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Welcome back to the Piano Pod, everyone.
It's the first episode of our new season, Season 5.
I hope you all had a fantastic summer.
I've really missed connecting with you.
Before diving in, I encourage you to check out
our introductory episode for this season,
which came out last week.
There you'll discover what's in store,
exciting guests, inspiring topics,
and our special focus on authenticity and joy
throughout Season 5, including why we chose these themes.
You can find a link to the intro episode in the description.
I am thrilled to kick off this season
by introducing our first guest,
who truly embodies the essence of authenticity and joy,
Dr. Sara Davis Buechner.
Dr. Buechner is celebrated for her musical command,
cosmopolitan artistry and visionary independence,
making her one of the most original
concert pianists of our time.
Celebrated for her intelligence, integrity,
and technical prowess, and thoughtful artistry,
she has won top prizes
at prestigious international piano competitions,
including the Queen Elizabeth and Tchaikovsky competitions.
Dr. Buchner has performed as a soloist
and chamber musician across North America,
Latin America, Europe, and Asia,
with renowned orchestras like the New York Philharmonic
and in iconic venues such as Carnegie Hall
and the Kennedy Center.
Her versatile repertoire includes collaborations
with film and dance, and she has premiered works
by contemporary composers like John Corigliano
and Yukiko Nishimura.
A dedicated educator, Dr. Buechner joined
Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance
in 2016 after teaching at institutions
like the Manhattan School of Music.
As a proud transgender woman,
she also advocates for LGBTQ plus visibility and inclusion,
contributing her voice to media outlets
and events worldwide.
So dear friends, today we explore Dr. Sara Davis Buechner's
incredible journey as a trailblazing concert pianist
and educator, focusing on her visionary artistry,
mastery in piano technique, and her advocacy
for both lesser known composers
and the LGBTQ plus community.
Please stay with me until the end of the episode
as our conversation will lead
to a more philosophical discussion later.
So let's begin the Piano Pod's first episode
of this new season with our guest, Dr. Sarah Davis Buchner.
Please enjoy the show.
["Piano Pod"]
You are listening to the Piano Pod,
where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they are bringing the piano into the future
and thriving in a complex, ever evolving world.
["Piano Pod"]
Welcome to the Piano Pod, Dr. Buchner.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
My pleasure to be here.
A great honor, thank you.
It's really an absolute honor and pleasure
to have you as our first guest of the season,
and especially with our focus on authenticity
and joy this year.
And I couldn't imagine a more fitting guest
to kick off the season.
You truly embody the spirit of joy and authenticity.
And first of all, I just wanna congratulate you
for your special recital at Merkin Hall last spring.
Thank you.
Yeah, and it was the celebration
of your incredible 40 years since your New York City debut.
And I bought a ticket,
and unfortunately I got very sick for two days.
I couldn't go out nowhere.
So unfortunately I had to miss,
but I heard it was an spectacular recital.
Could you share some highlights from that night
and what it meant to you to celebrate
such a huge, huge milestone in your career?
How did it feel to perform at such a significant event?
Well, the recital came about a little bit
of a surprise for me because just my manager said,
oh, they wanna present you at Merkin,
which had never really happened before.
So it was just, you know,
going to be another recital on the concert slate.
But I realized that the date was going to coincide generally
with the 40th anniversary of my New York debut,
which was back in 1984.
And I wanted to mark it by playing something special.
As it happens, I had been studying a lot of piano music
by a Hungarian composer named Petr Volf,
a set of pieces that he calls the Volf tempered clavier,
rather cleverly.
Jazz inspired, very, very fun, somewhat demanding,
but fun pieces for piano.
And this music had come to me through Petr's cousin,
Veronica Volf, who was my very first piano teacher
when I was four and five years old.
It's a wonderful connection.
She had sent me a few copies of some of the pieces
that he had written during the COVID time saying,
I think you might be interested in playing some of these.
And I was so touched.
I remember getting into tears
when I played that Adagio in E major,
which I recorded on YouTube shortly after getting that music.
So around that time, I got in touch with Petr by Zoom,
and I played most of those pieces for him
on Zoom calls during the time of COVID.
It was sort of my project to undertake
while I was at home mostly.
I mean, I was teaching, but concerts were dry enough.
So I used that time to study a lot of that music.
And then here was this special recital.
So I made that the second half of the program
was the American premiere of 14 of these pieces
from the Wolf Temperate Clavier.
Petr came from Budapest,
and we had sort of a grand celebration of that.
Really? To the concert? That's amazing.
["14 of These Piano Concerts from the Volf Temperate Clavier"]
Wonderful.
And then also you performed besides the Wolf Temperate Clavier,
is it 14 out of 24, correct?
14 out of 48, actually.
48.
About one quarter of it, yep.
Wonderful.
And then you also performed pieces by Mozart.
And then also another Hungarian composer, Miklós Rószá?
Miklós Rószá, yes.
Yes, that's right.
Well, you know, the thing about Mozart for me,
also this is the composer that I've loved most
since my childhood, since I was four.
I mean, that's when I would walk to the radio
in our living room whenever Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro overture came on.
It was every afternoon at 4.30,
it came on as the tagline for this show.
My mother noticed me walking to the radio,
kind of fixated at that time.
I've always loved Mozart's music,
and it always feels, oh, I don't know,
comforting or foundational to start my recitals
with Mozart's music.
So that sort of felt like a given.
And then, you know, so there's something
about foundations there, about Miss Wolf and Mozart.
And Miklós Rószá was one of the great Hollywood composers
in the 1940s and 50s.
That's what he's most remembered for now.
His scores to Ben Hur, Double Indemnity, Spellbound,
quite a few of these film noir classics that he scored.
But he was also a very thoroughly trained composer,
a great composer, in my estimation.
He wrote some piano music.
His variations were premiered by Clara Haskell in Paris.
A lot of string music, a lot of orchestral scores,
and this daunting piano sonata,
which in my estimation is one of the greatest
of the 20th century.
It's a formidable kind of piece of work,
quite virtuosic and difficult to play.
I always loved movie music.
I watched movies a lot when I was a teenager
in my early 20s, et cetera.
And you'd see that name come up on the screen
for a lot of great movies, you know,
music by Miklós Rószá.
So I did a lot of reading and research, you know,
and found a lot of the concert pieces.
Also, fortunately, I played that sonata as a student
and I had a cassette recording of it.
And someone gave me Miklós Rószá's home address
in Hollywood, so I mailed it out there.
And I got a phone call from his daughter
who said how much he had loved it and he liked it.
And a couple of years later, I went to Los Angeles
and I played in the Hollywood Bowl.
It was a Pops concert.
And I played Miklós Rószá's so-called spellbound concerto,
which is sort of a Pops 15-minute piano concerto
made of themes from that motion picture.
And as I was rehearsing with the orchestra,
I suddenly heard the musicians sort of talking,
this kind of whizz whizz whizz whizz whizz whizz whizz.
And behind me to my astonishment was Miklós Rószá's daughter,
Juliet, was pushing him in his wheelchair up the path,
put him right next to the piano.
He had several strokes and it was hard to communicate with him,
but he wanted very much to hear me play.
And they brought him to that dress rehearsal.
It was, I think, one of his last public outings.
So I had a chance to meet him and talk to him a bit
about his music, which was a superb honor, of course.
Wow, that's amazing.
And what was it like to be in the venue?
And what was the reaction from the audience
by listening to all these contemporary composers?
Well, I think the recital itself in Merkin was a big hit.
It was a nice, generously sustained hand.
And standing ovation and all the rest of it.
Times have changed.
I mean, I hoped that Peter's music would elicit a review
in the New York Times or something like that.
But they don't review so many concerts these days.
So unfortunately, that didn't happen.
But there was a grand party afterwards.
And actually, quite a few celebrities came as well.
Really?
Oh, yes.
Like who?
Well, that's between me and my gods.
OK.
Yeah.
Well, you deserve all the attention, of course.
Yes.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah.
That's wonderful.
But do you plan to play all the Wolf tempered
clavier eventually?
I think it's possible.
I mean, it depends on the venue.
I tend to think that a concert of any one particular composer
has to be particularly perfectly done.
Because it's a lot to digest.
I myself, I've gotten bored at concerts of all Bach.
I mean, I love Bach's music.
At a certain point, if that's all you're listening to
for a program, it can get a little tedious.
But it depends what it is.
I think like the last three Schubert sonatas
are a divine evening of music if they're played to perfection.
I think anytime you play all Mozart,
it's fantastic, of course.
Lots of pianists have essayed all the Beethoven piano sonatas.
But you have to be prepared to do it to about sheer perfection,
to really bring it off.
So Peter's complete Wolf tempered clavier
would probably be run to about two and a half to three hours.
And that would be a devoted audience indeed.
And I might get a little tired doing it too.
