This page contains links to just about everything I’ve written on this site, as well as articles, recordings, sheet music and recording projects elsewhere that I’ve written or been involved in.
Annual Advent calendar
For almost 10 years since 2005, I blogged every day during advent on a topic that’s something to do with dance, music, and in one case, IT. Here you can see those calendars as a page of links. Every year I want to do another one, every year, life takes over.
- Advent 2005 – the first one, where I pay tribute to the people who taught me to play for class
- Advent 2006 – a follow up to 2005: the music that I associate with those people and why
- Advent 2007 – Studio series 4 (a CD of ballet class music I made) – the pianist’s commentary
- Advent 2008 – Anecdotes from a life behind a ballet-piano.
- Advent 2009 – Musical surprises in the ballet repertoire – my personal favourite
- Advent 2010 – A year off.
- Advent 2011– My top IT tips for everyday computer users
- Advent 2012 – Playing for ballet class, tips for pianists
- Advent 2013 – Christmas Carols for Ballet Class (free music downloads)
- Advent 2014 – Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist
- A year of Ballet Playing Cards: not advent, but a year’s project starting in January 2015
Lists of non-advent articles
- 100 (32!) tips for working with ballet pianists (for dance teachers)
- Interesting musical things about The Nutcracker
- 30 days without a supermarket – one of my favourite challenges
- Multi-tasking – why thinking that you or others can do it is bad for the world
- Metre and rhythm: links to posts on these topics. This is also now the page you’ll get to if you try and get to my old pages about these topics on my previous site.
- A page of waltz-related posts. There’s more to waltzes for ballet class than meets the eye. 10 years of pondering about the waltz.
Articles elsewhere
- December 2021 (online) The Politics of Musical Time in the Everyday Life of Ballet Dancers. In M. Doffman, E. Payne, & T. Young (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190947279-e-20 [subscription/institutional access required]
- May 2021 “Ballet and Music” in Ballet: The essential guide to technique and practice. Marlborough, UK, Crowood Press, pp. 178-187.
- Still, J. (2017). Mobile, fluid and relational: Towards a musicology of everyday musical experience in the ballet world. Il Corpo Nel Suono, 1, 111–121 [publication related to the 2017 Il corpo nel suono conference in Rome]
- Still, J. (2017). Tia DeNora. 2013. Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life. [Book review] Current Musicology, 101(2017).
- Still, J. (2015). How Down is a Downbeat? Feeling Meter and Gravity in Music and Dance. Empirical Musicology Review, 10(1–2), 121–134. See also the review commentaries on the article in the same issue— by Robert Hatten “Up within down,” and Arnie Cox “Disanalogies Between Physical Space and Metaphoric Musical Space: Response to Jonathan Still’s Essay.”
- Still, J. (2008) ‘The Vocabulary of Metre [review of Stephanie Jordan’s Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a century). Dance Now Vol. 17 No. 2 pp. 93-95.
- Still, J. (2006) Review of ‘Sound Moves Conference at University of Roehampton. Dance Now. Vol. 15 No. 1.
Still, J. (2004) Review of Dancing/Listening. Dance Now Vol. 13 No. 2 (Summer) 2004, pp. 63-64. - Still, J. (2001) Can I have the wrong music please? Dance Gazette Issue 2, pp. 36-39. [I’ve uploaded this article on this site, together with a commentary showing how my thinking on a lot of it has changed in the last 18 years)
Between 2000-2014 I also contributed several articles and columns to Dance Gazette about music, one or two about IT and dance as well.
Interviews or articles I’ve contributed to
- 2017: “Key insights: Interview with the pianists“—An interview with me and colleague Richard Norriss about playing for the Royal Academy of Dance’s Genée International Ballet Competition. Originally published in the programme for the 2017 Lisbon competition.
- 2016: “Don’t shoot the pianist” by Amanda Gray for Dance Gazette. Inside this article is a love-letter from me to Ljubjlana and the wonderful teachers and pianists there.
- Playing the Barre, by Marcy Adair, in Steinway’s Listen magazine. This article is based a lot on an interview with me about music and ballet classes.
Musical scores: (Compiler, typesetter and editor)
2017: RAD Discovering Repertoire
2015: RAD Advanced 1 and 2 Male
2015: Typesetting of all musical examples for Mullally, R. (2015). The Brussels basse danse book: a critical edition. Binsted, Hampshire: Dance Books.
2014: RAD Grades 4-5
2013: Editing and typesetting of the score (1 piano reduction, and original score for two pianos) of The Green Table, in Guest, A. H. (2013). The Green Table: The Labanotation Score, Text, Photographs, and Music. Routledge.
2013: RAD Advanced Foundation, Advanced 1 and 2 Female
2012: RAD Grades 1-3
2011: Intermediate Foundation and Intermediate London: RAD
2009 Pre-Primary in Dance and Primary in Dance. London: RAD
2009 Solo Seal [music book] London: RAD.
2005 A Dance Class Anthology: The Royal Academy of Dance Guide to Ballet Class Accompaniment. London: RAD. [I also wrote the introductory article on pages 2-21]
2005 Alternative Music for Grades 1-5 [printed music & audio CDs]. London: Royal Academy of Dance. [now obsolete/out of print]
2005 Music in Focus: A Guide to the Alternative Music for Grades 1-3 and Grades 4-5. London: Royal Academy of Dance [now obsolete/out of print,
Note about Music in Focus:
As of 14/4/2020 the links above will still bring up the pdfs of the guidebooks, but that may not last forever. There are things in the guidebooks that I would do differently now, 15 years down the line, and obviously the product to which the books refer are now obsolete. However, there is a wealth of information in them about ballet repertoire that is handy to have, and a short guide to rhythm and meter as well at the end of each one that some teachers have told me they found useful.
Apart from these, I also edited and re-typeset Grade 7, Grade 8, but I’m not sure when.
Audio CDs
For RAD CDs, see the music section on the RAD Enterprises website.
2017: (executive producer & performer) Discovering Repertoire, levels 2, 3 & 4 (RAD)
2014: (executive producer/arranger/performer) Grades 4-5. London: RAD
2014: Volume 2 of music for Little Magic Train (with Andrew Holdsworth)
2013: (executive producer, arranger, compiler, with the band “Radost,” and Valerie Sunderland) Music for Character, Grades 1-3. [one of my favourite projects]
2013: (executive/producer/arranger/performer) Advanced Foundation, Advanced 1 and 2 Female
2012: (executive producer/arranger/performer) Grades 1-3. London: RAD.
2011: (performer) Intermediate Foundation and Intermediate London: RAD
2009: (performer and executive producer) After Class Vol. 2: London: RAD
2009: (performer) Studio Series Intuition Vol. 6 London: RAD.
2008 (performer) Studio Series Intuition Vol. 5. London: RAD.
2008 (performer and executive producer) After Class
2006: Studio Series Intuition Vol 4. London RAD
2006: (performer) Music for RAD Grade 8
2005: Studio Series Intuition Vol. 3. London: RAD
2003: Music for Little Magic Train children’s dance classes (with Daniel Jones)
1999: Studio Series Intuition: Volume 1. London: RAD
1998: Cassette to accompany Woytek Lowski’s book The Art of Teaching Classical Ballet. The cassette is out of print now, but the book was reprinted in 2016.
1996: The Best of Jonathan Still (cassette, out of print, JHB Music, Berlin)
1993: Bravo Bassoon (accompanying bassoonist Daniel Smith)
Edited books
2004 (ed) Revealing MacMillan (conference proceedings). London: Royal Academy of Dance