A Natural History of the Piano Quotes

“Oscar is our Liszt and Bill Evans is our Chopin,”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians - from Mozart to Jazz and Everything in Between

“Recent breakthroughs in the field of neuro-science have shown that playing the piano is good for your brain. Dr. Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School spoke in 2009 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on the brain’s “plasticity”—its capacity to change—and announced that even nine- to eleven-year-old musicians show more brain activity than nonmusicians when performing tasks that require high levels of perceptual discrimination. Playing the piano, it turns out, is especially effective in enhancing skills in such important areas as pattern recognition and memory. To your health!”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

“They include conceptual artist and “environmental music” composer Annea Lockwood, who created a work entitled Piano Burning. Debuted in London in 1968, it requires the performer to select an upright piano in disrepair, put it in an open space with the lid closed, and set it on fire with a twist of paper doused in lighter fluid. (Optional balloons may be stapled to the piano.) “Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can,” she suggests. To which any responsible writer would add, please do not try this at home.”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

“As Victorian-era prudishness set in, some upstanding citizens also took to putting coverlets over the instrument’s legs out of an exaggerated sense of modesty.”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

“The handful of leading craftsmen turning out pianos during that time produced only around thirty to fifty of them per annum. But by 1798, piano maker James Shudi Broadwood could barely keep up with demand, writing to a wholesaler, “Would to God we could make them like muffins!”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

“Alkan even wrote a piece for four feet, called Bombardo-Carillon, in which the player’s legs are likely to get entangled during performance. (When Swiss-American pianist Rudolph Ganz was asked to perform Bombardo-Carillon with a female pianist, he declined on the grounds that he didn’t know her well enough.)”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

“Peterson revealed that he had decided the only way to get attention was “to frighten the hell out of everybody pianistically.”
― Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians--from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between