Another Canadian classical music blog

I had the pleasure this morning of visiting s55ael for the first time, which is a fine Canadian blog that I hadn't yet visited until now. It is written by a collaborative pianist and teacher living on an island (read the blog carefully to figure out which island) with numerous excellent musings on such things as...

Choices
Practicing and hiking
Inclement weather at a busy time of the year
The finer things in life

...and how they relate to the life of a busy professional.

I have wondered for some time why it is that so few Canadian classical musicians make the decision to blog when the phenomenon is becoming so popular in other countries such as the US and England. Here are some other classical music blogs in Canada:

Help! I'm a Postmodernist!
My Other Life
The Score

And some blogs by expat Canadian classical musicians:

Adventures in Opera Singing
Questo "Mars Rosso" mi amollisce e assidera

If you know of any other classical Canblogs or write one yourself, drop me an email or comment and I would be glad to list it.

Idomeneo furor

The Deutsche Oper in Berlin has cancelled a production of Mozart's Idomeneo over security worries over possible fallout regarding an added scene by stage director Hans Neuenfels in which Idomeneo presents as a gift the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon, and Mohammed.

Link to CBC article

Update 9/28/06:

Roger Kimball in WSJ weighs in on the controversy

1 night, 650 composers

As part of the Canadian Music Centre's New Music in New Places festival and scotiabank nuit blanche, David Ogborn (recently featured on Tapestry's Opera Briefs 6 program) will be curating Dream House, a multi-level sound installation in the CMC's national headquarters at Chalmers House. Featured will be recorded excerpts from the works of 650 Canadian composers past and present from speakers positioned throughout the historic house.

Dream House runs at Chalmers House on 20 St. Joseph Street in Toronto from 7pm Sept. 30 to 7:15 am Oct. 1. Yes, you read correctly--that would be all night.

Problems for P*dc$st@rs

It appears that Apple is claiming ownership of the term "podcast" p&dc#st as an extension of its copyright priveleges and issuing cease and desist orders to websites that use the word in their content. Oh no! I mentioned it in some of my past content!

Link (Via The Well-Tempered Blog)
Wikipedia article on the word in question

Other possble names:

How about its German translation:

Huelsesendung

Or maybe an anagram of the word:

cads opt
sad copt
cad post
cast pod
cod past
coda pst
pad cost
past doc
PC toads
TCP soda
Capt. DOS
PC at DOS
sod at PCs

COC in FT

The Financial Times weighs in on the Canadian Opera Company's new Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre with a generally favorable impression.

Link

10 ways of improving your sight reading skills

1. Practice sight reading every day. Practice makes perfect. Great sight readers are more often made than born.

Four Star Sight Reading and Ear Tests: Book 4 By Boris Berlin And Andrew Markow. Daily Exercises for Piano Students. Ear Training and Sight Reading. Early Intermediate. Level: Grade 4. Book. 56 pages. Published by The Frederick Harris Music Company. (4S4) See more info...

2. Practice in the dark. Piano playing isn't just an intellectual exercise but a physical activity as well. You can teach the body to trust its instincts so that when sight reading the eyes can stay focused on the music while the rest of the body does its thing with confidence and grace.

3. Read through songs and arias with a singer, or through sonatas with an instrumentalist. Sight reading isn't just forced labor. The process of reading through repertoire with a singer/instrumentalist can be extremely satisfying, deepen the level of partnership, help to build skills, and be fun.

4. Work as a pianist in the studio of a voice teacher. A voice teacher can put you to work learning a wide variety of music from the art song, opera, oratorio, and music theatre genres without a lot of lead time to learn music properly. The more you do, the broader will be your knowledge and skills, and the better you will get.

5. Read about Chunking Theory [wiki] and try to figure out how you can group musical elements into perceptual groups. Reading music, like reading text, is a process of finding perceptual groups. When you read from a book, you perceive not just letters but words, phrases, and clauses. Music is no different.

6. Read soundtrk's observations about sight reading on My Other Life.

7. Read Martha Beth Lewis's remarks on the process of teaching sight reading.

8. Improvise in the style of a particular composer or genre. It's not just about notes and rhythms, but the totality of musical elements, including style. The more you are able to re-create the style of a particular time and place in musical history, the more your sight reading will sound like the real thing.

