A selection of alumni news
Following the publication of Issue 16 of the Oxford Musician, we are delighted to share some more news from our alumni.
Katrina Estok (Trinity, 2019) has co-authored Developing Keyboard Skills Through Composition Inspired by Dances from Around the World. This new textbook reimagines piano pedagogy by integrating composition, improvisation, and global musical traditions into keyboard skill development.
Unlike conventional piano methods that emphasize rote learning and technical exercises, this innovative approach empowers students to achieve piano proficiency while actively engaging in the creative process. By merging pedagogy with improvisation, the textbook makes the learning journey both practical and artistically fulfilling, positioning students as active creators rather than passive learners.
The book features twenty carefully crafted dances and etudes inspired by folk traditions from around the world. Each piece serves dual purposes: as a technical study building essential keyboard skills and as a window into diverse musical cultures. Students explore Balkan rhythms, Latin American patterns, and Asian pentatonic scales, expanding their musical vocabulary beyond Western idioms while developing technical proficiency.
Developing Keyboard Skills Through Composition Inspired by Dances from Around the World is now available in print and digital formats from Routledge.
Katrina Estok is a pianist, piano teacher, and writer from Calgary, AB. She studied piano under Edwin Gnandt for four years and received her undergraduate degrees in music (BMus) and English (BA) in 2018. In 2020, she obtained her Master’s degree in musicology from the University of Oxford, where she received a distinction for her dissertation on Béla Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle.
Professor Lionel Pike (Pembroke, 1959) has recently published The Langauge of the Rasumovsky Quartets: Beethoven and Robert Simpson (Austin Macauley: 2026).
While working for the BBC Robert Simpson gave an illustrated TV lecture on the last of Beethoven’s three ‘Rasumovsky’ string quartets, Op.59. This talk was so well received that he was strongly pressed to write a complete study of Beethoven’s Op.59, but he countered that he did not wish to write any more words about music; he had already done a great deal in that line. Instead, he wrote three quartets of his own (Nos 4, 5 and 6) that explore those incomparable Beethoven pieces. The present book shows how this later music analyses the process used by Beethoven, and by contrast how Beethoven’s work can unravel secrets of Simpson’s art. The results are enlightening both for the ordinary listener and for the scholar.
Lionel Pike is Professor of Music Emeritus at Royal Holloway (University of London) and was the organist of the college chapel there from 1969 to 2005. For four years, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of London. He was a chorister and assistant organist of Bristol Cathedral, and at Oxford, was organ scholar of Pembroke College, his tutors being Sir David Lumsden and Dr H.K. Andrews.