other teaching material

When he died on 22 January 2010, Surendran Reddy left many fragments, sketches, ideas, notes and graphs, incomplete pieces, student pieces and files of teaching exercises. Much but not all of this miscellaneous material dates from the last years of his life. It helps to shed light on completed compositions by Reddy, on his methods of work, and on his methods of teaching. ACE has grouped them for this performing edition into four categories and made a page and a single pdf for each category: 1: the teaching manual, a little exercise book for felix sebastian otterbeck which is prefaced by a document explaining Reddy’s pianistic history, approach to teaching and thoughts about music generally; 2: other teaching material and student work; 3: incomplete long pieces; 4: incomplete short pieces, sketches and fragments.

Surendran Reddy taught music throughout his life, leaving copious amounts of documentation that reveals what he taught, to whom, when, and how. His ‘other teaching material’ – aside from a little exercise book – is published here in as close to alphabetical order as possible, given that some exercises do not have a title. ACE has sometimes supplied these, in square brackets. These exercises, studies, chord examples and examples of other musical building blocks are presented here as a continuous pdf, but they are just examples (like the one shown on the right), without the enriching narrative that Reddy would have given his students in practice. Taken together they give a strong sense of Reddy’s concerns as a teacher, and among them are delightful short complete pieces that Surendran wrote for his students, such as kim’s dream.