Georgian composer, teacher, conductor, and musicologist Otar Taktakishvili (1924–1989) played a leading role in the revival of Georgian art music in the second half of the 20th century. Despite his multiple duties and close relationship with the USSR regime, Taktakishvili consistently wrote music based on Georgian traditional folk music, hence imprinting and preserving the national Georgian identity through his compositions. These nationalistic influences appear prominently in several of his piano suites and are ubiquitous in the Piano Suite written in 1973. In the Piano Suite (1973), Taktakishvili adapts and recreates the sonorities, registers, coloristic effects through textural layering and articulations, rhythmic patterns and performance practices of selected Georgian folk instruments at the piano. He creates a unified suite by evoking the sound characteristics of his national instruments. The Piano Suite is unique and likely the only suite in the piano literature based on the imitation of a group of folk instruments, and as such deserves a place in the scholarly literature on world piano music. An analysis of the pianistic resources used by Taktakishvili to imitate the unique musical qualities and performance practices of five popular Georgian folk instruments reveals a reliance on repetitive rhythmic figures, textural layering, imaginative articulation, and deft use of the registers of the piano. The composer also distinctively implements characteristic modes and harmonic language to evoke the flavor of Georgian folk music.

Johann Gottfried Eckard was a self-trained composer and keyboardist studying with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Versuch while he lived in Augsburg. Eckard traveled to Paris with the keyboard instrument builder, Johann Andreas Stein, in 1758 and settled in France for the rest of his life. Eckard only composed eight keyboard sonatas and a set of variations on the Menuet d’Exaudet. He published his works during the transitional period from harpsichord to fortepiano. The eight keyboard sonatas incorporated variations of musical styles which included Italian sonata, galant, and empfindsamer stil. His keyboard sonatas influenced his contemporaries including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Schobert. Eckard was one of the early fortepiano composers in France and tried to promote the new instrument, but wrote in the Foreword of six sonatas (op.1), that they were suitable for the harpsichord, the clavichord, and the fortepiano. The six sonatas of op.1 were published in 1763, two years after fortepiano was advertised for sale in the local newspaper. In 1768, the fortepiano was used in a public concert for the first time in Paris. In the aspect of performance practice, both harpsichord and fortepiano used juxtapose during the transitional period, even though the music would sound better on the fortepiano especially the slow movements in Eckard’s sonatas. The early stage of French fortepiano building was influenced by German keyboard instrument builders. In addition to building harpsichords, French builders, Taskin and Goermann, also started building fortepianos. Eckard was highly respected as both a composer and a performer from music critics in his time.

I detta arbete kombineras mina erfarenheter av producentrollen med mitt intresse för synthar och ljuddesign och jag har gått på djupet i hur man kan använda detta vid skapandet av popmusik.  Syftet med examensarbetet är att få en djupare förståelse på keyboardsounds/stämmor och deras musikaliska funktioner. I arbetet analyserar jag ”Dunka Dumma Hjärta Dunka”, en låt producerad av Anton Engdahl, för att producera två poplåtar på svenska utifrån demos.  Jag har analyserat referenslåten och tagit ut exempel på hur keyboardsounds/stämmor kan användas och hur de låter i relation till resten av ljudbilden. Jag har dokumenterat och redogjort för keyboardsounden/stämmorna och resterande musikaliska element i produktionerna samt länkat till ljudfiler för att tydligare demonstrera vägen från demo till klingande resultat.  De exempel jag har utgått ifrån har gett olika resultat i de två olika produktionerna ”Släppa Allt” och ”Ta Din Skit”. Att följa exemplen strikt fungerade bra i den första men ledde till inspirationsbrist i den andra. I stället fick jag i den andra produktionen ta en annan väg och i processen skapades andra keyboardsounds/stämmor än de i exemplen. Detta är positivt då jag lärt mig mycket om keyboardsounds/stämmor och deras musikaliska funktioner att ta med mig i mitt framtida musikskapande.