Reflecting on 40 years since your New York City debut,
how do you feel your artistry and choices in music
have evolved over the years, over the decades?
And are there elements from your early performances
that you continue to embrace or have your taste and technique
transformed significantly?
Wow, Yukimi, that is like the question of the decade there.
It's going to take a long, long time to answer that.
I think that an artistic journey is a kind of evolution,
of course.
If I think back to my taste in music when I was a child,
it was rather Catholic because it
was shaped by my parents' desire to see
that I had good piano lessons and studied good music.
And I think the first crack in that armor
was probably when I was about 12 or 13 years old
and then the movie The Sting came out
and it had music of Scott Joplin.
And I went down to the music store
and I got a lot of rags of Scott Joplin
because I liked Joplin's rags.
And I remember asking my piano teacher
about playing some of those and also the Gershwin
Preludes for piano.
And he told me, well, that's fun to play,
but you can't play that on serious recitals.
That's just for your own amusement.
And that was just where it was.
And I accepted that as common wisdom
for a good portion of my life, frankly,
until I had the courage to break out and say, I like this.
I think this is really good.
And I can play it well and I'm going to play it.
You have to get to the point where you're not worried
that people will criticize you for your choices.
Or if they do, who cares?
That's their problem.
Speaking of Miklos Rojas' piano sonata,
the very first time I did play it,
I was getting my graduate degree.
And one of my professors, he was in a musicology class,
stopped me and always says, I saw
you're playing some Miklos Rojas.
And I said, yes.
And he said, why are you playing that trash?
And I just said, I like it.
That was the best answer I could give him.
Later, I thought I should have said, well, I
like that trash better than your trash.
But that wasn't the best answer.
But you have to have great belief in your artistic choices
to do something like that.
And you can't fault anyone, myself
or any other young pianist, for playing
the traditional repertoire when you feel like, well,
that's what you have to play to be judged.
So when I left my hometown of Baltimore at the age of 16
to go to Juilliard, I remember I was practicing this B minor
sonata, Ballet Kerefs Islamé, the Tchaikovsky Piano
Concerto, trying to think what else I was practicing.
A whole pile of Chopin etudes, almost all of them.
It's 25.
All of which is music I've played in concert,
and none of which I've played in concert for probably
the last 25 or 30 years.
Not that I don't like that music,
but it doesn't say something unique and really vital to me
that I feel like I have to transmit.
If I go to Carnegie Hall and I hear Christian Zimmerman
play the Liszt Sonata in B minor,
I am sure he's going to give that an incredibly committed
and personal interpretation because he's playing it,
because he feels something very powerful about it.
And I think it's possible I would play that piece again
in the future, but it has to be at a time when I feel like,
oh, there's something in that piece that I have yet
to really say in public.
And ironically, it's the music that's
much lesser played that I found so much richness in,
in terms of music that it's so fresh to my ears,
so fresh to a lot of people's ears,
because it's not played very often.
And there's much more to discover in great music
that hasn't been, frankly, overplayed,
like the Beethoven sonatas, the Prokofiev sonatas.
I'm not saying those pieces shouldn't be overplayed.
That's great, great music, of course.
But when I start to make my own list of music
that you almost never encounter in the concert hall,
you can quickly make a list of very, very fine composers,
starting with Anthony Dvorak and then Gabriel Pirnay
and Joaquin Trina, Gabriel Fauré.
Even works of Cesar Franck are almost never played in recitals.
Make a very, very long list of stuff.
Even if you want to take on Bach, think how much Bach wrote,
and think really how much of his keyboard literature
is played, a very small portion of it.
Tons of things that Bach wrote that you just never
experienced in the concert hall.
Say, for example, the Art of Fugue.
How often do you hear someone take on some project like that?
So in terms of going back to your original question,
my artistic journey, my evolution, and so forth,
I feel like I would describe it as kind of an ongoing circle that
just seems to expand and expand and expand.
I feel sometimes a little scared that I can't control that circle
a little bit better.
I'd like to feel like there's a proscribed journey that one
is taking.
Like you're going from here, you're going to this spot,
this spot, this spot.
And then at the end, when your life is finishing,
you're in your deathbed, and God appears.
It says, you've done the right thing.
Then you pick the music that you exit with perfectly.
But it's more like just this unending maze
where you open this door, and then that door leads to this,
and this, and this, and this, and there's endless other things.
The world of music is just enormous.
I knew it was big when I first went to New York to study,
but I had no idea just how big it really could become.
And of course, it's not just investigating the past.
Music is created every single day.
So in addition to expanding in terms of what you don't know
from the past, what you don't know about today,
and what you don't know is going to be composed tomorrow,
there's just endless possibilities.
So not only looking into all those possibilities,
but then also deciding which possibilities are really
of interest to you and which are not.
And I think after my birthday this year,
I'm tempted not to say the number,
but what the heck, I'll go for it.
I'll soon be turning 65.
There's something that's saying, it's time to say it's all right
if you don't want to play that anymore,
you know, the rest of my life without playing that piece.
Actually, I recently moved to this lovely apartment
you see me in.
And moving for a musician always involves countless,
probably 200 boxes of scores.
And there I was sifting through a lot of those scores.
And some of them I looked at and I thought,
I'm not going to play that.
I'm probably not even going to teach it.
But I don't need it at my home.
I'll put it in my studio at Temple University
in case a student's interested in it.
I'm starting to think about when I'm not here,
maybe somebody can use it.
So, and I'm not sure.
Not yet.
You're very young.
No, I don't want to get too morbid about any of that.
But there's something a little bit comforting in a way
that, you know, I recall the first time I walked
into the Juilliard Library and I saw a student, as I said,
I just turned 16 or 17.
And I see these aisles and aisles and aisles of scores
and so much music.
I had no knowledge of what it was.
I was terrified.
You know, my God, I'm going to learn all this.
How am I going to do this?
So now it doesn't terrify me so much
that that stuff is actually kind of endless.
And are you still learning new repertoire on a regular basis?
Yes, it's kind of.
I often tell people that planning, say,
planning a recital program is a little bit like plotting out
a gourmet meal, right?
You're going to have a dinner party
and you want everybody to have something that they like.
You know, there's got to be some salad.
There has to be some side dishes,
a couple of main courses, maybe some desserts,
maybe some side snacks, some candy here and there,
you know, or something sweet to drink and so forth.
And in terms of either recital programming
or what I feel like if I'm studying
and I have a good balanced program to work on,
well, there's things to study that are of technical interest
that help me maintain just my ability to play.
And there's never any shortage of challenging etudes
to look at, of course.
Then, of course, there's Baroque music.
And if I'm not really so much in the mood for Bach,
actually, these days I'm finally sitting down.
I'm trying to read about 10 to 15 Scarlatti sonatas every day
so that at some point I can say, yes, I played through them all.
It's really important.
I think of him as one of the very, very great composers,
a composer I dearly love.
And I don't want to climb into the casket
without knowing, yeah, I did.
I don't want to feel like, oh, there was volume 10 and 11.
I didn't get to.
That'll be sort of disappointing.
What's, of course, intriguing about Scarlatti is
that in his writing he seems to have thought
of every possible technical device used by composers
from much later centuries.
Think about double notes and octaves and crossed hands
and different articulations and registrations and speeds.
I mean, the variety is simply astonishing.
Then there's classical sonatas.
And these days I always find myself catching up on the ones
that I don't know quite as well.
These days it could probably be Schubert.
And the romantic repertoire has been pretty much covered.
I'm much more of a Chopin and Brahms personnel
than I used to be.
You know, Liszt has had his run in my life.
Youngsters with the fast hands would play all the Liszt.
That would be just fine.
I'm sort of getting into Dvorak all over again.
People don't generally know that he wrote a lot of piano music.
And although some of it is a little unwieldy in terms
of his keyboard writing, it's quite beautiful
and very refreshing in a way.
Then at the 20th century there's just always more Pizzoni
and Martinu and yes, even some more Miklos Rocha.
And then new things.
I mean, Peter Wolf.
I'm always looking for new Japanese composers to play.
I'm very intrigued by that country and its music as well.
And, you know, composers do send me scores.
And I tend to be kind of picky.
I'll read through things.
And in general, if I'm not interested,
I'll just lay them aside.
But I do make it kind of a commitment
that I don't just play old music.
That I do act to try to premiere things,
not just by a famous composer, but by generally a lesser known
composer who I happen to have met.
Someone who needs a champion.
You know, I think that's part of the process for me.
Wow. That's quite amazing.
You know, lately a lot of young musicians started performing more,
you know, lesser known compositions or lesser known composers,
compositions by lesser known composers or what not.
But you've been doing this for decades and you're way ahead of everybody else.
And then, yes.
And then, you know, to do this, my podcast, I actually get to learn
about each guest, but also I get to learn so much about different piano literature.
And then as I was learning about you and listening to all sorts of, you know,
your recordings on Spotify or YouTube, I came across so many interesting pieces.
