibelius software, via MIDI to Logic samples of a Steinway grand piano.