Amy Beach was a prolific composer for the piano and an accomplished concert pianist. This chapter explores her works for solo piano, encompassing her lifespan: from those composed as a young child to her Improvisations, op. 148, written in her late sixties. Beach wrote fluidly for the piano, with her intimate knowledge of the instrument coupled with her secure compositional skills culminating in a fantastic repertoire for piano. Her pieces include simple, pedagogic works; intricate character pieces; works in generic forms; and virtuosic works requiring advanced piano technique. This chapter sets out Beach’s prodigious oeuvre for solo piano chronologically, in the context of Beach’s life, exploring how her personal circumstances symbiotically influenced her compositional output. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of her few pieces for organ, piano duet, and two pianos.

This chapter introduces input and output – how we get data into and out of our programs. The input modes include the command line, file input, pipes, and typed input. (A later chapter treats graphical user interface input.) The output modes include the command line, file output, and pipes.

This personal take describes the motivation, development and eventual commercial release of TouchKeys, an augmented musical keyboard which measures the motion of the player’s fingers on the key surfaces. Digital musical instruments typically lack the mechanical constraints of their acoustic counterparts. Instead, the major obstacle facing novel digital instruments is the time it takes a performer to learn them. TouchKeys preserves the familiar action and layout of the keyboard while adding new techniques such as vibrato and pitch bends, aiming to connect to the expertise of trained keyboardists while providing a gentler learning curve compared to other novel instruments.