So, for example, this morning I was watching a performance of
Kulank Variations by Koji Taku.
Koji Taku, yes.
That's a fantastic transcription.
It's a very great piece and that's a wonderful story to tell,
which links into all of all of this.
You know, there are basically, I would say, two central characters in my life
who really inspired me to think about music on a very cosmopolitan basis.
The first was my Baltimore main piano teacher after Miss Wolf.
She took me to play for her teacher who was a brilliant Filipino pianist
named Reynaldo Reyes.
And Reynaldo was a graduate of the Paris Conservatory.
He got second prize in the Puzoni competition and a few other notable things.
But he settled in Baltimore around the time when I was a kid to teach piano.
And of course, every American dollar he earned doing that went back to the
Philippines to support a family of about 2,700 cousins.
The tradition of that place.
But he inspired me so much because he spoke seven or eight languages.
And I remember as a child to go to his house or his studio,
I loved it when the phone would ring because my brother and I would look at
each other and we'd play a little game.
Guess what language we're about to hear because we could never tell who he was
going to talk to on that phone.
Now, this is in like 1965, 66.
And international phone calls themselves were a huge, huge deal.
So this man would pick up the phone and we'd hear French, we'd hear German,
we'd hear Italian, we'd hear Tagalog, we'd hear Greek, you know, for God's sake.
He spoke so many languages.
And he loved to opine that language was the key to the world, that you could,
if you spoke languages, you could go anywhere and do anything.
It left a very serious imprint upon my brain.
I didn't even study any foreign language until I got to high school.
I studied French and I studied some Russian.
Only later in life I studied a bit of Spanish and Japanese as well.
But that cosmopolitan outlook made its impression upon me for sure.
And then shortly after I got to Juilliard, we had the most marvelous teacher
of piano literature.
He was a great pianist named Joseph Bloch.
And Jimmy Bloch became a very, very dear friend.
He was a very witty man.
He was also a very well-traveled man.
He didn't have the gift of language per se, but he was someone who reveled
in the exotic.
And he brought this kind of zest and joy about that into the classroom
in the most wonderful ways.
You know, he would wax eloquently about composers who were never played
at that time in the 1970s, like Alcom.
And he had this very theatrical way of speaking with his hand held high,
like this, Alcom, the etudes and the minor keys.
You poor little boys and girls don't know what you're missing.
Say this kind of stuff, you know.
So I remember his very first lecture giving him the whole history
of the piano literature, which he knew, you know,
encyclopedically he just reveled in this.
The very first class was about the Elizabethan Virginals book.
You know, he has this music for these instruments I didn't even know existed
and composers like John Bull and William Blow and Giles Farnaby.
And it was amazing to me.
And I went and I started learning some of that and I brought it
to the class the next week.
And I think it was a piece by Farnaby.
He stood over me and he said, wonderful, you were born to play Farnaby,
which is not necessarily a compliment.
But I just loved this adventurous and funny spirit that he had.
Mr. Block also loves the country of Japan.
He had been in the army and served in the army during the occupation of Japan.
And I think during that time he had met artists and musicians.
He was sort of an esthet, you know, part of his personality.
And I became interested in Japanese culture and we sort of bonded over that
and also other things.
We both liked silent movie music and things like this.
But it was Joseph Block who really particularly inspired me in terms
of he would make the students come up to sight read scores in the class.
And I quickly learned how poor most musicians are at sight reading.
It was sort of a bad skill.
As it so happens, my very first teacher,
Juilliard was not a bad teacher but certainly not a good one.
He was mostly a non-teacher.
He slept through a lot of my lessons and had a nice nap.
And I was rather distraught about it at the time.
And I remember thinking, well, what am I going to do about this?
And, you know, it was not a time when people ever dreamed thinking about
change your piano teacher.
But in that state of mind, I went into the Juilliard Library one day
and I thought I'm in New York City.
This is Juilliard and I'm looking at this wall of things that I don't know.
And basically, what if I just start playing through things?
And I embarked on a two-year project.
It took me pretty much exactly two years to read through every volume
of piano music on those shelves.
Now, I skipped some that I didn't like so much, like Prokofiev.
It's pretty hard to sight read Prokofiev.
It's not my favorite composer, frankly.
But I started with Isidor Atron's Rhapsody Number Two one morning.
And then two years later, I remember finishing
up with the Piano Concerto of Ephraim's Zimbalist.
So it took me from A to Z. And, of course, what happens when you do that,
you know, okay, you get to A, you have to deal with, yeah,
Alcon, who I wasn't too crazy about, but Albanus was pretty interesting.
And just fudged my way through, through Iberia was rather a challenge.
Oh, so good.
And then you get to see you suddenly hit someone like Clementi.
You realize, oh my God, there's four volumes of Clementi sonatas
that nobody ever plays.
And then there's Chabrier.
He's a marvelous composer, you know.
And then I hit the four big volumes of sonatas by Jan Sladislav Dushek.
Some of them are very, very beautiful.
And then when I got to F, there was Pharre waiting for me, well,
to play through all the barter roles of Pharre.
Over the course of those two years, I became a very good sight reader.
And I was accompanying a lot of friends on string instruments as well.
So I became a kind of a sought after accompanist for recitals.
And my skill sets improved, you know, quite a bit.
Sight reading will improve your technique, it'll improve everything.
And that was kind of like my thing.
I would spend at least an hour, sometimes two, in the practice room
in the beginning of the day, the very first sandwich,
just read, read, read, read, read.
I really had no idea how much I was helping myself out in terms of being able
to speed up my learning process and learning repertoire.
But I gained such an appreciation for those composers
who you just didn't hear in the concert hall.
And then I wanted to play those composers.
You know, I heard my classmates up and down the halls
of Juilliard playing all the Beethoven sonatas brilliantly.
Chopin etudes like Nobody's Business, Liszt etudes, works of Chopin.
These were the, you know, the stock and trade.
And I had to study those things also as well.
But nobody was playing Mujeres Espagnolos or Joaquín Torina.
And it's so beautiful.
I'm so happy I recorded that.
I love, actually I love the album.
And I see the painting in the back.
Is that the painting?
I don't know if you can see it.
I noticed.
Yes, yes.
I love the album.
I mean, so many genres you tackle in recordings and concert venues, right?
And then, oh, I also love the album called Jazz Nocturne.
Oh, yes.
And you know, I had to go to Amazon and buy the score
because I absolutely fell in love with all the pieces in that album.
Oh, well, Dana Sui is one marvelous composer.
I realized I skipped, I started that long dive traveling.
I totally skipped over, you had mentioned the Poulenc variations of Koji Taku
because I wanted to bring this full circle.
It was many years after I was out of school and I was living in Western Canada.
But when I came to New York, I would always visit Joseph Block at his home
in Larchmont when he was becoming rather elderly in the early 2000s.
And he had these two volumes of collected Japanese piano music
from his occupation days.
It had been published by Zenon, I think, or whatever.
And I asked him if I could borrow those and he said, oh, sure.
And I took those home.
And in the middle of those, that collection of music by composers
who I'd never heard of, here was this piece by Koji Taku
who I'd never heard of either.
And it amazed me.
And I went back to Jimmy's house, I don't know, a few weeks later,
and I played the piece through for him and he loved it and so did I.
And I started to put that onto my concert programs.
I didn't know much about Koji Taku.
I just knew that he had been trained in Paris, studied with Corteau
and Boulanger and then become kind of a jazz pianist later in life.
But at some point, his daughter contacted me.
I had no idea.
His daughter, who was still alive, and she's sort of a pop musician.
And she was delighted that I was playing the piece.
And then a Japanese publishing company asked me
about preparing a new edition of the piece because it had a lot
of problems in the score.
And I did that.
I prepared a rather thorough edition of that piece.
And then another edition has come out since that time and the editor
of that edition pays homage to me and thanks to me
for doing such a wonderful job with the thing.
I'm very, very proud of that.
In a way, I plucked something of total obscurity
that no Japanese musician remembered at all and brought it back to life.
I can go into my grave knowing I did something good in my life.
It's a good feeling.
I think it's a great set of variations.
And I've played it a bunch of places.
And I'm so proud that it's back in print because of me.
Oh, that's beautiful.
Honestly, as I was listening, your performances are actually really
distinguished by a deep intimacy and profound understanding
of each composer's roots, history, and culture, language,
and allowing you to connect with their stories
and convey the compassion in their works really.
So can you share how you personally approach the process
of understanding a composer's intentions, especially you perform
so many different works by various composers from the dead
to the living, you know?
So well, that's boy, you keep me you brought the heavy artillery.
It's it's all right.
That's fair enough.
I'm thinking back again to a very big influence upon my life,
particularly in my teen years, was the world of paintings
and visual art, probably starting just from class field trips to museums.
We lived in Baltimore, but we would not my dad would either drive
or take us on the train down to Washington
and see museums for cultural betterment.
