Terry Winter Owens

Piano

Notes from the composer:

Our wonderful piano is the most versatile of all the musical instruments. People have called it the King or Queen of the instruments. On the piano, we can play melody and harmony all at the same time! Not only do we have 88 keys but we can play ten or more notes at once; we can play very quietly or very loudly; we can make many different tone colors from "warm" to "tinkling" to "thundering", to name but a few. We can make overtones, glissandi and tone clusters. We can blur notes or make them clearly separated. We can make short or long staccatos and singing legatos. We can do one thing with the right hand and quite another with the left. With the damper pedal and the sostenuto pedal, we can make notes continue to ring out for a long time.

With only a single instrument, ten fingers and three pedals, you can create a whole universe of sounds and play some of the most beautiful music ever composed. The piano is so beloved that many composers have devoted their lives to composing music for it. All the music of all the composers is called the piano repertoire. The piano repertoire is probably larger than the repertoire for any other instrument - so we will never run out of wonderful music to play.

Other instruments do not have the versatility of the piano. Most of them play only one note at a time and usually within a limited range of two to three octaves. But each instrument has a particularly beautiful tone color and various possibilities of expression. The combination of instruments playing together in chamber ensembles or in the symphony orchestra gives us an another exciting repertoire. If only there was enough time, many of us would learn to play many other instruments. But the piano alone keeps us very busy, doesn't it?

So, here are some serenades for the piano that try to remind us of the sounds and styles and timbres of some of the other instruments.