Jonathan Still, ballet pianist
Music, dance, IT, trivia. Not necessarily in that order.
Posts about the work of ballet pianists—including stuff that might not seem immediately related (like historical dance, character, musicology, and so on)
As I’ve already mentioned in posts about the difficulties of playing slow threes (like mazurkas and polonaises), where you can end up accidentally thinking in six-count units instead of eight-bar…
About once a year, I buy a Fry’s Turkish Delight bar, a slab of faintly fragrant sugary pink jelly covered in chocolate. It has no nutritional value, no crunch, no…
You sit at the piano, and watch the teacher address the class, rattling off directions, her hands a blur as she marks movements with her hands at 8x fast forward…
The moment I see a teacher marking a pirouette that has a massive, sweeping balancé in it, I know there’s trouble ahead. Like the dreaded 2/4 sissonne of yesterday’s post,…
A short but apposite entry today, because I’m off to record a whole bunch of examples of exactly what this post is about: music for that kind of sissonne exercise…
The music that is harder to find than a black swan Let’s start with a few facts. Although this solo, and the Black Swan pas de deux that it comes…