But particularly, I guess it was the impressionist composers always left a
very, very big influence on me.
I just loved, you know, a lot of people do love the canvases of Renoir
and Monet and so forth.
But it it it fascinated me that these canvases were like a portal to a totally
different world.
And if you stand transfixed into one of these places,
you can absolutely smell the breeze.
You can feel the air in those things.
You know, it's just enables you to relive something that in a sense is gone.
But it's immortal there in front of your eyes.
Even as a child, I was kind of dazzled by portraits of Rembrandt, you know,
because I would look at them and guess they were beautiful.
But what stunned me was that the people were alive to me.
They weren't dead.
You know, their eyes, their hands, everything telling me their stories.
And I think that I had this connection between what art truly is.
It is a kind of an immortality.
It's this portal to someone's story, somebody's existence.
And I mean, this is what humanity is.
It's a series of stories.
We all have our story to tell.
So that's the part that maybe fascinates me the most about the music I hear that
really intrigues me is where is it bringing me to?
What kind of story is it telling?
Say, when I'm playing Rachmaninoff's variations on a theme of Paganini for piano
orchestra, you know, it's such a strong, rhythmically absorbing piece.
And the minute you get into, I don't know, it's variation seven or eight.
And the Dies Irae is her.
Now you realize that the composer is telling you something about the devil, the violin,
the power of the A minor tonality and the inevitability of death.
You know, he wrote this piece towards the end of his life.
He wrote it around the same time as the symphonic dances, which also use the Dies Irae
and the Isle of the Dead and so forth.
And you want to climb into Rachmaninoff's head.
I mean, what was he thinking about?
What were his thoughts about the meaning of life, about the brevity of life or his own
contribution as a creative artist?
I find that so completely absorbing, you know, and it's probably one of my favorite concertos
to play because it just sucks you from the very, very first notes.
It's a perfect piece of music.
I can't say that about a whole lot of scores actually, that, you know, even if Beethoven
or Mendelssohn, Schumann, et cetera, et cetera, we can hear things that are great.
It's a great piece of music, but to say something is absolute sheer perfection.
You could not change a single note dynamic, anything in that score.
I do think of that piece that way, the same way as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony perhaps,
or the Requiem of Gabriel Farré.
In any case, you know, this idea of studying the music from the musical outside of it,
like it's a great tableau, it's a story, it's an autobiography, it's someone's life, it's
so totally absorbing to me.
I mean, I can't imagine starting the study of a piece from the aspect of, okay, let's
see, I want to win a piano competition, so this part I want to play fast and then this
has to be accurate.
I mean, those technical details will come in when you analyze the piece, pick it apart,
have to practice it, you know, like the master watchmaker take all the mechanism apart and
study it.
But I think that comes later.
The very first thing is, does it excite your passion?
Does the piece excite your passion?
Does it pull you into that composer's world?
And that's what a great composer does, you know, pulls you into their story, not your
story, but their story.
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You mentioned a little bit about technique.
So how do you balance the need for technical precision with the expressive demands of the
piece?
Do you find that one often informs the other?
I think ultimately they do, although like I just said about the watchmaker, there's
this aspect of study.
If you start from the top of Mount Olympus, imagining, well, let's pick a piece.
Actually, I think I'm going to restudy the Mendelssohn Rondo Papriccioso because I played
it when I was 12 and I think I can do it a little bit better now.
So from the Mount Olympus of, oh, that's going to be light and frothy and the opening will
be incredibly beautiful and moving and then there'll be sprites and elves dancing and
it's over in the thunder sock at the end.
What a great dramatic piece.
That's my mindset.
That's where I want to end up.
To get there means lots of slow practice.
The opening has to be perfectly calibrated and voiced with taste and style and then a
lot of question about tempos.
Is it going to be a very slow, somewhat slow?
How are you going to approach that?
Then what about the speed of the scherzo?
As a kid, I used to just womp it out and play it as fast as I could.
Well, that's not going to happen now.
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Then the octaves, you don't want those just to be show off bangy octaves like when I was
12, that's what I did.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Well, no.
It's a storm.
It has to have some evocative picture and so forth.
So now you have to break it down into, okay, technically, what are the things I have to
be in complete control of so that I don't have to think about the technique?
My favorite definition of piano technique is by pianist Beryl Rubinstein.
Not many people realize there's so many Rubinstein.
There's Anton and Art.
Beryl Rubinstein was, I think he was the head of the Cleveland Institute, but he wrote a
couple of short books on piano technique.
And I love his definition where he says that technique for pianists is like money in the
bank.
The more you have, the easier your life will be.
However, to show it off for its own sake is very bad taste, perfectly said.
It is, of course, the means to the end.
And if you have a prodigious technique you can rely on, then you can set about to controlling
the sounds and the speed and the tempo and the message of what it is that you're doing.
I was really surprised when my teacher, Mr. Reyes, passed away.
I think shortly after that, my dad dug up out of the basement all of my old assignment
books that I had had since studying with him starting around age seven or so until I went
to Juilliard.
And he mailed them to me and he sent them to me.
And I was looking through them.
And my remembrance of Reynaldo Reyes when I was a child was that he danced around the
room.
He explained the difference between words like vivace and living and animato and talked
about French sculpture and paint the colors in French paintings and what is the real meaning
of Impressionism and how do you half pedal and quarter pedal, blah, blah, these things,
because these are the intellectual things that so absorbed me about his brilliant conversation.
I was not ready to open those assignment books and see week after week after week after week
specific assignments, this scale, this scale, this scale, this scale, contrary, parallel,
staccato, legato at the third, at the sixth, the octave, the Czerny, the Kulak, the Pishna,
all the Bach inventions, Bach's symphonias, just piles of that stuff.
I do remember kind of hating the Bach three-part inventions and him getting mad at me once
and he said, you have to practice.
He didn't like to practice those things.
But he had schooled me in these kind of fundamentals as well as having a weekly solfège class,
also for all his students.
The college students and the kids, I mean, the whole range, the whole panoply we do in
front of each other.
But it's sort of reinforced to me that you really can't be a virtuoso unless you attend
to your equipment.
It's like you can't be a race car driver if you don't open up the hood and see if all
the parts are working inside.
So at some point, well, let's see, we're leading into a discussion perhaps of my own approach
to teaching the technique of the piano, which kind of opened up for me shortly after I moved
to Canada in 2003 when I started to teach at the University of British Columbia.
It was a colleague of mine who mentioned to me, he said, did you ever see those technique
books with the big red covers on them?
And I thought, yeah, I remember in the old Juilliard book sale, they used to throw those
things out.
What was in those things?
And then by chance, I was approached by Dover Publications about doing some editing and
eventually I actually became the chief editor there for a little while.
But I thought about those books and I thought, you know, I don't really even teach much technique
to my students and that's not very bright.
Maybe I should give those books a look again.
They were, of course, the seven volumes of the Master School of Piano Playing and Virtuosity
by Alberto Honas, which are still a very, very unique and incredible resource.
I found a couple of those volumes somehow and looked through them and they're just fantastic
documents because, of course, they have this very, very scientific, really intelligent
approach to studying keyboard technique from many different angles, butt rests by many
exercises by Honas himself, as well as these exercises by 20 or so of the world's greatest
virtuosos at the time because they were friends of Honas.
So I brought the idea of republishing these.
They hadn't been in print in decades to the powers that be at Dover and they were keen
for the first two volumes, which they didn't have to pay any royalties on.
So I said, well, I've got to write something about the, you know, just put them out there.
Like they're just, you know, whatever.
I need to know more about the person who did these and make something kind of special about
this repubblication.
So I started to research the life and work of Alberto Honas, who was a very important
pianist, a good friend of Ignatz Paderewski and he happened to be the premier of Paderewski's
piano concerto in New York and also in Boston.
And he had taught in Berlin for a while and then come to the United States, taught in
Philadelphia and New York primarily.
But he taught some rather prominent people and it's sort of, I had this bingo moment,
this recollection of talking about Alberto Honas decades before with the composer Vincent
Persichetti, who was a teacher at Juilliard during my time there.
Because Persichetti had studied this kind of mirror writing with Honas, who proposes
it in his study of scales.
That is that an E major scale playing in ascending with the right hand, E, F sharp, G sharp and
so forth.
In mirror pattern, the opposite direction will be C, B flat, A flat in the left hand
and with the two hands doing the same patterns of white and black notes in opposite directions.
And it's a very, very good way to practice things so that you develop the same facility
for both hands.
I guess I'd seen that somewhere, I think Ernest Bacon also mentions it.
And I saw Mr. Persichetti in the hallway one day and I said something about his mirror
etudes and I said, is that something similar to, I saw those exercises by Alberto Honas
and he got very animated.
He was a short, very wiry Italian man.
And he said, oh, oh yes, yes, mirror writing is a very exciting way to write for the red
day.
