Schools : Bartolomeo Cristofori, the piano inventor, resources

Bartolomeo Cristofori 1655-1731

https://upload.wikimedia.org/

You may have never heard of Bartolomeo Cristofori, but you definitely know his invention. 

Cristofori was an Italian musical instrument maker credited with inventing the pianoforte on the XVIII century.

Today, May 4, Google celebrates the 360th birthday of Bartolomeo Cristofori who has been widely credited for the invention of the piano

Google doodle Bartolomeo Cristofori

Doodler : Leon Hong

https://www.google.com/doodles/

• Google Doodle:

You know me. Love Google doodles. And Piano is one of my two Master degrees. I have a Master in Piano at High School of Arts (Portugal) and a Master in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Porto. 

What can I do? As a teacher who loves the piano, I can't miss to write about the creative Doodle, of course. 

Bartolomeo Cristofori 1655-1731

credits: Wiki Commons / LPLT)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/

On the blog dedicated to its doodles, Google wrote that one of Cristofori’s “biggest innovations was creating a hammer mechanism that struck the strings on a keyboard to create sound. The use of a hammer made it possible to produce softer or louder sounds depending upon how light or hard a player pressed on the keys”

The interactive Doodle highlights this breakthrough of being able to change the volume. 

“My favorite part of the doodle is the animation of Cristofori playing when the volume is set on forte. If I had more time I would have put even more bounce to his bottom. I hope people decide to do more research after playing with the doodle and learn more about him" 
Doodler Leon Hong

• What music is playing in the doodle ?

The melody is from Johann Sebastian Bach's Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring. It was important to have a piece that was from the same time period as Cristofori's life. 

Replica of 1690 oval spinet 

by Tony Chinnery and Kerstin Schwarz

https://upload.wikimedia.org/

• Some biographical notes:

Cristofori was born in Padua on May 4, 1655 in what was then the Republic of Venice.

A portrait of Ferdinando de' Medici with his musicians

credits: Getty Images

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/

At the age of 33 he was employed by Prince Ferdinando de Medici, son of the duke of Tuscany. Ferdinando, a lover and patron of music, was the son and heir of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Tuscany was at a time still a small independent state.

Ferdinando de Medici hired Cristofori to take care of his menagerie of musical instruments, and probably, because he’d heard that Cristofori was a pretty cracking inventor too.

The 1722 Cristofori piano 

in the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome

https://upload.wikimedia.org/

He is believed to have started work on what would become a piano in the 1690s and the first one is thought to have been made in 1709.

Prior to inventing the piano, Cristofori invented two other keyboard instruments. The first was a the spinettone, a kind of harpsichord. The second was the more original oval spinet, invented in 1690.

He called is invention a "gravicembalo col piano e forte" – a clavichord with soft and loud. The name was shortened to pianoforte and then simply piano.

"Un Arpicembalo di Bartolomeo Cristofori di nuova inventione, che fa' il piano, e il forte, a due registri principali unisoni, con fondo di cipresso senza rosa..."

Gran Piano, 1720

Bartolomeo Cristofori

The Metropolitain Museum of Art

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/

The very first pianos look quite different to modern instruments – there are no pedals, the keyboard is much shorter and the whole instrument is much smaller. If you heard one of these early pianos it would also sound very different – much quieter and much less resonant than a modern piano, such as a Steinway.

Considered the "great" among musical instruments, the piano has proved a key vehicle for the genius of Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Lizt and many other great piano composers.

However, the piano was not popular at first and many felt it was too difficult to play. Cristofori died largely uncelebrated for an invention that would later change the musical world in 1731 – a year before the first sheet music for the piano appeared.

Cristofori’s design was largely ignored in Italy, but it soon became known and adopted in Germany through articles in dictionaries of music.

No one is sure how many pianos Cristofori built, but today only three survive that were made by him personally. 

They were all built in the 1720s and are found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Google Cultural Institute or at the museum in New York City, at the Museo Strumenti Musicali in Rome, and at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of Leipzig University in Germany.

https://www.offstreetmusic.com/

Education:

As a teacher in Literature and former teacher in Piano, I must write about my favorite musical instrument. The piano.

Today I have a different sensibility looking to the world, no doubt.

I teached Piano at Voccational Music schools for ten years and at the same time teach Literature & ICT and Digital Literacy at official schools for more than 30 years.

I teached my students to love Literature and love Music at the same time in different curricula. Music and Literature are so similar.

