The Laboratory Piano Course series is designed to develop sight-reading skills and firm keyboard techniques. Each concept and skill presented is reinforced many times throughout the book. Skills and drills are often incorporated in solo and ensemble pieces, rather than being a series of separate exercises that can often bore students. A variety of music from all periods is
presented. The important modes are included, as well as the major and relative
minor scales and arpeggios, in two octaves.
Although Book One of The Laboratory Piano Course is designed for instruction in the piano laboratory, it can also be used in a conventional piano classroom. It is suitable for a wide range of piano students-for adult students, for college music majors and
nonmusical majors, as well as for high school and junior high school students.
The third book of this series, Ensemble Music for Group Piano first appeared in 1970. It was published by Canyon Press, which
was then a Baldwin Company. It was the first of its kind and grew out of a desire of the Baldwin Piano Company to develop
teaching material especially designed for the piano laboratory, which Baldwin had just begun to market. Thousands of college students and school children enjoyed these wonderful fun pieces. They are as much fun to play today as they were in 1970.
The complete series (in three volumes) is an outgrowth of eight years of research in group and class piano teaching, and only those materials which have been very successful with actual classes been included. Students from these experimental classes have had the opportunity to share in the final preparation of the manuscript, making specific suggestions on such matters as fingering, pedaling, and dynamics.