Incredible, hard, yes, yes.
Honas showed me, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I just sort of like forgotten about that and said, oh yeah, right, Alberto Honas and all
that kind of stuff.
Anyway, so one of the things I wanted to write a kind of short biography of Mr. Honas to
put into the preface for these volumes.
And I started to look up all the students he had taught and some of those names are
a little obscure to us now, but some rather prominent pianists at the time, primarily
Ellen Ballon was a very famous French Quebecois pianist.
But this one name came up, Rhea Sadowski.
And I was going crazy trying to find her biography and particularly her obituary because I just
couldn't find it.
And then I saw there was an address in Ann Arbor and then there was another address in
Berkeley and I said, no.
Could it?
Anyway, the address in Berkeley also had a phone number.
So I doubted.
And this voice answered.
It was a voice out of 1935.
Hello.
The New York 1935 voice.
Is it possible that I could speak with Mrs. Rhea Sadowski?
This is she speaking.
May I please have the honor of knowing whom I am speaking with?
And I was so stunned.
I said the rudest thing imaginable.
I said, my name is Sarah Davis Buchanan.
I'm a pianist and I'm doing some research on the life and work of your teacher, Alberto
Honas.
And I'm astonished.
I said, I'm very, very happy to find that you're alive.
And she said, well, I'm very happy that I'm alive also.
Fair enough.
So I bought a ticket to San Francisco two days later and I bought a mini cam that I
filmed.
My first thing I did with Rhea was film a three hour personal interview with her because
she had an incredible, absolutely incredible life story.
And it's one of the shocking and disheartening things in a way to be a concert pianist, to
realize that our work is playing the music of others and so forth.
And we may have a career for a while, but after we died, you're not going to be up there
like Bach and Mozart.
How much are you really going to be remembered?
She was originally born in Canada, had immigrated to the Bay Area, was a Greek prodigy, studied
with Honas in Los Angeles, also with both Josephine and Rosina Levine in New York.
Gone to Europe, was a good friend of Misha Levitsky and Egon Patri and people like this.
Her husband was a Hispanic scholar.
So they lived in the 1940s in South America, where she premiered a lot of really important
piano music by some of the greatest composers in that continent, in Chile, Brazil, Argentina,
you name it.
And in 1931, she gave a New York recital where she played the American premiere of Prokofiev's
third piano set up.
It was an amazing life and an amazing pianist.
And at the time I met her, she was 92 years old with a mind as sharp as a tack and she
still practiced every day.
And at the age of 95 to celebrate her birthday, she learned and memorized the album for the
young of Tchaikovsky and played it live on Canadian radio.
Oh my goodness.
I had made some connections there for her with the CBC up in Vancouver.
She just had a mind that was just incredible and great.
I should say also, by the way, after doing that little radio broadcast, that then when
the cake and candles came out, she said, I feel like a little bit of Bach and walked
to the piano and played the second movement of the Italian concerto more beautifully than
I ever will hear it in my entire life.
It was just incredible pianism and great, great music.
Anyway, so when those two volumes came out, when Dover republished them, they have a sort
of a one page little testimony by Rhea and then a couple of photos of the two of us hanging
out in her house at the time.
She's of course passed on since then.
But she told me quite a bit about Honas's teaching.
What a master teacher that he was.
In the pre-internet age, he wanted to put something out that would have incredible universal
application.
So the seven volumes, which divide the aspects of piano technique into various important
areas, also have text in four languages.
I believe let's see English, Spanish, French, and Italian.
So that they can be used pretty universally around the world.
They came out in 1929, shortly before the Great Depression hit.
They were expensive books.
I think they were priced at $10 a volume, which is well beyond the range of most people's
ability at that time.
After the depression hit, they just went out of print pretty quickly, which is a great
chain because it's the work of a master pedagogue.
Volume one starts from, or I guess I should say that series of those books basically takes
the approach of from small to large.
From the smallest aspects of piano technique to the largest.
So starting with volume one is mostly devoted to exercises that help extend the reach of
the hands and the flexibility of the muscles.
And it has all kinds of intriguing exercises by Honas himself, by Alfred Courtauld, by
Busoni, by Joseph Levine, an incredible stretching exercise by Joseph Levine.
These are great, great exercises by great, great thinkers on the pianistic art.
Volume two devotes itself to the study of scales and all sorts of permutations.
Volume three is arpeggios.
Volume four is about the art of playing double notes, whether it's double seconds, thirds,
fourths, sixths.
And volume five is to go to chords and octaves and volume six about other musical concepts
associated with the piano, including the longest, most useful chapter ever written on the art
of pedaling the piano that I've ever seen.
They're sort of like must haves.
And at the time those first two volumes were republished, none of it was available on IMSLP.
Now the whole thing is on IMSLP.
See it for free.
So I send it to my students all the time and I try to grill them on this and that.
But it's not just the exercises.
It's also after these exercises and suggestions for practice, then Honas puts examples from
the classical piano repertoire, where it's used.
So talking about playing double thirds, he's got a lot of scales with various fingerings
and so forth in double thirds.
And then he's got a few excerpts from of course the Chopin etude, but also other parts of
other pieces, say concertos or sans-sans where there's passage work like that, or music of
Brahms or Mendelssohn might have this aspect or that aspect or that aspect.
And it helps integrate your understanding of you know, you're not just practicing exercise
just to do an exercise.
You're acquiring the skill to be able to play that kind of piece.
So it's fantastically useful stuff.
That influenced my own pedagogy to a great degree because I thought, well, here's one
of the greatest teachers of the 20th century who left behind this great, great record of
just what he thought was important.
And it was kind of amazing to be in Reyes' house and she opened up her old vimes that
she used when she was 13 years old and studying with a man in New York City and showing me
the circles that he made.
Well, this one is not for small hands.
This one will help extend this, you know, whatever.
And I saw that, you know, these books are very, very large.
She didn't intend for anybody to go through every single part of it.
He just pick and choose, you know, this one, this one, this one, this one.
He wanted to have a great resource as a teacher.
And that's what it is for me.
It's a great, great resource for me as a teacher as well.
You have the series of School of Virtuosity titled School of Virtuosity on Tone Bass explaining
Honest technique, right?
Or rather, it's not just a technique, it's really book itself with like a really the
resource for pianists.
And then I'm not part of Tone Bass, so I'm not promoting anything.
But yeah.
So, so these seven courses, seven video series, you are explaining about his book, basically.
That's sort of explaining about his organization of all that material, but then demonstrating
as well, you know, so it's it's good to have somebody showing, you know, because a Tone
Bass has the camera like above the keyboard.
So you can see my hands, you know, showing, say, for example, the stretch marks, this
is one where you play octaves is one three and then silently substitute the second finger
so you can stretch this particular muscle or something like that.
So just sort of demonstrating a good or proper way to do it.
But then those excerpts that I mentioned, you know, some of those show that, you know,
why would you want to do that?
And what's the idea behind all of this?
There's so much to it.
I mean, you know, say to play an octave passage from, let's say, Liszt's B minor sonata,
you know, to discuss all of that would be first to practice the passage with the thumb
alone with a very loose wrist to promote the relaxation of the hand.
Then for accuracy, you probably want to make sure are using just fifth finger, fourth finger,
third finger.
What is the fingerings of some of the outer parts, the aspect of up and down with the
wrist moving in and out of the keyboard, all this.
Would you want to transpose that exercise, for example, to get maximum impact out of
it?
Do you want to practice legato, staccato?
I don't know.
Just all sorts of variation possibilities there which are going to improve your piano
technique.
And tone bass is designed for both professionals and amateurs.
I mean, amateur players, I think, like having this kind of like inside scoop on how do professional
pianists really prepare something.
And they learn a lot from that.
But I've heard some awfully good amateur players also who benefit from this kind of thing.
And I think all of it helps to promote the art of piano playing, which frankly, these
days, you know, we've come down from the great high long ago of the 1920s, 30s, 40s when
everybody took piano lessons to a time now when everybody takes guitar.
That's a shame.
I mean, the piano is a marvelous, magical instrument with not only affords us many,
many hours of sonic joy, but there's still something so wonderfully gathering about a
piano that everyone can stand around and admire and talk and contribute.
And that's how it was in my home, particularly at holiday time, you know, really around the
piano and sing things, you know, it's a very American thing to do.
Well, but that's actually the start of anyone's journey.
So I think these days because I'm teaching young children to sometimes that's something
missing from home because, you know, anyway, but I'm just curious.
So I think you mentioned probably in tone based video because I watched a little bit
because I was so curious about Alberto Hones work and I really want to check out the book.
I'm glad because I was about to buy the book on Amazon, but you can do it.
You can get it for free on IMSLP.
You know, before it was on IMSLP, of course, I wanted to I'm working on that edition of
it.
I wanted to acquire a set and it took took about a year and a half and about a thousand
dollars to get to get a set together.
