Education Publications, Penelope Roskell: The Complete Pianist

More than fifteen years in the making, The Complete Pianist: from healthy technique to natural artistry is a new and ground-breaking textbook from Penelope Roskell, offering a unique approach to piano playing. Roskell shares a lifetime of teaching and performing experience, as well as her in depth research into healthy piano playing.

The Complete Pianist

The Complete Pianist is a comprehensive guide to piano playing, containing over five-hundred pages of text, and links to three-hundred video examples and two-hundred exercises newly devised by the author. The book has something new to offer to all pianists and keyboard players – student and teacher, professional and amateur. Particularly useful for teachers, with much of the material in the book designed for teachers to use and share with their students.

Roskell guides pianists through the early stages of learning a piece, through all the technical challenges and interpretative choices, towards inspired performance. Each new aspect of playing is addressed through a series of practical exercises which proceed, step-by-step, from the basics towards more advanced applications. Penelope demonstrates all the musical and technical points herself in videos accessible by smartphone, tablet or computer.

The book comprises twenty-two sections, including a whole-body approach, finger touch and tone production, playing at speed, fundamentals of chord playing, advanced chords, rotation, lateral movements, tone and texture, pedalling, learning, memorizing and sight-reading. Roskell hopes that with this book she will help pianists of all abilities to progress technically with safe technique. With good technique comes the ability to interpret pieces in more depth, with more confidence, improved sound and freedom to express music more beautifully.

Penelope Roskell

Penelope Roskell has performed in major concerts in over thirty different countries. She is Professor of Piano Pedagogy at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. With over forty years of teaching experience, she is the leading UK specialist in healthy piano playing and holds a clinic for patients with tension or injuries in her role as Piano Advisor to the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine. She has researched a range of different techniques to improve healthy piano playing including osteopathy, yoga, Alexander Technique, tai chi, and the Feldenkraus method.

Through her many years of teaching experience, Penelope noticed that the same problems were reoccurring with her students. These issues included physical tension, weakness, and lack of co-ordination, all of which can lead to other issues including a uniform, dull and harsh sound, performance anxiety and a seeming lack of musical conviction. Through this book Roskell hopes to help students and teachers with these issues, to find solutions for developing their artistic skill, as well as preventing injury.

Watch the video below to hear from Penelope Roskell on her new book.