9. Play an afternoon of voice auditions as the house pianist. Do or die. The best incentive to rise to the level of a top-notch sight reader is to be thrust into a situation where you must read at a high level under a considerable amount of pressure.

10. Play at the same level sight reading as you would in a well-prepared recital. Okay, this is impossible, but having it as a goal will propel you to the next level.

Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course - Sight Reading Book (Level 1) (Carefully Sequenced Examples Designed to Enhance Music Reading Skills for a Lifetime of Piano Enjoyment) Written by E. L. Lancaster, Gayle Kowalchyk. Instructional book for piano. Series: Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course. 48 pages. Published by Alfred Publishing. (AP.14539) See more info...

Additions to the skills list

I've added a few things to the list of Required and Preferred Skills for the Collaborative Pianist, including being able to use text capabilities of cell phones (ie. "Can U acc m2 at auds?") , and the importance of having an answering machine or service attached to every phone line.

If you notice anything I've omitted from the list, please comment either here or on the skills list and it can be added should it be viable. I'm thinking of adding a "Technology skills" section, although I still need to give the subject more thought before I proceed.

Opera in the rain

After two very well received and sold-out performances of Tapestry New Opera Works' Opera Briefs 6 at the Distillery Friday and Saturday, we repeated 3 of the 10 works at Word on the Street today at Queen's Park on the CityTV stage. The weather proved to be somewhat less than optimal for outdoor opera, as it began raining hard half an hour before our start time and continued throughout the performance. Nevertheless, there were many people in the audience and consisted of numerous new faces in addition to familiar ones. The singers were miked, always a difficult proposition since professional operatic voices singing into traditional microphones can result in blowing out speakers if the mike distance is too close.

Since this was an outdoor stage, fellow pianist Jennifer Tung and I arrived to find an electronic keyboard, but no stand and no pedal. (Prior to arriving at the venue, Jennifer and I joked that I would have a higher chance of being electrocuted by an electronic keyboard should it get wet as I was to play in two of the scenes whereas Jen was only playing in one of them). A packing crate had to suffice for a base for the keyboard, and the tech guy very kindly rigged a guitar pedal as a sustain pedal in the following manner: button #2 triggers sustain pedal, button #3 releases pedal. Nevertheless, I was thankful that in my student years I had been paying attention to the lessons that pertained to finger legato. The bold, rugged, stalwart, and soaked audience responded favorably to the three scenes that we all performed and both Jennifer Tung and I escaped electrocution.

Here is a complete list of the mini-operas of Opera Briefs 6 (librettists are listed first and composers second):

• Buring Bill by Dave Carley and Anthony Young
• Up, Up and Away by Krista Dalby and Kevin Morse
• Au Cafe Trudeau by Leanna Brodie and Kevin Morse
• Going Home by Dave Carley and Kevin Morse
• She Sees Her Love by Leanna Brodie and Craig Galbraith
• Miss Jones Laments by Dave Carley and Craig Galbraith
• Spel-ling by Lisa Codrington and Kevin Morse
• Eva in the Underworld by Dave Carley and David Ogborn
• Striker from the East versus Laszer (also from the East) by Lisa Codrington and David Ogborn
• The Perfect Match by Krista Dalby and Anthony Young

Striker, Miss Jones, and Cafe Trudeau were performed at Word on the Street.

Not a way to improve your technique

The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society has a picture of a finger-stretching device from around 100 years ago similar to the type of device that may have permanently disabled one of Robert Schumann's fingers.

Link

Music makes kids smarter

From Science Daily, news from the Oxford journal Brain that there is now conclusive evidence that musical instruction can positively influence the brain development of children. The study meausred brain responses of children aged four to six which were divided into groups that studied and did not study in the Suzuki program. The study concluded that brain response had a measurable improvement in the children that studied music than those that did not:

Analysis of the music tasks showed greater improvement over the year in melody, harmony and rhythm processing in the children studying music compared to those not studying music. General memory capacity also improved more in the children studying music than in those not studying music.