It's not easy.
Yeah.
But anyway, in the video, you said, you know, you emphasize the importance of building a
solid technique foundation that is developing piano technique is not just a phase, but ongoing
lifelong process.
Right.
And how do you see this continuous development of strong technical foundation continuing
to a pianist's growth and evolution as an artist?
Well, I mean, there's there's always something new under the sun.
Right.
So if I really want to drive myself crazy, I'll open up my volume of those Ligeti etudes
and start practicing some of those because I still recall the first time someone came,
a student came to my apartment to play some of those for me.
And I recalled thinking, thank God, I'm not under the age of 30 and I have to learn these
for competitions.
It would be just flabbergasted, you know, by then.
You know, I had one specific experience which sort of told me that piano technique never
really stops.
And that was a recital in Japan.
I think and I was I really had to play some Scarlatti and I love Scarlatti, you know,
but there was one sonata I thought, oh, I really want to play this thing.
It's nice, nice opening.
And I started practicing it and I realized it had extended passages of repeated notes,
fast repeated notes in the left hand.
I had never done that.
I had never played repeated notes in my left hand.
And I had to spend weeks developing the technique to be able to play it.
I still don't really have that technique to play it.
But if I was going to play that piece, I just had to train my fingers to be able to do that.
And I remember that was like the first time in maybe a few decades that I thought, here's
something I really don't know how to do.
And I have to teach myself how to do it.
There's always going to be something.
I think.
Another amazing gift you have is improvisation.
And you sent me the link of Meet the Mets, Rhapsody in Orange and Blue.
Are you a Mets fan?
I am a Mets fan.
Yes, I've been a Mets fan.
Well, I'm a lifelong baseball fan.
To grow up in Baltimore was to be a Baltimore Orioles fan.
And then when I went to college, I was a very huge Yankees fan for many, many years.
But that came to an end when I moved to Canada and I started to spend a lot more time in
Japan.
I became crazy about the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka.
In fact, you're my enemy.
I'm a Giants fan.
Oh, Japan, they say anti-anti-anti-giants, you know, anti-giant.
Your friend of mine, my friend, sent me this is a Kanji, Hanshin Tigers Kanji drill, Kanji
drill.
And the exercises are based on baseball scenarios.
Oh my goodness, how adorable.
How adorable.
It is rather adorable.
I've got to work on that.
So that became the baseball thing for a long, long time.
But then when I joined the faculty at Temple, I was living in Philadelphia and I have to,
to be honest, I just don't have any affection for the Philadelphia Phillies.
But I always loved New York.
I'm not crazy about the Yankees having moved to a new Yankee stadium.
And anyway, I started rooting for the Mets.
And at some point, a friend of my challenge me says, you know, they have that theme song
is really catchy.
You should do something with that.
I said, oh, come on.
You know, but at some point, I don't know, I did it as a joke.
You know, I started to write this, this, this crazy arrangement of meet the Mets.
And then, okay.
So I made a video of it and the thing went kind of viral and I ended up playing it at
Citi Field a couple of times for their, when they had the pride night.
I played the big Yamaha under the Jumbotron, which is great fun.
I mean, I love baseball and I always have, it was always in our house.
Everybody loved baseball.
My grandmother particularly was the big baseball nut.
So it's kind of, kind of fun, but that's not an improvisation.
I'm really not able to improvise.
That's a jazz skill.
But I have composed a bit.
When I was getting my doctoral degree, I wrote, I wrote a song cycle and a set of variations
for violin and some piano pieces.
And I've lost my interest in composing, unfortunately.
It's hard to do.
It takes up a lot of time and you have to be really inspired.
But I'm glad I wrote those pieces.
And sometimes I do play my own music from time to time.
And I know several very accomplished pianists who really admire that meet the mess thing.
I think I'm going to have to, I didn't write it down.
I'm going to have to notate it down.
Yeah.
Transcription or arrangement are always fun because it's somewhere between the composition
and improvisation.
Right, right, right.
It's a very catchy tune.
You know, what can I say?
And you get to, it's got that part where you have to, you hear the sound of the crack of
the bat.
So you get to hit the piano too.
I know.
I saw it.
It's a brilliant arrangement.
I enjoyed it so much.
And then some of the octaves and chords and oh, they are really, really difficult to do.
Brilliant, brilliant arrangement.
I love it.
You have been teaching for as long as you have been a performing artist, I'm sure.
And then, you know, as someone who has taught at prestigious institutions like the Manhattan
School of Music, the University of British Columbia and Temple University currently,
what have you found to be the most rewarding aspect of shaping the next generation of pianists?
I think the best reward that you get from doing that kind of teaching is you acquire
a kind of perspective, which includes hope because you're touching people.
And it's funny in the fullness of time, how many years I've now taught, I certainly had
students who I thought were just about to just embark on huge major important careers
and didn't.
I also had students that I really didn't really assess their talent levels very high and they
went on to do significant things in music.
You're always surprised by what the end result of things is.
And you sort of learn that the human soul or the creative spirit takes an awfully long
time to gestate.
It doesn't happen quickly by any means.
And maybe I should have intuited that earlier because I certainly when I was finishing up
Juilliard, I was studying with Rudolf Frickushny, a very great teacher, a wonderful man.
And at the time I got out of school and I was entering piano competitions, I played
repertoire that I had studied with him, including Czech music of Martinu and Janáček that
he played a lot.
And people complimented me and said, oh, you play just like Frickushny.
That's a great compliment.
But the problem is I'm not Rudolf Frickushny.
I'm Sarah Davis Pugner.
I wasn't playing even that.
I was playing the music well, but I wasn't playing it like me.
It takes an awfully long time to play like yourself.
And at a certain point I stopped playing that repertoire and just later decided that I'm
going to pick that up later when I know what I want to do with it.
And I'm sure Rudy would have said that to me.
Actually he had a famous quote he used to say that you walk in your own way, you play
the piano in your own way.
It's very, very true.
But in any case, as a teacher, I think I always wanted zealously to give my students all these
things that Mr. Reyes and Mr. Frickushny and several others had given me in terms of nurturing.
Those teachers were like parents to me.
They really took me in hand.
And as long as I was devoted and worked hard, they would give me as good as I gave also.
And so that was my sense of what the teacher-student relationship is really like.
I was a little surprised in my first teaching position that it turned out not necessarily
be the case.
There were some students who were very close to me and we forged quick bonds and others
who were just casual and not much came of it.
And in a sense, they're not family.
We are people who sort of ships passing in the night.
But some of it is destined to be life changing and some of it, it's not.
You learn to sort of give up the control in that situation.
The other party is responsible with themselves.
The best thing you can do is give them the tools.
And if they take the tools and you know there are good tools, they can do something with it.
And I certainly have plenty of students tell me years later how grateful they were to me
for this lesson or that lesson.
Having said that, I remember one summer, I think it was 1978, I was having kind of a
technical crisis in my playing.
I was 18 at the time.
And I went for a summer class in Victoria, British Columbia, where one of the teachers
was a man named William Aide, who was the head of piano at University of Toronto.
But more importantly, he was a co-student with Glenn Gould of a great pedagogue named
Alberto Guerrero.
And Bill Aide just looks, he's still around, Bill Aide looks like a piano prof.
If you have piano prof in the Webster's Dictionary, there's a picture of Bill with his bald head
and his thick glasses.
And he looks like a piano professor.
Bill Aide walked on stage as the piano prof, and we weren't really expecting one night,
expecting very much from him the night he walked on stage and played Campanella faster
than any human being had ever done it.
I couldn't quite believe it, what I was seeing and hearing at that time.
He was a great, great teacher of technique.
And he helped me reshape even the way that I held my fingers so that I could move quickly
and acquire great, great dexterity.
He was a great, great teacher.
And for those six weeks that I worked with him that summer, I spent many, many hours
actually sometimes even sitting on the floor with my hands elevated to force my fingers
to exaggerate and stretch, you know, sort of get them to be more dexterous, doing these
sometimes slow, sometimes fast kind of exercises, and I didn't just do exercises he wrote out,
I fashioned my own out of them and I made a kind of a catalog of what was a good way
to practice this way.
You know, decades later I said to Bill something about how grateful I was for all that work
that summer, and I said, you must have influenced so many hundreds of pianists who did those
exercises.
And he says, no, he says, you were the only one who really did it that much.
I was stunned, you know, to hear him say that.
But I had that experience myself of spending time with students and showing them meticulously
all kinds of ways to practice and then a week or two later asking them how to work out and
say, I didn't like it too much.
You know, you have to let people go on their own journey of life and realize that some
will place great value on your wisdom and advice and others have a different way.
They just either they don't see it, they don't want to see it or they don't really quite
understand the value of what it is that you're giving them or frankly, or it doesn't work
for them.
