There are certain habits of piano practice which are ingrained in us from an early age and which have become a form of “piano dogma”. As a young piano student we may accept these practices without question, trusting in our

NetEase Cloud Music is a freemium music streaming service publically launched in 2013. Its music service has attracted over 800 million registered users, and its principle aim, according to a spokesperson, is to “actively fulfill our responsibilities to promote the

The composer, conductor and educator Bernhard Sekles (1872-1934) caused a minor scandal in 1928. Sekles was director of the Hoch Conservatory of Music in Frankfurt am Main, and he decided to put Jazz on the curriculum. The courses in the

This atmospheric piece for solo piano, whose Afrikaans subtitle ‘Wind oor die Branders’ translates as Wind over the Waves, is by Richard Pantcheff, a British composer, born in 1959. It comes from ‘Nocturnus’, a suite of six pieces written for

The best teachers want to be made redundant – that is, they aim to make their students confident, independent musicians. In other words, they want to encourage autonomy in their students. As a teacher, perhaps the simplest way to encourage

For years, film and television producers and writers have been using classical music to make their work more memorable. It should come as no surprise that some of our earliest memories of classical music might be from the cartoons we

The title of this article is a quote from Robert Schumann’s ‘Advice to Young Musicians’, a cornucopia of practical advice and poetic words of wisdom for young people beginning their musical education, which still has plenty of relevance for musicians

What’s your “guilty pleasure music”? That is, music or a composer that you’d rather keep quiet about in case your highbrow, classical music-loving friends look down on you. Mine is Philip Glass – although I don’t feel remotely embarrassed about