Link to Science Daily article
Link to abstract in Brain
Full article in Brain

Devil's Advocate:

The study in Brain only used kids in Suzuki programs in the "Toronto area", rather than kids in a broad-based spectrum of musical programs in a wider geographical region. Does this study merely prove that there is a high level of Suzuki instruction in Toronto?

In addition, it appears that only 12 children were tested, 6 in Suzuki programs and 6 not, hardly a sizable number of test subjects to be a definitive study.

My new email account

Because of problems I've been having with my Operamail account related to receiving both mail and attachments, emails sent to anything @ collaborativepiano dot com will now forward to my brand new Gmail account (thanks to a kind and long-time reader from Newfoundland who sent me an invitation to join). You can probably figure out what my Gmail address is. (Hint: Starts with "c", then "o", etc.)

Another Collaborative Piano program added

The University of Memphis has been added to the list of Degree Programs in Collaborative Piano, with programs both at the Masters and Doctoral level.

Take the ultimate classical music quiz

From the Guardian, a quiz from the National Youth Orchestra [of Great Britain] fundraiser held at the Royal Opera House last Sunday. Warning: it's difficult.

Link to quiz

Nigredo Hotel+Opera Briefs 6=one busy month

For the last week, we've been rehearsing not one but two shows at Tapestry: Opera Briefs 6, which opens this Friday at the Tapestry New Work Studio, and a remount of Nigredo Hotel (by librettist Anne-Marie MacDonald and composer Nic Gotham) for the Algoma Fall Festival, with Alex Dobson and Patricia O'Callaghan performing the roles of Raymond and Sophia in the same production that Tapestry put on to great acclaim in the spring of 2005.

The Tapestry production isn't the only Nigredo Hotel happening this fall. Stopera in Canberra, Australia is producing NH at the Street Theatre from September 14-23 with David Pearson and Rebecca Collins in the two singing roles. The chamber ensemble is led by musical director and pianist Vivienne Winther. The opera is followed by the Nigredo Hotel Jazz Lounge featuring some of Canberra's finest jazz musicians.

Link to Wikipedia entry on Nigredo Hotel
Algoma Fall Festival ticket information
Stopera ticket information

Pencil on Paper

Yuzu's On Nocturnal Avenue2 features pencil drawings of the great pianists, with links to flickr sets.

Link

(Via the well-tempered blog)

Eastman's College Fair

High school students looking into university programs in music may want to attend the Eastman School's 1st annual College Fair on the evening of October 18th in Rochester, New York. This event is co-sponsored by the Juilliard School and Ithaca College.

Link
Presenting schools (well over 60 of them)

For directions and hotel accomodations, scroll downwards on the above links.

Tapestry presents Opera Briefs 6

Tapestry New Opera Works will be presenting Opera Briefs 6 on September 22nd and 23rd at 8pm in the Tapestry New Work Studio at Studio 315 in the Cannery in Toronto's Distillery District located at 55 Mill Street.

Opera Briefs 6 will be featuring the work of composers Craig Galbraith, Kevin Morse, David Ogborn, and Anthony Young based on libretti of Leanna Brodie, Dave Carlie, Lisa Codrington, and Krista Dalby. The works featured are the fruits of Tapestry's 2006 Composer/Librettist Laboratory in August.

The ensemble will consist of soprano Carla Huhtanen, mezzo soprano Jessica Lloyd, tenor Keith Klassen, and bariton Alexander Dobson, and pianists Jennifer Tung and Christopher Foley (that would be me).

Opera Briefs 6 will be conducted by Alexander Cann and directed by Tom Diamond.

-------------

Longtime Tapestry followers may notice the new logo on the poster above. Tapestry's bold new look is courtesy of Rossignol & Associates Design--stay posted for additional graphics.

More Rossignol designs for Toronto theatre productions

The Ring Cycle live on CBC Radio Two

The Canadian Opera Company's much-lauded Ring Cycle at the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto is also being broadcast live on CBC Radio Two.

Link to schedule of broadcast events

Flutists may soon be obsolete

The Takanishi Laboratory has just perfected a flute-playing robot. Clicking on the performance movie link will bring you to a page that features an automated performance of Flight of the Bumble Bee. Thankfully there is no word on a collaborative pianist robot yet. (Accompabot? Robocompanist? Concerto droid?)

