Eastward piano: practice, culture, recorded history

"This book follows the piano through musical worlds typically overlooked in the instrument's history. Grounded in practice-led research, it treats the piano as a mobile, adaptive resource rather than a fixed cultural artefact. By engaging with early commercial recordings from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, this book unsettles the rigid oppositions (East/West, oral/literate, folk/scholarly) through which the piano's presence has typically been read. The concept of 'modeness' attends to music as realised performance, while Foucault's 'heterotopias' frame the instrument's eastward trajectories. A central case study-the author's 2015 album The Rebetiko Era-brings these threads into the studio, examining arrangement, improvisation and recording as compositional acts. Moving beyond a conventional musicological study, the volume also provides the musical scores for nine of the album's tracks, complete with insightful commentary.