Anyone heard of Robert Van Eps book?

[guldhamstern]

Hejej hallo.
I was listening to an interview with brilliant guitar player, educater, human (etc) George Van Eps and he was talking about his brother Robert was working on a piano book.
After some google'ling i found out some copywright list with:

The Physics of piano technique by Robert Van Eps.

But the book just doesn't seem to exist.

Anyone heard of the man?

Maybe just plain stupid to ventilate this subject but now it's done.

[mjedwards]

Hejej hallo.
I was listening to an interview with brilliant guitar player, educater, human (etc) George Van Eps and he was talking about his brother Robert was working on a piano book.
After some google'ling i found out some copywright list with:

The Physics of piano technique by Robert Van Eps.

But the book just doesn't seem to exist.

Anyone heard of the man?

     I only came upon this a couple of years later, but thought I might reply all the same.
     Yes, I have heard of Robert van Eps, but know nothing about him.  I have two books of piano pieces by him, and they are very good indeed, and I would highly recommend them to anyone who likes that lush, romantic style of piano music with layered textures and rich, subtle harmonies - music that sort of inhabits a territory somewhere between Rachmaninov and a certain type of film music.  One of these books is called "American Impressions", and contains 11 pieces depicting scenes in America; the other is a book of 6 seemingly unrelated pieces, but I don't have it handy now, and don't recall the album title.  (One piece was an almost jazzy, Gershwinesque passacaglia, you might call it (not so titled, though), based on a ground bass of the jazzy "walking bass" type; the last is an insanely complicated fugue in 5 or 6 voices, extremely chromatic, slow and sombre in mood, and very subtle harmonically.)
     The book of "American Impressions" advertises a cassette that was available of all the pieces played by the composer, and I would very much like to get hold of it.  I have never had it, and doubt it would be easy to obtain now, even second-hand.
     I have never heard of the book by van Eps referred to above, so cannot comment on that.  "American Impressions" seems to be available on Amazon quite inexpensively, for anyone interested.
     I will be playing at a wedding reception soon, and am seriously considering including some of the American Impressions - just right for that sort of occasion, I think.  So I would highly recommend any piano music by Robert van Eps just on the strength of his name alone.
     A couple of samples of the sheet music can be seen here:

  https://ecygnet.com/products/american-impressions

     I think the ghost of Rachmaninov will be quite obvious even in these brief samples you can see there - but it is no mere pale copy, but very well-crafted music in its own right.

     I hope that (belatedly) helps.

Regards, Michael.