Re: What's this jazz about the modes?

In article <f8uoj1t0jgv1ln207h1smr17disria1qnt@xxxxxxx>, ¤ Alias <.@.> wrote:
>On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:01:07 GMT, "Matthew Fields" <spam@xxxxxxx>
>wrote:
>
>>Yes, pedagogy provides its own biases. This is why Bartok is so important
>>to pianists, for instance.
>
>Hi, Matt.
>Could you expand upon this idea for the benefit of myself? It seems
>like you have a valuable idea here, but me, being a guitarist and a
>novice Classical pianist, am very curious (not to mention 'in the
>dark' ) as to what exactly you are pointing to here. I'm open minded
>and do not quite understand why Bela Bartok is so important to
>pianists,given the context of the discussion.
>
>Thanks much,
>¤ Alias

The masterwork of Bartok's that is most known to pianists is his
Mikrokosmos, a widely varied collection of pieces arranged into 6
books which he judged progressively more and more difficult for the
player. They explore complex shifting rhythms, polytonality, inversion
canons, tritone poles, weird pitch collections, all sorts of things.
Many people consider them very approachable, both for the student
and the listener. So they have supplemented the obbligatory easy
pieces by Bach and Haydn as part of the regular teaching repertoire
for classical pianists. As a result, budding pianists since Bartok's
time grow up much more flexible and adaptable to new styles and
patterns than they would have otherwise, I think.





--
Matthew H. Fields http://www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/
.