True. Playing the piano is not easy but when we able to play piano is a wonderful experience. 

You must include the doodle of Cristofori into your school curriculum, Literature or Music, even better a cross-curricular project Music & Literature.

Let your younger students go on Google website and try playing the piano: forte, mezzo forte and piano or pianissimo. Awesome, isn't it? They will love to play!

Ask them if they know the melody? I f not, play Bach's piece on YouTube (must prepare your lesson in advance to have all the material you need).

"Birthdays are not only celebrations, they are milestones that offer a chance to look back and re-evaluate our past with the clarity of hindsight. Perhaps they can reveal where we may want to go next, or insights into why we are here, or maybe just help us ask better questions."

Christine Jowers

Hoping you will share this celebration with your students!  Piano students and other. 

And of course you could share with them the love of piano music, playing if you are a piano teacher or listening the great composers on their smartphones or tablets. 

Why not watching some videos of young pianists?

Remember the young pianist I wrote about some years ago, Jan Lisiecki? Now he is recording at the Deutsche Grammophon. Wow!

I know! First steps are always the hardest, with the piano as with anything else.

It takes time! Many hours studying every day. But at end it's a wonderful sensitive liberty when we are playing the piano.

Encourage the pianist inside your students and their cultural development. And don't forget to cross piano teaching with some good writers in Literature.

Finally, watch and listen this rare piano music lesson by Alfred Cortot:

Wow! Leaves us breathless. Such a beautiful piano lesson!

Alfred Cortot was 84 in this video. So this rare video was taken in 1961, a year before his death. He was a Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor. 

Alfred Cortot one of the most renowned 20th-century classical musicians, especially valued for his poetic insight into Romantic period piano works, particularly those of Chopin and Schumann.

My piano teacher studied with Cortot, and she introduced him to me about his writing notes about Chopin. His books were wonderful. Cortot wrote not just about technical ideas and exercises, but of inspiring suggestions as well. How to do exactly in playing the piano, music, literary connotations and other insights. 

Cortot helped me to touch the piano differently, feeling what I was playing, and not be discouraged by technical difficulties.

Hope you will be inspired with all of these digital resources and share them in your next piano lessons.

G-Souto

04.05.2015

Copyright © 2015-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com® 

Schools : Bartolomeo Cristofori, the piano inventor, resources by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Let's talk about Music at school, again!

Credits : © Mathias Bothor / DG

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/

...perhaps the most 'complete' pianist of his age...

BBC Music Magazine

Let's talk about Music in public education, once more. Music curriculum is not yet a major value in public schools. Oh! It's so wrong! Watch again the video Sir George Martin talking about Music in public schools Teaching Music.

"Music should be a very solid part of the education of young children."

Sir George Martin

I deeply agree with him. I was very lucky, because I could study both Music, and Literature and Sciences at school. Not at the same school, that's true. It was difficult to go from a public school to another public school (Arts) but I did it.

Later, I got my master in Piano at High School of Arts (Portugal) and my master in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Porto. 

And today, I have a different sensibility looking to the world, no doubt.

I could teach my students to love Literature and to love Music in the same curriculum, Humanities.

All along my teaching career, for thirty years, my students learned Languages and Literature and a bit of Music. In the classroom, we could hear classical music, jazz or pop, and understand how music can be integrated in school curriculum.

Of course, they were lucky, because to me it was easy to share my expertise in musical domain.

I had the joy to discover good musicians among my students. Today there are some good young musicians who were my students at the school.

Music, as you could read on some of my posts,  is a fundamental part of young people's education. 

When we are lucky and can study both, we can understand better  the importance of music in our life. Better it will be in some kids' life.  

Music can be a strong way for inclusion: Music as a social inclusion for kids.

I love all kinds of music, but today, and following Sir Georges Martin's talk, I would like to write about Classical Music in Education.

Visiting  Discovering this young pianist at Deutsch Grammophon website,  as i often do, I discovered the young pianist Jan Lisiecki.

How interesting could in the digital era to talk to my digital students about Jan Lisiecki. It could be a nice and fresh example to kids at Elementary and Secondary schools that love classical music and  love to play an instrument and can't.

Did you felt the enthusiasm of young students when we are talking about music in the classroom? Any kind of music. Pop or classical. No matter the curriculum. It depends from the learners we are teaching. 

Of course, it depends of us as teachers. Music goes in every curriculum. Some feel free to include music and some are not. They don't know nothing about music. It's rare a school teacher talking and teaching about humanities and music in the same curriculum.