For keyboardists, touch is a paradox. It refers to the physical actions that constitute performance, yet to be “touched” by music is also to consider the immaterial relationship between performance and our psychology. In this dissertation, Touch and Modernity in French Keyboard Pedagogy, 1715–1915, I explore this dual notion of touch, deciphering how performers, teachers, analysts, and critics described the keyboard as a unique interface between body and mind. I track the notion of touch through an undertheorized corpus of instruction manuals for harpsichordists and pianists written in France between 1715 and 1915. The authors of these manuals outline several strikingly flexible theories of touch, described as some combination of action, sense, and metaphor. They use touch to construe the keyboardist as a modern ideal, dedicating their pedagogical programs to “newness,” configured to varying degrees as edification through rationalization, social development through institution building and urbanization, industrialization, culminating in the themes of alienation and solipsism. The musicians who wrote and used these manuals found unlikely interlocutors across a diverse field of thinkers. These interlocutors included philosophers and encyclopedists, bureaucrats, technologists, anthropologists, anatomists, psychologists, and others. Venturing explanations for the body’s relationship to sensory impressions, aesthetic judgments, and knowledge acquisition, these figures joined music pedagogues, using the keyboard and its various iterations—from instruments to telegraphs and typewriters—as a grounding object for touch. They delineated the stakes of an array of ideologies, positing an artistic, intuitive, discerning, or efficient touch as a benchmark by which to calibrate their modern subject, idealized as inhabiting an interface between historicity and progress. Their definitions for touch shuttle between public and private spheres, the exterior world and the interior psyche, the self and the other. This dissertation’s methodology treats four broad topics as lenses through which we discern modern modes of theorizing, deriving, and disseminating knowledge through touch. These include sensibility, or the condition for subjective knowledge; empiricism, or knowledge by way of experience; physiology, or knowledge acquisition through study of the interaction between mind and body; and psychology, or the potential for variable knowledge based on perception and attention. I argue that, animated by the aforementioned topics, touch enacts a dialectic of musical “work”—connoting preparatory labor, polished performance, and an object for contemplation and analysis—through which keyboardists came to represent modern subjectivity more broadly, the concept for which concretized over the course of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Touch thus affords a unique framework which we may use to study historical definitions of selfhood, denoting the materials, practices, and ethics of experiencing our bodies and articulating our relationship to culture and society.

Many research projects have been conducted to compare standing text entry with nomadic text entry. Other research projects have compared the input types of touchscreen and physical keyboards while texting. There is few literature that compares the two inputs types during a standing and nomadic text entry. This research was conducted to investigate the differences in error rate and characters per minute for both input types during both text entry conditions. To investigate these differences two devices were used, the iPhone 4 and the Blackberry Curve 9350, to type a phrase during both a standing and walking condition. Both characters per minute and error rate were analyzed. The investigation showed that there were no significant difference in error rate, but there was a significant difference in characters per minute. The touchscreen keyboard performed better in terms of characters per minutes and arguably performed better in accuracy.

No description available.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1994. / Includes tables. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Harold F. Abeles. Dissertation Committee: Lenore M. Pogonowski. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-104).

Treatise (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI.

The keyboard works of the English virginalist Peter Philips have been little studied in comparison with his more famous contemporaries, William Byrd, John Bull and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. While Philips left comparatively fewer keyboard works than these composers, his music contains very unique attributes. This study compiles the latest research of Philips' life as well as an analysis of representative works showing many of the individual and uncommon features to be found in Philips' works for keyboard. Pieces from all genres of Philips' keyboard output are represented and discussed, including Pavanes and Galliards, Fantasias and Intabulations of madrigals. Musical examples of each of these works are provided. A description of the instruments needed for the performance of the music and an illustration of the rare type of keyboard instrument required in the Pavana and Galliarda Dolorosa is included. A discussion of Philips' style, particularly regarding ornamentation, is included with a comparison to the works of his contemporaries.

This presentation demonstrates the significance both historically and aesthetically of the obscure Portuguese composer Carlos Seixas, (1704-1742), to the development of the keyboard sonata during the transitional period between the Baroque and Classic eras. The relationship between Seixas and his better-known colleague Domenico Scarlatti is explored and particular musical styles and techniques generally assumed as innovations of the latter composer are shown to exist in keyboard works of Seixas which probably pre-date those of Scarlatti. Thematically-related multi-movement sonatas and structural techniques anticipating the ternary single-movement sonata design are illustrated in several of Seixas1 sonatas. In addition to the recorded performance of selected sonatas by Seixas, this dissertation includes three tape recordings of selected piano works by J. S. Bach, Barber, Beethoven, Chopin, Franck, Prokofieff, and Scriabin.