Advice please on how to write a piano concerto


Scanning the search terms that bring new readers to An Overgrown Path is an education in itself. Every day old chestnuts such as 'Pierre Boulez gay' and 'Petroc Trelawny awful' deliver fresh visitors. And in addition there are the one-off searches, such as this morning's from a university IP address for the term 'How to write a piano concerto'. Rather appropriately Ask.com sent the would-be composer to a post about a John Cage Piano Concerto and the visitor spent forty minutes on my site, so all was not lost. But I suspect the searcher may not have experienced the Eureka! moment they were looking for. So any advice from readers on how to write a piano concerto will be gratefully received and shared. But let's leave the Pierre Boulez query to John Drummond.

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Comments

Nathan Shirley said…
How to write a piano concerto. That's a fairly easy subject to sum up in a few words...

There are 99 ways to skin a cat, and more to write a piano concerto.

One method- begin with two piano parts, one for the solo piano and the other as a piano reduction of the orchestra to be exploded (orchestrated) later. Treat the orchestral piano part as a very rough guide only, as you orchestrate you can fine tune/add details.

How's that? It could almost be a twitter post!

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