Comparitive Essay: Young Girls at the Piano & the Piano Lesson

The piano, created by Bartolomeo Christofori in 1709, has impacted our society by becoming a popular instrument and a popular medium for musicians to create musical masterpieces. Also called the pianoforte, the piano is one of the most beautiful sounding instruments that can range in sound from as low as a gust of wind, to as high as the shrill sound of a bird. It has evolved over time and become an amazing instrument. The piano was accepted very well in history and it has generated many changes in the music industry. The piano was also used a lot in society and has had many applications grow from it. Without it, many classical masterpieces as well as modern songs wouldn’t have been possible.

Hopkins, A. (2012). Protest and Rock n' Roll During the Vietnam War. Student Pulse, 4(11).

This journal is about the musical piece composed by a man named Benjamin Britten titled The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This piece was surprisingly interesting to me as it created different feelings of emotions through the instruments volume, sync, and rhythm. I do like various instrumental styles of music, however, I was hesitant about listening to a classical style orchestra. Throughout the piece it seemed the sounds would constantly change, which reminded me of the early black and white cartoons that relied on classical style music to show the emotions they were trying to make the audience feel. For example, I remember a scene from an episode of the old cartoon Popeye, when there was fast paced instrumental music in the background while Popeye was saving Olive Oyl from a dangerous situation and they both were running to get to safety. The xylophone from Bitten’s composition is what made me think of that exact episode of Popeye and Olive Oly running to get to safety.

Many people have come across a time in their life where any action or event from the past comes back to haunt them in their present life. This past event either affects their future actions in a negative or positive way. A play in which a character must contend with an aspect from the past is, The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. In August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Bernice Charles, struggles with embracing her family’s history of enslavement and oppression. She does this by deciding to keep the family’s heirloom, the piano, but yet denies its presence. She also decides to move up north from the south and away from her family’s history with her Uncle Doaker and daughter Maretha, again proving that she wants nothing to do with her past. Later on in the play, Bernice and her brother Boy Willie encounter Mr.Sutter 's ghost. Bernice decides to go against her idea of never touching the piano and plays it for the first time since the death of her parents. With the support of their ancestors they successfully fight back the ghost and Bernice realizes it 's a mistake to avoid or run away from her past. The actions taken by Bernice at the end of the play reveal that despite their past anyone is capable of embracing and moving on from their past in a way that will help them benefit their future actions positively.

In The Piano Lesson, the central symbol of the play is the 137-year-old piano, an object that incarnates the family history. A gift purchased through the exchange for slaves, it originally exemplifies the interchangeability of person and object under the system of slavery. This traffic in flesh reaffirms a white kinship network at the expense of black ones (Johny, 2005) (Image, 42). The piano bears the marks of generations of both racial oppression and sexist gender ideology.

Can a treasured object of the past serve as a teacher for the future? Once people share the historical significance of it, an object can symbolize the overcoming of hardships of those lives in which it becomes a part. Therefore, it may indeed “instruct” future generations to glean wisdom from the past. August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson centers on the trials and triumphs of a family affected by the enslaving of their ancestors and by current racial prejudice. An embellished piano, which bears the carved images of their enslaved ancestors accounts for the conflict that the Charles’ face. The Charles’ siblings inherit the piano from their mother, widowed upon the murder of her

In Player Piano, everything is controlled by machines and computers and depends on productivity. The managers and engineers only create new programs for more productive production. Even the rates of production and consumption are calculated by a computer (EPICAC), which is seated in the large Carlsbad cavern system. The EPICAC computer even determines the people's careers and in this way their whole lives. It gives intelligence tests to everyone, and on the basis of their results it sorts people into two categories - suitable for university entering exams and suitable for 'work'. The university studies allow their graduates to become managers, engineers, writers or public relation workers. You may become a writer only if

