Using The Steinway Library For Jazz Repertoire
Most people buying into the Steinway Library of Piano Music think of it as a classical resource. The covers are all black and white, the composers are all dead, and half the pieces have tempos marked Largo or Andante. I picked it up around 2008 when I was trying to build a more sophisticated voicing vocabulary beyond standard jazz harmony textbooks. The collection turned out to be useful for that purpose, even if it was never designed for it. I want to walk through how you actually use these volumes, what to skip, and where it falls apart entirely. The Steinway Library of Piano Music is a multi-volume set published in the 1960s and 70s. It covers Baroque through 20th-century repertoire, and the editions are clean — no fingerings cluttering the page, reasonable editorial markings, and reliable engraving. That editorial clarity matters because when you are learning a piece for jazz study, you need to see the actual harmony without someone telling you how to voice it. Here is the thing most jazz pianists miss when approaching this collection. You should not be learning every piece in it. The entire point is to pick specific volumes and works that directly strengthen the harmonic and contrapuntal skills you need for improvisation and comping. Everything else is just practice without a clear output.
I start people with Bach Inventions and Sinfonias, which appear in one of the earlier volumes. These are non-negotiable for jazz pianists because they teach independent hand movement at a fundamental level. Jazz harmony requires your left hand to outline chord tones while your right hand plays melodic or contrapuntal lines. The Bach Inventions force you to do exactly that without any stylistic compromise. My standard recommendation is the C Major Invention (No. 4) and the F Major Sinfonia (No. 7). Those two pieces alone will expose every weakness in your voice leading within about three weeks of daily practice. After Bach, move into Chopin Etudes, particularly Op. 10 and Op. 25. The Steinway Library has these in a dedicated volume. What jazz players get out of Chopin is not the romantic expressiveness — it is the fact that his etudes demand that each hand operate at a completely different structural level simultaneously. Op. 10 No. 4 is an exercise in left-hand clarity over right-hand melody. That is exactly what voicing a complex chord progression while walking bass feels like on the bandstand. The Debussy volume in this collection is the single most underutilized resource for jazz pianists. If you have ever wanted to expand beyond standard altered dominants and tritone substitutions, Debussy is where you go. The whole-tone and pentatonic language in works like "Cloches à travers les feuilles" directly maps onto modern jazz harmony. I spent about six weeks transcribing the first movement of the "Reflets dans l'eau" Etude note for note. It changed how I approach quartal voicings and suspended chord tones permanently. The Steinway edition of that piece is clean enough that you can actually read the original notation without decoding sloppy editorial marks.
Ravel is similar but more harmonically dense. His "Menuet antique" and the opening of "Pavane pour une infante défunte" both appear in the Steinway Library volumes. These pieces use modal interchange and secondary dominants in ways that prefigure the harmonic language of Miles Davis and Gil Evans arrangements. You do not need to perform them concert-style. Learning the chord progressions and then reharmonizing them in a jazz context is the actual exercise. Now I need to be honest about where this approach breaks down. The Steinway Library does not contain any actual jazz repertoire. There is no Gershwin, no Monk, no Coltrane. If you are looking for a jazz method book with backing tracks and play-along exercises, this is the wrong tool. You would be wasting money and time trying to force it into that role. The Steinway Library works best as a secondary resource for building foundational technique and harmonic vocabulary, not as your primary jazz study material. Another problem I run into constantly is that the editions are not always easy to find in print. Many of the original Steinway Library volumes went out of print in the 1990s. You will find them on eBay, Book Depository, and AbeBooks. Prices vary wildly depending on the volume. The Bach and Chopin volumes tend to be the most available and cheapest, usually around $15 to $30 used. The more obscure 20th-century repertory volumes can run $60 or more. I would recommend checking WorldCat first to see if any local library has the complete set before spending money on individual volumes you might only use once.
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There is also a digital option. Some of these volumes have been reissued in PDF format through various sheet music retailers. The Steinway website itself has some downloadable excerpts, though the full library is not freely available online. If you go the PDF route, make sure you are getting a high-resolution scan. Small notation gets illegible quickly on a tablet screen, and you will spend more time squinting than practicing. Let me share a specific problem I hit that shows why the physical book matters more than you might think. I was working through the Chopin Etude Op. 25 No. 11 — the "Winter Wind" — in the Steinway Library edition, trying to extract the harmonic sequences for jazz reharmonization exercises. The editorial markings in that particular volume included fingerings that crossed into the actual notation space, making it nearly impossible to read the bass line independently from the right-hand figuration. I ended up copying the entire piece onto blank manuscript paper just so I could annotate it freely. It took about forty-five minutes but saved me hours of frustration. If you plan to study from this collection intensively, buy the physical volumes and be prepared to write on them or photocopy pages onto blank music paper. The one volume that I would strongly recommend skipping for jazz purposes is the Beethoven Sonatas volume. Yes, you will hear every jazz pianist tell you that Beethoven is essential. For classical performance, absolutely. For jazz piano development, it is not efficient. The harmonic language is diatonic in a way that does not transfer well to extended chord harmony. You are better off spending that same practice time on the Ravel or Debussy volumes. Beethoven can wait until you have a solid jazz foundation and want to explore more contrapuntal comping techniques.
For a structured approach, I suggest spending about two to three weeks on each piece you choose from this collection. That means listening to recordings, slow practice, transcription, and then reharmonization or adaptation exercises. Do not rush through the repertoire. The goal is depth of understanding, not quantity of pieces learned. A single Chopin Etude studied properly will give you more useful material than half a dozen Beethoven sonatas practiced superficially. If you want supplementary materials alongside the Steinway Library, Mark Levine's "The Jazz Piano Book" and Barrie Nettles' "The Chord Scale Theory and Harmonic Analysis" pair well with this collection. Levine gives you the jazz harmonic framework, Nettles gives you the complete theoretical underpinning, and the Steinway Library gives you the classical repertoire to build the technical foundation underneath. Together, they cover more ground than any single method book ever could. I also keep Schaum's Advanced Piano Library and Bastien's Advanced Piano Course on hand for faster, shorter pieces that still develop specific technique areas. These are cheap, widely available, and useful as supplemental studies between the heavier Steinway Library pieces. They do not replace the classical repertoire work, but they fill gaps efficiently.
The bottom line is straightforward. The Steinway Library of Piano Music is a solid resource for jazz pianists who understand that its value is indirect. It builds the technical and harmonic foundations that make advanced jazz piano possible. It does not teach you jazz. If you approach it with that distinction in mind, spend two to three weeks per piece, and combine it with dedicated jazz study materials, it will serve you well. If you expect it to be a jazz method book, you will be disappointed and out roughly twenty to forty dollars per volume depending on availability.