Link

(Via Neatorama)

Update of 9/13/06:

Thanks to oboeinsight for clarifying that flutists are indeed much better company, and better dressed than robots. I feel that she is also correct for calling into question the appropriateness of a flute-playing droid wearing a cowboy hat for a publicity shot. As well, those extruding wires might be a little cumbersome when turning pages in the orchestra, not too mention how the difficult climate of a city such as New York or Cleveland could wear on the quality of circuitry upon leaving a concert hall en route to a taxi or subway. On the up side, a robotic flutist would not need to clean out their instrument as frequently as their human counterparts since the computer-controlled airstream could conceiveably be configured for low humidity.

Image hosted by the Takanishi Laboratory at Waseda University

This site's official search engine

Sherlocco has a service that allows you to customize the name of your search engine.

Link to the official search engine of the Collaborative Piano Blog

(Via Neatorama)

Yet more degree program updates

Six more institutions will be added to the list of degree programs. They are:

Brandon University
Camosun College/Victoria Conservatory of Music
Houghton College
Michigan State University
Taiwan National University of the Arts
Western Oregon University

The total of identified collaborative piano programs now stands at 67 and counting.

Make chamber music, not war

Can chamber music be used to aid the peace process? You bet it can, say University of British Columbia faculty members Rena Sharon and Salvador Ferreras.

Link

Airline Icarus re-broadcast tonight

The performance earlier this year of Brian Current's new opera Airline Icarus will air this Sunday September 10 at 10pm on CBC Radio 2's Two New Hours. Also on the program are three works of HK Gruber from the same concert.

Two New Hours schedule
Hear CBC Radio Two streaming (Note: internet feed is set to Eastern Daylight Time and optimized for Windows Media Player 9)

A look into Brevard's collaborative training program

Ted McIrvine in the Hendersonville News writes about the process of training collaborative pianists at the Brevard Music Center under Arizona State faculty member Andrew Campbell. On the art of playing orchestral reductions, McIrvine writes:

The piano parts...are notoriously unsatisfactory. Some arrangements pile too many notes into the reduction, trying to replicate the entire score on two staves. Since a piano reduction is simply one person's idea of how to represent the orchestral harmonies on a keyboard, the collaborative pianist can with impunity use their own analysis and judgment in adjusting the piano part, using the printed edition as a starting point. Octaves may replace single notes, or single notes replace octaves. Solid chords may be broken or broken chords may be made solid. Tremolos may be added to represent sustained string sounds. The sky is the limit, providing the pianist has judgment and reason in steering a single piano to simulate an entire orchestra.

Link

Practicing season begins this week

Timothy Mangan's article in the Orange County Register about the virtues of practicing made me cheer.

Link

(Via oboeinsight)

The collaborative arts on the web

Until the last few years, collaborative pianists have been slow to create web content. In the summer of 2001 I decided to purchase the domain name for "collaborativepiano.com", which surprisingly had never been claimed. As of today, the domains ending in .net, .info, .biz, .org, and .ca are actrually still unclaimed and available.

Some sites of pianists that specifically label themselves collaborative include those of Hugh Sung, Rebecca Wilt, Amanda Johnston, Philip Voldman, Lisa Reynolds, and Karen Lee-Morlang.

A very interesting project of Hugh Sung is the recently started Collaborative Pianists group on Myspace.com. In addition to a members' roster that at last count had 244 members (with musicians of all backgrounds), a forum, and a bulletin board, Hugh states that one of his goals is "to create a worldwide network to connect instrumentalists and vocalists with pianists who understand the fine art of musical partnership and support", a goal entirely possible given the capabilities of the Myspace platform.

A similar type of network already exists on sites such as the list of Piano Accompanists in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, although this is more of a service-oriented directory than a place to put together musical partners.

An entirely new type of organization is Collaborative Works in Chicago. Set up as a limited liability partnership consisting of Shannon McGinnis, Nicholas Hutchinson, and Jerad Moseby, Collaborative Works is a "vocal coaching studio and collaborative arts institute" where partnership and collaboration are built into their core values and advertising:

What sets Collaborative Works apart? Our collective experience and the wealth of repertoire we've studied and performed make us the ideal one-stop resource for your next project. We take pride in our work and bring professionalism and artistry to each and every project. We believe that good sight-reading ability, while a necessity in our fast-paced business, does not by itself create a good accompanist. Therefore we make a commitment to arrive at each and every coaching, rehearsal, and lesson, as close to performance-ready as possible. Strength at the keyboard can only make your work stronger, and security in our own playing allows us to focus on you.

