Celebrate Piano! Lesson and Musicianship (2B).(Book Review)

Celebrate Piano! Lesson and Musicianship 2B is the fourth of six books in this series encompassing the first years of study. The book is designed to prepare very young students for the study of classical literature.

The presentations and activities in this book touch on many essential elements of musicianship including intervals and related singing exercises, rhythm exercises and games, technique, transposition, major triads, listening skills, musical terms and form and concise study suggestions for many of the pieces. Each element is put into action in a short piece clearly designed to highlight the new issue; there are twenty-six elementary pieces in the eighty pages of the book. These pieces also have optional notated accompaniments that are available separately from the book on your choice of CD or MIDI recordings; also available separately is a correlated set of flash cards.

A strong point of Lessons and Musicianship 2B deals with musical form. In four of the six units, the student is given effective introduction to parallel and contrasting answers, ostinato, D.C. al Fine, introduction and coda. Three presentations dealing with phrases include composition exercises asking the student to complete a given answer to the opening phrase. If this is part of an overall plan of the course, it would certainly ...