Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Monday, November 21, 2011

2P4H Is Held Over Until December 4

At the Toronto run of 2 Pianos 4 Hands a few weeks ago, I can't remember having laughed so hard. After teaching for 8 hours that day, watching a play whose first act essentially pokes fun at piano pedagogy had me gasping for air many times. 2P4H is now held over until December 4th, so if you haven't seen this hilarious, sad, wonderful, and heartbreaking celebration of piano playing, it's definitely worth the trip. Here's just a taste of the gags that Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt are up to:





Is This the Future of Practicing?

Even for a tablet desk slated <cough> to retail at $1,299, this video of the upcoming EXOdesk failed to excite me. Until the :39 mark, when my jaw hit the floor. Yes, that would appear to be a Bechstein-branded piano app. If a the screen sensitivity of this type of device could be finely honed to respond to minute changes of touch, you might just be looking at the future of keyboard instruments.




(Via Mashable)


Meme of the Day: Prepared Piano Edition

If you've ever played the John Cage Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano and had to go through the arduous process of collecting all the screws, bolts, nuts, and rubber mutes and meticulously measured exactly where to put them, these sentiments will be familiar...



Sunday, November 20, 2011

Huge Archive of Free Video Game Piano Arrangements on PDF

Whether your game of choice is Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Castlevania, Shadow of the Colossus, or Super Mario Brothers, you can find a huge number of video game selections arranged for solo piano on Mark Andrews' Ninja Pumped. Teachers might find these free sheet music PDFs a godsend for young students who may have heard these songs dozens of times while gaming. Being able to play them might just be a way to rekindle their interest in the piano.

Here's Mark (aka RigorMortis999) playing Legends of Azeroth from World of Warcraft:




Sign or Resign at Shorter University

If you're a faculty or student at a university, what happens if your personal beliefs conflict with a school's corporate agenda? And what do you do when your employer enforces the terms of their agenda?

Shorter University in Georgia is doing precisely that - all students and staff must now sign a Personal Lifestyle Statement, whose Principles of Personal Conduct might be offensive to some (see #3):
I agree to adhere to and support the following principles (on or off the campus): 
1. I will be loyal to the mission of Shorter University as a Christ-centered institution affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention. 
2. I will not engage in the use, sale, possession, or production of illegal drugs. 
3. I reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. 
4. I will not use alcoholic beverages in the presence of students, and I will abstain from serving, from using, and from advocating the use of alcoholic beverages in public (e.g. in locations that are open to use by the general public, including as some examples restaurants, concert venues, stadiums, and sports facilities) and in settings in which students are present or are likely to be present. I will not attend any University sponsored event in which I have consumed alcohol within the last six hours. Neither will I promote or encourage the use of alcohol.    

A Times Free Press article looks at the difficult decisions facing many faculty and students at Shorter, including collaborative pianist and vocal coach Ben Harris:
To Harris, DiPillo and others, the gay portion of the statement is the headline maker, but not the crux of a culture change they fear will diminish the school that has produced two Metropolitan Opera winners and an 85 percent student acceptance rate to medical schools. 
“For me, my conduct should show my faith. Now I have to come up with a phony document to insert Baptist doctrine into opera training and singing. We’re here to educate, not to have prayer at the beginning of each class,” Harris said. 
Harris is an instructor of collaborative piano and a vocal coach in Shorter’s School of Fine and Performing Arts. He assumes that because he has spoken out, he won’t get the option of signing the statement of faith when faculty contracts are extended in the spring.  
Harris said if his contract isn’t renewed, he and his wife and two small children will move to Texas to work on his father’s ranch.

The Shorter University situation is also a fascinating example of the conflict between a university's right to manage its affairs and the need of its academic community to assert intellectual independence.



Thursday, November 17, 2011

Meme of the Day: The Urtext Police





Practice More Effectively, Not Necessarily Longer

For the last few days, I've been thinking about a recent Study Hacks article on the surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers. According to a study conducted at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, the practice habits of music students considered to be elite performers were contrasted with the practice habits of merely average students. The amount of practice time between the two groups was roughly even, but the type of work utilized in the practice time was what differentiated the groups:
The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability.
The scheduling of practice time was also different between elite and average players:
The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.  
The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  
In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two-sessions a day schedule.
Assuming that the students that faculty had picked to be "elite" or "average" actually corresponded to those who went on to have careers (a completely different question), we can draw the following conclusions on how to rise to a high level of playing:

  • Pick the best times of day to practice and stick to them. Every day.
  • Take the time to do the detail work. Hands separately. Slowly with metronome. Multiple repetitions. Work at problem spots until they're fixed.

Apparently those who do the work and do it consistently actually have more relaxed lives than those who don't. Considering how difficult a life in the arts can be, a relaxed attitude towards life is a very noble aspiration indeed. 


Meme of the Day

If you've ever had a studio teacher put the lid all the way down after you play the first chord, approach you a dress rehearsal saying "Please, a little bit less", or worse yet, put the dust cover on the piano while you play, this meme of the day is for you.


Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Meme of the Day

For those of you who are often a bit too eager to overbook and then end up having too much music to learn at the last minute...

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Paul Schoenfield Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano

From the Sala Sinfónica del Auditorio de Castellón, here are Jose Franch-Ballester, José M. Blumenschein, with pianist Amy Yang (who has an amazing website best viewed in widescreen) playing the Freylakh movement of the Paul Schoenfield Trio for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano:




Meme of the Day


Monday, November 14, 2011

The Arts and Entertainment Plan is a Medical Benefits Program for Candadian Performing Artists

One of the really tough things about being a Canadian performing artist is that it's next to impossible to get extended medical benefits unless you work as an employee at a medium to large arts organization that offers benefits for your level of pay. Since that rules out the vast majority of working artists, many of us make do with only basic provincial medical health insurance, which, depending on which province you live in, can either cover a lot of procedures or very little.

