Dispatched from the Audition Room (mit Bolzano auch dabei) After the third day of piano auditions at New England Conservatory, I attended an evening recital given at the school by one of my piano faculty colleagues. Backstage, he said that while he was playing he imagined my stern voice from the audition room. Making a fairly unpleasant face, he told me, "You know when you say, 'Mmmmm, not really good...'" The cold fact is that from about … [Read more...]
Correction
As I started working on Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff, I aimed to learn the notated rhythms accurately. The published score is a reproduction of Feldman's handwriting. Some things puzzled me. There are a few measures that don't add up to the expected number of beats (mistakes?). (The top staff is the flute part. The lower staff is the keyboard part: notes with stems up, played by the keyboardist's right hand on the piano, notes with … [Read more...]
Ugly Beauty
"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." -- attributed to John Cage The sound coming from pianos (the physical, real sound) may displease the pianist. In trying out a concert piano, there are often several notes on the instrument that just can't be made to produce what is wanted. Those notes may need "voicing" -- a … [Read more...]
Scoreless
Just before playing a program that began with Chopin's Opus 45 Prelude, I started to think through the beginning of the music. Backstage in the green room, I had no piano and no copy of the written score -- and I couldn't recall the spacing, the exact arrangement of the notes, of the first chords in the piece. Solo pianists who play a lot of music by memory tend to be concerned about forgetting. For many pianists, it's the main focus of … [Read more...]