‘The Pianist’ is a cinematic masterpiece by the Polish director Roman Polanski. One of the key ideas that appear throughout much of the film is that of ‘hope being instrumental in our survival’. This idea is portrayed through Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish pianist, as he struggles for survival in Warsaw as everybody that he once knew and everything that he once had is lost. The idea of ‘hope being instrumental in our survival’ is worth learning about as it allows the audience to realise the importance of hope in todays society – and to understand how Polanski uses music to symbolise ‘hope’ for Szpilman in the film. Polanski effectively utilises an array of visual and oral text features such as music, dialogue, and lighting to build further

Winner of multiple awards such as the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, August Wilson is known most for his forceful cultural plays. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wilson was born to a white father that later abandoned his family, and a black mother. Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade after being accused of plagiarism. Wilson after went to public libraries and read various books; this was an initiation for Wilson and his successful future. When Wilson first started writing he didn’t think he was able to write his own works because of such great writers before him. “Quote black literature criticism”. However

What should one do with their legacy, and how should it be put to use? In the play “The Piano Lesson”, the Charles' family faces this question, and struggles to find the answer. The family’s legacy is in the form of a piano. On the piano are carvings of their ancestors. The two main characters that are having a conflict over the piano are Berniece and Boy Willie. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano so he can add the proceeds of the sale to the proceeds of selling watermelon’s and buy some land from “Sutter”. Berniece doesn’t want to sell the piano because it holds the memories and blood that stains its wood (Gale, 2000, p255). She refuses to play the piano and keeps its history from her daughter in fear of calling up the spirits that

On September 4, 2016, I visited the Matisse in His Time exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. This exhibit is home to a plethora of pieces by many different European artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. While it is focused on Matisse and his extensive works, containing more than 50 of his pieces, there are many portraits and sculptures by other influential artists from that time period including Renoir, Picasso, and Georges Braque. Three of the most appealing works that I encountered in this exhibit are Maurice de Vlaminck’s Portrait of Père Bouju, Pablo Picasso’s Reclining Woman on a Blue Divan, and Henri Matisse’s sculpture series Henriette I, Henriette II, and Henriette III.

When the two men meet, Matisse’s career was beginning to take off. On March 19th, 1906, his second one-man show opened at a Private Gallery where he exhibited fifty-five paintings, along with a number of sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and lithographs. The paintings ranged in date from 1897 to the current year, so the exhibition served as a retrospective that gave a clear idea of his art development. For the 1906 Salon exhibition, Matisse only showed a single painting, Le Bonheur de vivre (Fig. 5), which was the largest- and most daring- canvas he had ever done. Matisse’s creation of The women with the hat (Fig. 3) had unexpectedly shocked people, but with le Bonheur de vivre. Matisse appear to have purposely set out this painting to create a shocking effect. That Matisse wanted his painting to be a kind of manifesto. Leo Stein bought the painting and declared it to be “the most important painting done in our time.” And was hung up high in Gertrude and Leo’s studio. Leo’s high opinion of Le Bonheur de vivre must have vexed Picasso.

The Piano examines the construction of sexuality in nineteenth century colonial New Zealand within the discourses of power that shaped this era. Different discourses of gender and race and their interactions are presented in order to support a narrative critique of the European patriarchal ideology as dominant social structure.

In the University Of Arizona Museum Of Art, the Pfeiffer Gallery is displaying many art pieces of oil on canvas paintings. These paintings are mostly portraits of people, both famous and not. They are painted by a variety of artists of European decent and American decent between the mid 1700’s and the early 1900’s. The painting by Elizabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun caught my eye and drew me in to look closely at its composition.

The beautiful sound of piano music has captured the hearts of people since the early eighteenth century. Since then, many musicians have dedicated their lives to this instrument. Some players even play piano so well that it may seem that this instrument is easy to play. However, to be able to play the piano well isn’t easy; it takes a lot of skill. To become a good piano player, one must love music very much, have good finger techniques, and body flexibility.