Connections On The Road

Following standing-room only presentations at the MTNA conference in Toronto in late March, I am hitting the road with the Connections road show, starting in Vancouver , British Columbia on April 16. (See www.christophernortonconnections.com or www.frederickharrismusic.com for a full tour listing)

The 8 repertoire books and 8 activities books that make up Connections are extremely useful new resource s for the would-be popular music piano player. The levelling runs in parallel with Celebration Series®, The Piano Odyssey®, the flagship series from Frederick Harris Music, and is suitable for 8 years of study, starting around year 3. A 10-year-old player could work their way through the entire series by the time they reach 18. It would be great to think that a player who starts the series at 10 years of age will still be playing at 18 — it’s a universal problem that students drop out around at age 12—14, often never to return to piano playing.

What is distinctive about Connections is the range of influences — apart from a classical piano education, I was keen on exploring a wide range of music as a young player ; among other works, I played the Bloch Piano Sonata, the Nielsen Piano Suite, Henk Bading’s 2nd sonata, Barber’s Piano Sonata and Prokofiev’s 9th sonata! As a fledgling composer, these works as well as those of Poulenc, Satie, Ravel, Debussy, and Bartok were major influences. Once I started to explore modern popular styles as a late teenager, I was instinctively drawn to Joe Sample, Weather Report, early Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis and, more recently, Lyall Mays and Jamie Cullum. Again, these influences have surfaced in Connections and the rich and diverse mixture of these and other composers have made for a unique brew of sounds and styles.

If you buy any Connections repertoire book you get a password which gives you access to performance tracks and backing tracks on the website, so you can hear the pieces I reference. To hear selected audio samples and view sample pages from the series, go to http://www.christophernortonconnections.com/samples.html

Here are some interesting reference points taken randomly from Connections 5:

Scamp — ragtime/Dixieland

Moonscape — Brian Eno, Joe Zawinul

A Summer Day — Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans (jazz waltz)

Sometimes it’ how I feel — Dvorak, Gershwin

A Folk Song — Kodaly

Tap Dance — Stephan Grappelli

Simple Pleasures — er, Grease…

It’s interesting for you to see what (digested) influences you can hear as you play pieces from Connections . The name gives it away — they are designed to connect in your mind with a variety of music styles. Each style has its own distinctive melodic features, chord progressions, and improv elements, many of which I hope to bring out in the live presentations.

See you on the tour!