We can discover some gifted students, then we talk with parents and if they can afford a musical education to their kids, there you have the chance to guide a little bit the the next generation of musicians.

Jan Lisiecki sitting near Glenn Gold's statue

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net

Having graduated from high school at age 15 in January 2011, Jan Lisiecki is studying for a Bachelor of Music at the Glenn Gould School of Music in Toronto on a full scholarship. 

Wow! Glenn Gould School! What an honour!

"The Glenn Gould School represents the highest standards in music education and is dedicated to nurturing its students so they reach the highest level possible."

Jan Lisiecki is now recording for Deutch Grammophon. Yuou can read his biography here

Awesome, isn't it? And let's hear this 16-year-old young man talking about himself and Music:

Wow! Love when he says "I am a normal kid"! Indeed he is! But a gifted young man who loves classical music.

Diapason describes Jan as "an unmannered virtuoso already with virile and, above all, irresistibly natural playing."

The BBC Music Magazine commended "Lisiecki’s mature musicality," and his "sensitively distilled" interpretation of the contrasting concerti, played "with sparkling technique as well as idiomatic pathos," noting that "even in a crowded CD catalogue, this refreshingly unhyped debut release is one to celebrate."

Can you believe it! All this about a young 16-year-old man!

Education:

Music has the potential to achieve social and psychological transformation of children and young people. Their sensibility will be accurate. 

We must never waste such an opportunity as teachers! Captivating the major interests of our students to Music.

Many teachers love Music and feel comfortable to speak about Music in the school curriculum.

Resources: 

The love of Music and those videos about Jan Lisiecki. And some CD as well.

Displaying the video below could be a good approach to understand the feelings of some of your students about classical music. 

I'm sure you will discover some gifted kids. You can guide them to continue to study Music in Higher Education. 

16-year-old pianist Jan Lisiecki in this interview, speaks about the uniqueness of the piano and explains why he likes to practice early in the morning watching the sunrise outside his window. What a better example? 

Some thoughts: 

All of your programs must be customized to meet specific classroom and curricular requirements, but also enrich students experience. 

For example, start by choosing the subject areas such as Core Curriculum (Language, Science, Music, Media Literacy) and of course a Media Art | Music project.

Music Art| Project in Vocational education: Based on the curricular strand to be focused on in conjunction with students needs and any other specific classroom requirements, the art form and a specially trained LTTA (Learning Trough the Arts) are selected. LTTA artits must work in partnership with you the teachers to develop customized arts-infused lesson plans.

Sequence of LTTA Activities 1)

• Teachers select a subject focus;

• Teachers and artists create units linking an arts activity to 8-10 facts or concepts from the regulated curriculum;

• Teachers attend artist-led workshops to develop artistic tools;

• Each artist educator visits the classroom at least four times over a six-week periode;

• While the artist leads a classroom activity, teachers observe how individual students respond, and internalize new skills through active participation;

• Teachers and artists then complete learning profiles of each student;

• Teachers carry on activities between artist visit;

• Teachers and artists evaluate each other's performance, and comment on the effectiveness of the lesson plan in fostering student engagement and learning

Of course, this would be the perfect Vocational curriculum. 

But, if it is not possible, you can contact the Conservatory of Music in your town or a Music School and ask for an artist or musician, a Music teacher or a music student to increase cultural education of your students. 

Who knows if you will discover a gifted kid, a new musician among your students? A new young pianist, perhaps?

This would be the perfect (idealistic, I know) school education! Artists and teachers working together for the complete education of children.

By the way, Jan Lisiecki debut album with Mozart's Piano Concertos Nºs 20 & 21 will be available this spring. 

Your students can follow him on Facebook. He is very active, love to share his concerts, and much more.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/

I am completely fascinated by this young pianist! Why following Justin Bieber if they have Jan Lisiecki to follow? A good question for your students ?

"Young people can learn from my example that something can come for nothing. What I have become is the result of my  hard efforts."

Franz Joseph Haydn

G-Souto

19.03.2012

Copyright © 2012G-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com®

Let's talk about Music at school, again! by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

References:

Jan Lisiecki site

http://www.janlisiecki.com/Jan_Lisiecki.html

Learning Trought the Arts | Canada1)

http://www.ltta.ca/program_description.html 

Deutsch Grammophon on Facebook and Twitter
http://www.facebook.com/deutschegrammophon
http://www.twitter.com/dgclassics