With the recent growth (proliferation isn't the right word to use, yet) of collaborative piano sites in the last year, it will be interesting to see what new sites are created in the next while. Stay tuned...

What's in a Name?

I originally intended to write a post entitled "10 interesting things about Collaborative Piano" as an informative way to touch on many of the issues that many of us feel are important. However, the first few ideas I had actually ended up growing a life of their own, and I decided to break up these ideas into separate posts to address each issue more completely. Here is the first of several installments:


"Collaborative Piano" is a term that has not yet caught on completely. There is a corner of the piano world that consists of pianists that rehearse with, coach, perform, and collaborate with other musicians, whether for financial reasons, personal satisfaction, or love of the repertoire. Traditionally called "accompanying", the pianists that practiced this art had a tendency to be marginalized, treated as second-class musicians, and often were omitted from concert programs. That is, until Samuel Sanders in a late 1980's interview coined the term "collaborative pianist" that several years later started to sweep the major cities of North America as a positive replacement to the subservience implied in the term "accompanist".

I first heard of the term in early 1995 from Rena Sharon at the University of British Columbia, and then that summer from Juilliard faculty member Connie Moore at the Bowdoin Festival. What both Connie and Rena felt needed to be emphasized was the concept of equality in what we do, that we work with rather than for. The term grew slowly but surely, and more and more of us opted to use it both for the profession and its practitioners. One of the reasons I started this blog in November 2005 was that I was starting to feel that too many of us were still being called "accompanists" both in public and the press, often with a negative subtext ("Oh, you played well, too").

Calling my blog "The Collaborative Piano Blog" did seem to me at first as smacking of hubris, as who was I to write on behalf of an entire profession, but I felt it was important to create a site that contained at least some core content on what the profession means, consisted of, what is at stake for us, as well as a little shameless self-promotion of my own projects. Perhaps through osmosis, the people that would visit the site, whether professionals, amateurs, casual readers, in educational institutions, arts organizations, lobbying groups, other blogs, the press, or public and private funding bodies would gradually begin to view our profession as not just a service industry, but an integral part of what makes the classical music profession work (after all, just try mounting an opera without repetiteurs or coaches--it can't be done). Nearly a year later, was the project successful? Hard to tell. However, I do notice the c-word being bandied about around Toronto more than it had been a year ago.

What do collaborative pianists want? Fame? Fortune? Probably not. Respect? Probably. Recognition as being committed performers and teachers alongside their soloist counterparts? Definitely.

What is Collaborative Piano?

My definition
Definition on the University of Colorado at Boulder site

The world needs more amateurs

Alan Rusbridger writes in the Guardian about a unique piano camp in England for some very dedicated amateur pianists. Rusbridger writes:

We should pause to deconstruct the word amateur. "A century ago," writes DJ Taylor in his recent book about sporting Corinthians, "'amateur' was a compliment to someone who played a game simply for the love of it. A hundred years later, it is a by-word for cack-handed incompetence."

The same point is made by the late American literary critic Wayne Booth, who wrote a book about his lifelong love of playing the cello. He intended his book to be "a celebration of what it means to do something worth doing for the sheer love of doing it, with no thought of future pay-off - in a world where you can't even survive unless you do some thinking about payoff".

I've always admired the dedication and long-term tenacity of amateurs, or as Rusbridger calls them, "virtual professionals"--we need more. Sometimes I notice that amateurs seem to love the art more than professionals do and may just be the real engine of the classical music industry, buying subscriptions, cds, as well as donating to organizations.

Link

Update 9/19/06

twang twang twang's take on the Rusbridger article

LOTR Blues

Richard Ouzounian in conversation with Kevin Wallace, the producer of the Lord of the Rings musical stage version, writes in the Toronto Star about the disappointing Toronto run of the show and its reworked version to be premiered in London next spring. An excerpt:

Then why weren't those changes made in Toronto? Was our city serving as a New Haven, the traditional tryout town where Broadway-bound musicals work out their kinks?

