Really ? I haven't post the preface to Alicia's First Piano Book here? Ooops, sorry. Here it is, exactly written for the foreword to the score :
This book would not have existed without my dear daughter, Alicia Pirena, and her love to music. It started about 3 years ago with a couple of short pieces I wrote for her to learn in her first few piano lessons, but then I enjoyed very much writing them that afterwards I started writing pieces which are more difficult, with the hope that she will improve her technique and would enjoy playing those pieces in the near future. Some of them were written during my travels, when I am thinking about her.
Some I wrote with her sitting on my lap, and two of them are duets which I imagined I would play with her. And since I was commissioned to write the music for the film "Romeo*Juliet" by the Indonesian award-winning film-director Andibachtiar Yusuf, I
decided to include 2 love "songs without words" from that film in this book, thinking that one day Alicia would pass that difficult ( I meant to say "romantic") period of her life and that those romantic melodies would alleviate her from love-sickness.
Whatever the reason of existence of these pieces, they are written purely out of love, not only to music and to my daughter, but to all the young people that hopefully would also share the fun of playing the piano, and to let them feel for themselves that music is our best friend, in times of joy and in times of sorrow.
I am grateful to my friends Ingrid M. Cahya and Iswargia Renardi Sudarno from the Jakarta Conservatory of Music for supervising and revising the educational aspects of each of these pieces, to Mutia Dharma for her help introducing those pieces to many young pianists who would play them for the first time and to Chendra Panatan my manager to whom I am grateful for his endeavors in the publishing of this book.
We all hope that this publication would serve as a small contribution for the young generation not only to learn how to play the piano, but also to realize what Shakespeare had said that music is "the food of love".
Ananda Sukarlan,
March 2009
