Keyboard Instruments: The Instruments, the Music, the Musicians

Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1981. First Edition. Hard Cover. 4to 0714821772 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright titling on spine. No ownership marks.128 pages clean and tight. 128 pages (32 in full colour, 96 in two colours) 150 illustrations. Though threatened by video machines and expensive stereo equipment, the piano remains the most popular piece of musical furniture in the Western World. KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS is for all those who gave up too soon and regretted it; those who never started and wished they had; and those who discovered keyboard music through concerts or recordings and would like to know more. The book is divided into three parts: The Instruments, The Music and The Performers. Part I, a largely visual section, analyses the three families of keyboard instruments, plucked, struck and blown. Part II covers the repertoire of the instruments over 500 years, in eleven detailed essays, such as 'The English Virginalists' and 'The Romantic Spirit'. Part III lists the hundred most significant performers whom readers are likely to encounter on disc, on radio or in the concert-hall, together with particular points of their playing to listen out for and the fields in which they excel, with particular reference to disc - Alfred Brendel's playing of Schubert, for example. The keyboard instrument is sufficient unto itself; it needs no accompaniment, serving as a one-man orchestra when necessary. It is equally' at home with a Bach chorale, a Strauss waltz or a honky-tonk blues. In the same way, KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS is the indispensable accompaniment for all music lovers who wish for a clear and reliable understanding of the instruments, the men and women who play them, and of the music which they play. Clive Unger-Hamilton was, for many years, a concert harpsichordist before he turned to writing about music. His publications include The Music Makers, a biographical encyclopedia of musicians,, and Royal Collection, an anthology of music composed by members of the British Royal Family. He broadcasts frequently on musical subjects, and has just completed editing an encyclopedia of theatre, The Entertainers. .