"No," insists Wallace with his old passion. "We're grateful we're going to get a second chance (in London). We never thought we would ... There is no doubt now that when we opened in Toronto, we were only a third through the process ... only you couldn't tell yourself that, or you'd go mad."

Link

Career Options updates

I've added several entries to the Career Options in Collaborative Piano list:

-Audition Pianist Co-ordinator
-Musical Dramaturg
-Podcaster

To quote my own words:

Since the field of Collaborative Piano is a constantly evolving field, the types of work that we are engaged in are also changing. If you are doing or know of anyone that is doing anything interesting or out of the ordinary, write a comment below and it can be added to the list.

See also: Link to very interesting negative comment after the initial posting, which caused me to add a caveat to one of the career options, but not to delete it, since it was based on the accomplishments of several individuals that had distinguished themselves in a very difficult but viable way.

Collaborative Piano vs. Piano Accompanying Part II

In late 2005 I did a Google Smackdown comparison on the number of Google hits for Collaborative Piano against the number of hits for Piano Accompanying to get a rough idea on whether the collaborative piano meme was at all close to overtaking the former traditional title for the field. In my somewhat whimsical posting on the Smackdown experiment, I listed the following result:

Piano Accompanying--2050 hits
Collaborative Piano--1080 hits

This evening, I did a retry of the same experiment with the following result:

Piano Accompanying--45,900
Collaborative Piano--31,900

In both results piano accompanying received more Google hits than collaborative piano, with a ratio of 1.9:1 on 12/23/05 but only 1.4:1 on tonight's search.

Does this mean that collaborative piano is overtaking, or has overtaken piano accompanying as the title of record for our field? Difficult to say, as the sheer number of Google results are impossible to test for quality. The total number of Google hits is encouraging (compare 3130 on 12/23/05 with 77800 this evening) and may indicate that our field is being written about more often with its practitioners beginning to create web content, or may merely be a change in either the Google or Google Smackdown algorithm.

At any rate, this is an interesting way of looking into the issue and worth another matchup on Google Smackdown. The whole meme-searching process is somewhat artificial, but an enterprising researcher with more time on their hands than myself might find an interesting study in graphing the results of comparative searches over time.

2 Worst Musical Careers of All Time

As we enter the new concert season with all its trials and tribulations, it is comforting that working conditions in the musical field aren't what what they were several hundred years ago. While perusing the vile contents of Channel 4's The Worst Jobs in History, I noticed two musical careers that allow us to be thankful that no matter how difficult things are for those in the performing arts, it can't be as bad as it was for practitioners of these lines of work:

1. Castrato - included for obvious reasons. The most famous of the castrati lived lives of luxury, but only a small percentage of those subjected to the horrendous operation became professional singers. Why the big fuss about this gruesome voice type? Friedrich Brodnitz explains in "The Age of the Castrato Voice":

The castrati sang with the lung power of an adult and the larynx of a child. This enabled them to spin out long musical phrases in a single breath. With growing age their voices slowly dropped from soprano to alto, but they always maintained a peculiar character that differentiated them from the typical timbre of normal adult male or female voices.

2. 18th-century violin-string maker - With the beauty of the violins built in Europe in the golden age of violin-making, it is often forgotten that somebody had to create the strings that would make the instruments sound in an age long before metal strings were invented:

Fancy hanging about in an abattoir and pulling 9 metres (30 feet) of warm intestines from a barely expired sheep? Hard to resist, isn't it?

It gets better, though. How about separating the hot guts from the fat and then kneading the offal to milk out the stinking sheep excrement? I know, it's too good to be true. You will also have to soak the guts in cold water for a while, strip and crush them, fumigate them (with the added delight of the horrid stench of burning sulphur) and then twist them into strings. It's not all fun, however – you only get to do it for 12 hours at a time!

Of course, working conditions of string-makers have improved greatly since those times and companies such as E. & O. Mari specialize in gut strings made still from traditional materials (yuck!) and methods (eww!).

More info and links from Wikipedia articles on Castrato, Strings, and Catgut