So anyway, you asked me for sort of a positive statement about all the teaching and it sounds
like I'm making a negative statement, but not at all.
It's more like as a young teacher, I really felt like, well, I know all this stuff and
I tell people this stuff that I'm going to have this incredible class of brilliant pianists
like Liszt or Busoni and they're going to transform the world.
Well, you learn to give up controlling other human beings.
And you know, and that's an important lesson to learn for sure.
But then how much more pride do you take in the accomplishments of students who do take
what you give them and go their own way with it?
And I'm thinking of three in particular who none of whom is a professional pianist.
They're all composers.
Well, tremendous composers and I play their works in concert because they're great composers.
I remember one of them is a Canadian composer, young fellow and called me up one day says,
Dr. B, can I stop practicing Hohenhausen?
Well, I was so impressed by what you showed me.
I was doing that for like 12 hours.
My hands really hurt now.
Well, that's some dedication there.
I said to him, you're a composer.
Stop practicing.
I guess the point being, you know, I mean, there was there was those who became composers.
It was one that went into music technology.
There was one who became the director of the US Marine Corps Band.
You know, people have their own artistic muses and it might not be aligned with yours, but
it's wonderful to see them follow it.
So well, sounds like you are raising creative, innovative people.
Well, in a way, I don't know that's that's necessarily such a totally positive thing
to say.
This has happened so many times to me that some student I've been teaching for a few
years, whether it's two years or even four years, undergrad student, it's usually in
the last or the next to last piano lesson that they say, Dr. B, what do I do now?
We start by saying, find time to ask me.
And I the first few times that happened, I was really, really buffaloed and I felt inadequate
because it's like I should be able to tell them, well, see, you enter this competition
that you write to this person, you do this, this like directed micromanage their life
and career.
But it was when I gave up on that that I came up with far, far better advice, you know,
because a few of them had said to me, a few students from time to time said to me, you
know, I think I'm going to teach some kids for a little while and just put some money
away and then maybe I'll go to business school or something like that.
Is there concerned about supporting themselves?
I mean, OK, reasonable enough.
But in general, when those students ask me about what do I do in the future, I say to
them, please look at this world around you.
Are we in need of more dentists, more accountants, more lawyers, more bankers, investment Wall
Street types, you know, delivery men, I don't know, shopkeepers, blah, blah, blah.
In this world, if even just 10 percent more human beings pursued creative arts as their
work, if they were painters, dancers, comedians, skateboarders, jugglers, storytellers, fabric
makers, think about just any way in which the human spirit can create something of beauty
and of intrigue.
What would this world be like if instead of the coin of money, we measured things in terms
of the coin of creative donation?
That is, that we're giving something to the world that makes it a better and happier and
more delightful place in which to live.
It really wouldn't take so many people.
I often say to people also, you know, in a baseball game, typically you'll have 40 to
50 thousand people cheering.
If you could get 500 of those people start going to classical concerts once in a while,
the music business would be in incredible shape.
Anyway, that's my way to try to tell them that you might have a hard life pursuing,
you know, a life as a musician, of course, but you're giving something so important and
so valuable and so self perpetuating that it means so much more than if you just say,
OK, that was fun, but now I'll get serious.
The world is not a better place when everybody gets too serious.
At least that's how I feel.
Well, you're a wonderful mentor and wonderful teacher.
I recently watched the promotional video for your autobiographical theater show of pigs
and pianos.
Yes.
So as a transgender artist and advocate, your unique position in the classical music world
is beautifully portrayed in the show, I'm sure, and which details your coming of age
story in New York.
Yes, right.
Yes.
So how has do you believe the classical music community has evolved in terms of acceptance
and visibility for transgender artists?
I would have to say no, I don't think it's really evolved so very much.
I'm routinely frustrated by the words of various sponsors and presenters and certainly my dedicated
agent has put in more than 20 years of hard effort trying to get doors to break open.
There certainly is some change in view of transgender people, particularly in northern
sophisticated cities, but if you see the horrific laws being passed that specifically target
LGBTQ folks all over, particularly the South and the Midwest, in many ways, culturally,
this country is fighting the Civil War.
It seems to be dedicated to fighting the Civil War forever and that's just rather maddening.
That extends into the music business for sure because presenters are afraid of something
that donors see as either off-putting or as they'll use it as an insult, DEI.
Right now that's something bad about DEI.
I was hardened to see Michelle Obama refer to that in her speech last week and say that
about affirmative action as if there hasn't been affirmative action for people in power
for the last two to three decades that's been around.
Now having said all of that, I'm well aware of my position in classical music and that
to date there's really nobody else doing what I do as a transgender artist.
Things will probably get better when there are a few more and I think there are more
pretty much on the horizon at the moment because you just can't keep burying people forever.
I know that I stand for something.
I know that when I walk into a concert stage that itself makes a statement.
I was aware of that when I transitioned as well.
I didn't realize how direly it would just stop my career cold when I was 37 years old
that everything would just sort of come to a halt and I would have to go to Canada just
to get a teaching job.
But I'm proud that I survived it and I'm aware that I have a kind of a social responsibility
not to be silent about it but to be very out about it, to be very proud about it, to be
as tasteful as I can about it, but also to challenge people.
In the last year particularly when these sort of bathroom bills are going around, I have
made speeches from the stage.
Especially after playing a concerto I'll say something to the audience that if they value
the worth of the music that they've just heard to please value the worth of the musicians
making it which include people like me and I appreciate your applause.
Since you like me so much please don't go into the voting booth and strip my civil rights
away.
It usually gets a big hand when I say that.
Of course what people will say publicly and do publicly is often very different than what
they'll say privately.
One sad prediction I had at the time of the George Floyd riots and sort of the birth of
Black Lives Matter when I saw the arts sort of responding to okay well we have to have
more black representation in the arts.
I sort of predicted, I said I thought I had bet for two or three seasons they'll have
lots of black artists and then it'll go right back to the same old thing.
I sort of feel like I'm seeing that happening.
There were these Florence Price things, lots of Florence Price.
The true diversity that could be presented in the concert hall is far larger than what
these concert presenters can conceive of.
I realize that I've been doing DEI myself for decades just because I love the diversity
of art.
Classical music, if it's just Bach, Mozart and Beethoven you're going to might be tired
of that after a while.
The fly in that ointment is always economics.
What they think is going to sell, what's going to sell a ticket, what's going to sell out
of house.
Ironically, what I've learned myself over so many years of playing concerts is that
you could walk on stage and play an entire program of really hard to listen atonal stuff
but if you present it in a charming and enlightened and interesting and passionate way and talk
about the music and what it means and how come you love it so much and listen for this
and this and this and make it kind of an adventure, everybody will love it.
I remember this wonderful quote in an obituary.
I have a bad habit.
I like to read the obituaries first thing in the morning.
First of all, to see if anybody I don't like is gone.
So that's a good day.
What a way to start a new day.
But addition by subtraction.
But no, you see the interesting lives that have been lived.
So there was a conductor I hadn't heard of.
His name was Franz Ahlers, A-L-L-E-R-S, and he had a pretty big obit there.
And he was a major conductor in Europe before the World War, before the Second World War.
And then of course, like so many European Jews, he fled to the United States.
And he found his employment primarily conducting in the Broadway pit orchestras, primarily the
Lerner and Lowe musicals, which he had done.
And this is great, great music, of course.
And he was asked, you know, since he had been doing Beethoven and Strauss in Austria, and
now he's doing Lerner and Lowe in New York City, he had been asked about it.
Did he feel bad about it or whatever?
And he said, simply said, there is no first or second rate music.
There are only first or second rate performances.
There's so much truth in that statement.
If you have pride in what you do, if you're convinced of the excellence of what it is
that you're doing, then you can do a great job or you fail and you don't do a great job.
So this kind of informs my thinking about so many concerts.
It hardly even matters really what it is that you're doing.
Are you doing it well?
Are you doing it in a way that connects with people?
Are you doing it in a way that ignites people's creative spark, awakens their passion?
That's really where the big money is.
Wow.
So what advice would you give to young LGBTQ plus musicians who are navigating their own
journeys in an industry that has historically been less inclusive, although we're trying?
Well there's always been those folks in the industry, of course.
Music creative, the creative arts are just full of wonderful LGBTQ folks.
It's just in the past that it was sort of like it was shielded, it wasn't talked about.
As one of my ex-managers said to me after he met me, after I'd come out, he said, well,
it just wasn't done.
So it was like it was an Emily Post rule or something like that.
I think there are good and bad aspects to the technological age, of course, as we all
know with cell phones and so forth.
But I think young people are just much more connected than ever before and their knowledge
of the world and acceptance of things that are very different than their understanding
is huge.
I mean, I can walk into a classroom pretty much anywhere.
Nobody's going to give me a second look or a second thought or anything about who I am
or the fact that I'm trans.
It just doesn't mean anything to these young people, which is I think it's a very, very
wonderful thing.