The Arts and Entertainment Plan is a program for providing prescription drug care, extended health care, and dental care to individuals and families who are members of participating organizations, namely ACTRA/UBCP, Recording Artists' Collecting Society, and the Canadian Federation of Musicians (aka Musicians' Union locals in Canada). If you think this might be an option for you, take a look at the program handbook, as well as details of the program and enrollment.

The Arts and Entertainment Plan is underwritten by the ACTRA Fraternal Benefit Society, and here is an interesting statement about the plan from the FAQ page:
The Arts & Entertainment Plan is now available because it's the right thing to do: workers in the artistic community are not afforded the same benefits as their public and private counterparts. A 2010 study by the Cultural Human Resources Council notes that only only 20% of those working in the cultural sector have access to dental benefits and only 20% of those working in the cultural sector have access to dental benefits and only 22% have a drug plan. The Arts & Entertainment Plan is doing their part in making benefits a reality for those within the artistic community who otherwise would be without this safety net. 


Against the Grain Theatre Presents La Bohème at the Tranzac Club in Toronto Dec. 1-3

Against the Grain Theatre is a Toronto-based collective of artists who have a penchant for interesting repertoire and unique venues. Their latest project is a production of Puccini's La Bohème at the Tranzac Club in the Annex. Under musical director Christopher Mokrzewski, many of my favorite Toronto singers are appearing, including Miriam Khalil, Ryan Harper, Justin Welch, Lindsay Sutherland-Boal, Neil Craighead, Gregory Finney, and Keith Lam.

Here's a clip from Against the Grain's Super Villains show earlier this year at the SMASH Furniture Store in the Junction (feat. Ambur Braid w/ Topher on piano):



Buy your tickets online
Against the Grain Theatre on Facebook

(Thanks, Nancy!)


Meme of the Day

For all you fans of Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz...



(Via Classical Music Humor on Facebook)



Sunday, November 13, 2011

David Guetta's Without You (Piano Guys remix)

The Piano Guys are Jon Schmidt on piano and Steven Sharp Nelson on cello. I think these guys are going to be doing some awesome things in the next while, so you can check them out on YouTube and Twitter, as well as their Founders' page.





(Via @kickassical)

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Heather Schmidt's Midnight Violin

Heather Schmidt's BravoFACT film Midnight Violin features Heather as composer, writer, director, and pianist in a narrative about an out-of-body experience. The film also features violinist Scott St. John on violin and actors Jessie Withers and Ashleigh Craig.



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Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Valentina Lisitsa Plays Für Elise

What I like about Valentina Lisitsa's playing is not only her ease of motion and beautiful sound, but the sense that the focus of the performance is not on her, but on the music. Yes, she is arguably the most popular classical pianist on YouTube, although it depends on your definition of what comprises classical music. Her rise to stardom happened through the acclaim of YouTube viewers, who obviously found a pianist that they found genuinely engaging on computer and smartphone screens. I've played the following video for many of my students who are learning that pesky Für Elise, and in spite of the fact that she is probably a little exhausted (after having just played the Grieg Concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic) I find that she captures the style and mood of the piece most wonderfully.





Monday, November 07, 2011

The Secret Wonder of a Brain on Music

An excerpt of David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain in Discover Magazine got me thinking about how much the workings of the music-making process might be something just underneath the surface of consciousness, something we can honor without knowing exactly how we actually do it:
The ability to remember motor acts like changing lanes is called procedural memory, and it is a type of implicit memory—meaning that your brain holds knowledge of something that your mind cannot explicitly access. Riding a bike, tying your shoes, typing on a keyboard, and steering your car into a parking space while speaking on your cell phone are examples of this. You execute these actions easily but without knowing the details of how you do it. You would be totally unable to describe the perfectly timed choreography with which your muscles contract and relax as you navigate around other people in a cafeteria while holding a tray, yet you have no trouble doing it. This is the gap between what your brain can do and what you can tap into consciously.  
The concept of implicit memory has a rich, if little-known, tradition. By the early 1600s, René Descartes had already begun to suspect that although experience with the world is stored in memory, not all memory is accessible. The concept was rekindled in the late 1800s by the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who wrote that “most of these experiences remain concealed from consciousness and yet produce an effect which is significant and which authenticates their previous existence.”  
To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks. It’s easy to understand why you would not want to be consciously aware of the intricacies of your muscle movement, but this can be less intuitive when applied to your perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs, which are also final products of the activity of billions of nerve cells.

How much of the following delicate musical skills are processes that are completely conscious, and how much are they skills that, once learned, we are able to access from our mental toolkit just underneath the horizon of conscious thought while we focus on what's going on in the present moment:

  • Following a singer's vocal line from the piano, being in the present moment so much that we can react to their every nuance, hesitation, and forward motion based on the play of consonants and vowels.
  • Following a violinist's bow, either watching or merely listening, and being able to tell exactly when, in the space of a microsecond, the bow slows down, stops, and changes direction for routine bow changes. Being able to perceive these bow changes is integral to being able to play together with a string player, especially a very good one who freely uses rubato.
  • Being able to walk the fine line between the composer's intentions and our own musical instinct.
  • Becoming so comfortable with the technical demands of a work that the hours upon hours of work spent learning the notes allows us to make the work a part of us while we concentrate on the present moment of the music. 
  • Being able to sight read a piece of music for the first time, making on-the-fly decisions about quality of sound, phrasing, and musical style.
What are some musical abilities that you've worked hard for, achieved, and learned to rely on once you internalized them?




Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Meme of the Day



For all the repertoire-learning ninjas out there, this one's for you...