Piano Music of Africa now available

There is wonderful news from Oxford University Press: A new anthology of piano music by composers of Africa and the African Diaspora is becoming available over the next few months. The anthology is edited by Dr. William Chapman Nyaho, who has been featured on this blog before. He deserves great credit for the important work of collecting and presenting such a valuable resource. As far as I know, I don't think there has ever been a serious resource for African piano music until now. I thank William Zick for alerting my attention to this project.

The first two volumes are available for order now from OUP's US site through a current promotion. There will be a total of five volumes that are graded from early-intermediate to advanced levels. I think that this offering will be a timely and tremendous addition to the contemporary piano repertory for both teachers and students. The fact that there are offerings at the early-intermediate and intermediate levels confirms that Nyaho and OUP are intent on a wide reception of these works.

I'll be ordering my copies this week!

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Life Moves Quickly Sometimes

Things have been pretty slow here at the Cincinnati Pianist blog for some time. I thought I'd throw a bone to my readers with the following update.

Recently it has been problematic for me to do any posting because my own computer has a bad video card and I have needed to use it only in "safe" mode (and only in 16-bit color, which is taking me back to the mid-90's!) My usual dedicated "blog browser" is Opera, but it won't work for me in 16-bit safe mode. But it turns out that I have some deeper hardware problems and will need to replace the poor machine entirely. So I am avoiding committing much more material to the blog until I get the new machine.

How about some good personal news? I have just been offered an adjunct teaching position at CCM in the CMT division (Composition, Musicology, and Theory). The course I will be teaching is a survey of chamber music literature for graduate students, many of whom are pursuing a cognate minor in chamber music. I have done this class once before in 2005 but gave it up after one quarter because I was still pretty burned out on academic life at that point. (I graduated with my doctorate in 2004 after a seven-year slog through the curriculum!)

But it's been a couple of years now; life has moved on, and it's now the right time to get back into academia with this opportunity. Usually this class has been taught by a musicology professor (rather than a performance professor) so the CMT division is showing considerable faith in my academic and classroom skills by offering it to someone who is mainly a performer and private lessons teacher. I am looking forward to improving and streamlining the coursework this time around. The good thing is that my performance schedule will be solely local for a few months, which will allow me a decent amount of time for preparation and research. UC is just down the street from me, so there's really no commuting issue either.

The bad news is that this new part-time job will take even more energy away from blogging here, but I am planning on continuing to post at least once (maybe twice) a week in the new year. Since I will be teaching the history and repertoire of the string quartet first, it will be nice to come back to writing keyboard-oriented material on off-days.

I'll be back soon with new material. Happy Holidays to all!

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Computer Issues

I am having some serious problems with my computer right now that are totally cramping my style. Blogging will need to wait for a little while.

While I try to get the system repaired I will continue posting student schedules from another machine.

Wish me luck...

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