I guess my tack has been that patience is my best friend in terms of if you live long
enough the old fuddy-duddies do die off the vine eventually and then they're replaced
by people who have a very different experience of the world and fresher appreciation of reality.
I mean, even politically, I would say I think it's the young people who are going to bring
us into a better era, hopefully at the end of this year.
So we need our young people.
We rely on them.
We need their fresh blood.
We need their fresh ideas.
We need their energy and we need their enthusiasm.
And that's all there.
The young people that I meet, young musicians I meet, I don't even think they think there's
a separation between straight and LGBTQ.
It's all the human race.
We're all humans, so what's the issue?
It's sort of like the old stick in the mud.
I don't want to insult my own dad, but well, poor dad.
He's a good man, but I'll tell that story.
I think it was in Vancouver.
He came for a visit and we walked into a Starbucks.
Now, my dad was born in, gee, probably 1933 and worked on the railroad as a young man
and he was a blue collar white guy.
So I don't know how much he had ever been into Starbucks, but we walked into Starbucks.
I said, Dad, you want to get some coffee?
He said, sure.
We took him into Starbucks and he started shaking.
He looked up on the board there and he saw these things, these frappuccino things, cappuccino
things, half whip, no whip, decaf, half calf, whatever.
He just started shaking.
He literally was shaking and the baristas, yes, sir, can I help you?
And he got mad and he said, I want a cup of coffee.
And I said, Dad, she'll make you a cup of coffee.
It's OK.
You don't have to pay attention.
What's all that stuff?
He was sort of upset.
And I tried to talk him down to, you know, you could have what you want and those people
can have what they want, too.
It's all good.
It's OK.
You don't have to get upset and challenged by that.
I think that's kind of like the problem.
The problem folks are the ones looking at the board and just wondering, why has the
world changed like that?
It's too much.
It's too confusing.
It's too much.
They can't deal with it.
No.
And I don't want to even critique that.
I mean, like I said, I started this interview mentioning my age.
I mean, I don't feel old.
I don't want to think none of us really.
I think we like the idea of old as revered.
Wiser.
Yes, wiser.
Yes, there we go.
But old as fuddy duddy and stuck in the mud.
That's not particularly all that attractive.
And yet, you know, the world changes with incredible speed and it's very, very hard
to keep up with things.
And I know any time I have to use my cell phone, I mean, you know, you see people, right?
I'm not one of them.
I'm the person doing it.
And I'm fine with that.
I don't want to miss out so much.
So I hope not.
Anyway, so that's my diversity story.
Wow.
Well, thank you.
Well, you know, living authentically, especially in the face of challenges, it requires such
immense energy and courage and can be also but in the end can be the source of joy in
life.
So from your performances to your advocacy, I think it really shows.
So I appreciate you for being here today.
Really.
Thank you, Yukimi.
Thank you so much.
You're so kind.
Such a lovely interview.
What is your next step?
I believe you are Greenwich House School Music School's inaugural German Dias Memorial Piano
Chair.
Yes, this was offered to me, I guess it's going back about eight or nine months ago,
just right out of the blue.
Rachel Black, who is the head of Greenwich House Music School in New York City, yes,
in New York City, yes, sent me an email and Herman Diaz was a very fine pianist, a great
pedagogue, and he had been the chair of that music department for about 60 years.
He was a good friend of mine.
He was a teaching assistant to Claudio Arrao, a good friend of Arrao's also.
His brother, his older brother, was a very prominent Cuban composer as well.
Herman was kind of like the royalty of Greenwich House for many, many years.
He taught a lot of really gifted pianists who went on to find careers and went to, after
that school, they went to Juilliard and Manass and Boston Conservatory and places like this.
Anyway, Herman died, I guess, about 10 years ago.
And Rachel sent me this email and she said, you know, we had this meeting at the piano
faculty and she said, it's been 10 years since Herman left us and we all agree we need sort
of a flagship person to be our head of our department and put a face on our department.
She said, and your name was brought up in Ubersian animals, everybody wanted you.
I was so touched by that.
And I thought to myself, I mean, I'm very happy to be teaching at Temple University.
It's a full-time job, although, you know, I have to be there basically about two days
a week.
And I thought, well, you know, I had left New York many, many years before and missed
it and I said, you know, Alberto Honos used to commute between Philly and New York.
Is there any reason I can't also?
And of course, well, first of all, I can't afford Manhattan.
Nobody can.
But I found this lovely place in Newark, New Jersey, which is 20 minutes out of Manhattan
and about 50 minutes north of Philadelphia.
So it seemed like it was sort of like meant to be.
And particularly, you know, for the last time, I'm going to mention my age because it sounds
like I'm consumed with that.
But I did think to myself, in terms of my pedagogy, what is it that I want to leave
when it's my time to go?
And I think Gredish House has this great history.
Of course, amateur pianists can go there, but professionals as well.
They have a beautiful concert hall.
It's a lot of advantages.
The piano department is probably one of the finest in New York City.
I mean, some fantastic pianists teaching.
It's a great environment.
And I thought, well, this will be a chance to work with very young people again.
And that's maybe a challenge and that's a little unusual for someone like me to do.
But why not?
So, you know, I can see in the future that Gredish House would be, especially since I
would be not just a teacher, but the head of that department, have a lot of say in what
is the future of that school.
The future of that place is terribly important to the city of New York, obviously.
It's kind of a flagship neighborhood music school.
So it will affect an awful lot of people and their relationship with great music if I'm
helping to direct how things go.
I'm a little scared to do it.
I've never really hit at anything.
I'm not particularly a good organizer or a well proportioned person in terms of paperwork.
But okay, let me try it.
Let me try this.
This is kind of important.
You know, it's one thing to feel that your teaching is important, but this is sort of
on a whole different level in a sense, like to running something, sort of like dictating
the course of things.
I hope I can do something good with it.
Oh my goodness.
It would be such an amazing thing in such a neighborhood-y place in New York City, West
Village.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's connected, of course.
The Gredish House is a much larger social service organization.
They have a dance school and they have social services for the LGBTQ community.
So there's a lot of personal reasons why it makes sense someone like me would be involved
with that.
So I hope I bring some knowledge and expertise to bear there.
Oh, I'm sure.
So you have all the concerts lined up, I'm sure.
So if my viewers and listeners can check out your website, sarahdavisbuechner.com, and
they get the latest news about your concerts, upcoming events.
Concerts are all listed there.
I have to update some other things on that website.
I'm not so good with that technology.
There's like recent articles and there's stuff from 2019.
I've got to do something about that.
But you have to take care of that ASAP and the schedule is all up there, yes.
So that will tell people where I am and what I'm playing.
Wonderful.
Thank you.
So this has been a really great fun, inspirational conversation.
And thank you so much for really staying here with me for this long time and before I let
you go, we have one more thing to do.
It's called the piano part rapid fire questions.
So each question may sound really silly, but your answers may reveal who you truly are.
Oh, okay.
Now you got me terrified.
So ready or not, please answer them with the shortest responses possible.
No explanation is necessary.
Okay, let's start with the easy ones.
Question number one.
What is your comfort food?
Mac and cheese.
How do you like your coffee in the morning?
Absolutely hot, black, steaming direct three cups.
Oh, great.
Cattle dogs.
Oh, cats.
Sunrise or sunset.
Oh, both.
I'm going to cheat on that one.
I love both.
Summer or winter.
Winter for sure.
Now level two.
What, what is your favorite food?
I love both.
Oh, great.
Easy one.
by? To thine own self be true, Shakespeare. Beautiful. What is the most important quality
you look for in other people? Sincerity. Now, level three. Name three people who inspire
you, living or dead. Malcolm X, Leon Trotsky, and Albert Einstein. Oh, wow. Great. Thank
you. Now, name one piece in your current playlist. MacDowell to a Wild Rose. Oh, beautiful. Such
a sweet piece. Yes. Perfection. Last one. Fill in the blank. Please fill in the blank.
Music is blank. Life. Music is life. Beautiful. Ding, ding. That was easy. Yeah. Oh, great.
So that wraps up this episode of The Piano Fall. Thank you, Dr. Buchner, for joining
us today and sharing your beautiful stories and insights and expertise and your authenticity
and joyous energy have truly inspired our conversation. You can learn more about Dr.
Sarah Davis Buchner and her amazing work through her website at sarahdavisbuchner.com. You
can also listen to her recordings on all major streaming services and you can watch her past
presentations and performances on her YouTube channel at Sarah Davis Buchner. All the links
are listed in the show notes. Thank you to my wonderful audience and fans for tuning
in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review it on whatever podcasting
platform you use. Remember to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
If you're watching this episode on YouTube, follow TPP on social media to get the latest
piano news. I will see you for the next episode of Piano Pod. Thank you. And thank you, Dr.
Buchner. Appreciate it. Thank you, Yukimi. Thank you so much.