This episode is brought to you by the Artsong Preservation Society of New York,
whose support helps make this show possible.
I'm Blair Boone-Maguirra, the founder of the Artsong Preservation Society of New York,
and I'm inviting you to join us for our Summer of Song Festival 2025,
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Join us for enchanting artsong recitals and masterclass performance workshops
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And join us in this realm where music speaks and words sing.
Welcome to the Piano Pod, everyone.
Today, I am so thrilled to introduce our guest,
concert pianist, sign-way artist, and improviser, Mr. Mark Markham.
Known for his mastery of tone production and extraordinary improvisational skills,
he has built a remarkable career that spans solo performances,
collaborations with renowned vocalists, and jazz improvisation.
His expansive artistry and versatility have earned him a reputation
as one of the leading pianists of our time.
Mr. Markham was nominated as one of our guests for this season by Blair Boone-Maguirra,
founder and executive director of the Artsong Preservation Society of New York,
which also happens to be our sponsor for this month's episodes.
So a big shout out to Blair for his dedication to keeping the artsong tradition alive
and for supporting the Piano Pod.
For our first-time listeners and viewers, welcome to the Piano Pod.
I am Yukimi Song, a classical pianist and educator from New York City.
Whether you are pursuing a piano, working in the classical music industry,
or simply passionate about piano, this podcast is your backstage pass
to the fascinating world of piano music.
In our bi-weekly episodes, we engage with remarkable guests
who are shaping the future of classical music.
Our mission is to create a vibrant community that embraces fresh perspectives,
ensuring classical music thrives in our ever-evolving world.
If you are new here, check out the introductory episode of season 5
to get a glimpse of what's ahead.
And don't forget, you can catch up on all our previous seasons
on your favorite podcast platforms or YouTube.
Now let me tell you more about today's extraordinary guest, Mr. Mark Markham.
Mr. Markham is a world-renowned pianist celebrated for his wide-ranging artistry
from his solo performances and collaborations with singers
to his improvisational brilliance.
He has graced the stages of iconic venues such as Carnegie Hall,
Royal Festival Hall, and the Salzburg Festival.
One of his most notable collaborations was with legendary soprano Jesse Norman,
with whom he performed nearly 300 concerts across 25 countries,
including the acclaimed Sacred Ellington program,
where he served as both pianist and music director.
Mr. Markham is also the recipient of the Distinguished Alliance
Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins University,
a testament to his outstanding contributions to the world of music.
Mr. Markham currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland,
and serves on the Advisory Board of the Arts Song Preservation Society of New York.
Before we dive in, I want to thank our incredible TPP fans and loyal listeners
for your ongoing support for the show.
If you enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to rate and review it
on your GoToPodcast platform, because every review helps others discover the show.
Now let's uncover the secrets behind Mr. Markham's multifaceted career
as a classical pianist, jazz artist, and collaborator.
Please enjoy the show.
You are listening to the PianoPod, 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.
Welcome to the PianoPod, Mr. Markham.
Oh, Mark, we're...
Thank you.
I am so delighted to have you with us today.
And then the last time we spoke was at the end of the show,
and we were talking about the piano,
and you were with us today, and then the last time we spoke was back in August, I believe.
So how have you been?
I've been great, you know, just dealing with hurricanes,
which, you know, affected people and affect concerts and travel and all those things.
And, you know, you don't think about it when it's so far away, but it does affect a lot of people.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I didn't think of that.
I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, so I know all about hurricanes.
Mm-hmm, yes.
It's down there, it's time of year.
Yeah, I've experienced hurricanes myself, too.
I used to live around the area, so it's a huge deal.
Now, but besides that, how has this concert season been treating you, besides all the storms?
Let's see, last Thursday, I was in Atlanta for a private concert
to raise money for the second Jesse Norman School of the Arts.
They opened the first one over 20 years ago in Augusta, in her hometown,
and some people in Atlanta decided that it was time.
And they got together and they have a place and they have students.
They kind of did a soft opening this summer and asked me, would I come down?
And that was to be in conjunction with the annual gala in Augusta,
which was to have been on Sunday, but they had to postpone because their city is,
a lot of it is in very, very bad shape.
Oh, really? Wow.
That was a big hurricane thing, and I didn't know if Atlanta would postpone,
and that went on for a week trying to figure out what's the best thing to do.
And so that has pretty much, that was a big focus.
I was down in Virginia playing a recital with a wonderful singer,
all German repertoire, so it started off slowly.
I have a big, big center to my season this year,
which I've been focusing on for the last year,
making sure that the work is done in advance so I can actually enjoy what I want to do.
When you play so many different types of repertoire.
Right, yes.
I mean, speaking of, you have such a wide range, a rich and exciting career,
spending, you know, from solo to jazz improvisation,
to collaborations with some of the world's most celebrated vocalists,
you mentioned Jesse Norman, and also other big name vocalists.
And also, I didn't realize you were also part, be part of this big chamber groups in the past.
So given this rich and varied path, I'd love to start by asking,
what has been the driving force behind your longstanding success,
and what continues to inspire your passion to, for exploring these diverse musical avenues?
I'm in love with music.
I think that that's, that is what this is all about, is my relationship with it.
Not my talent, not my luck, not my, what are opportunities,
it's about your relationship to the music that you want to perform in front of people,
because that is the only thing that we all have in common.
That your relationship with whatever it is in your life, whether it's with a person,
whether it's with playing the piano or music or your job, whatever.
I mean, it's a huge thing.
Somebody actually asked kind of a very similar question the other night,
wanting to know, how do you deal with insecurity when you didn't grow up steeped in all of this music
that you now take to places all around the world?
And I said that it's your relationship with music,
that in the pieces that you're playing, that you're so inside them,
you don't know if there's one person in the room or 10,000.
And it doesn't make a difference.
You still have to play the same.
You have to fight for your connection constantly to this and to prepare.
And for me, no one ever said there were different categories.
You can only do this, you can only do that.
That works for people who organize things.
That works for concert halls.
Sometimes it works for agents.
Sometimes those people, it makes their life easier, but it doesn't make my life fun
to be fit in this little track of, yes, you do this.
You know, I debuted with orchestra when I was 18.
And then, oh, do this, do this, do this.
And then that summer, I was sent to a concert hall.
And then that summer, I was sent to an opera training program.
And I was 18 years old and I got there.
I never played anything in my life with opera.
I fell in love with all of this.
And, you know, it's just, and I was always playing improvisations when I was a child
and no one ever said it was hard.
So you realize that's the thing that carries you through this life.
People go to concerts to not avoid life, but to take a break.
They sometimes need two hours of being with someone else
and to participate in that relationship with them as they guide you through music.
And that's what we do.
We're just a vessel where this passes through us.
And that's what I protect.
That's what I nourish.
That's what I look for.
I try to instill that in my students and that that is the only, we serve.
Music does not serve us.
We serve it.
A big shift right now that I'm having to go up against a lot
because people like to use music to make them more important.
And that's not the story.
That's not, that's not the purpose.
That's why it's, that's why it's very tricky, especially in this country, culturally.
We're dealing with Western European music.
Right.
And we're trying to feed it into this culture, which is, you know, deeply based in money.
That is part of the United States.
And so what starts to make money?
Sadly, it starts to run ahead of everything else.
But, you know, this country is from Europe.
Europeans founded this country.
So this music, you know, I was fortunate enough to study with people who trained with people
who were European.
Who were steeped into this and know what the sounds were.
I mean, they were around when Brahms was alive and they heard people playing his music.
I trust them when they tell me this is the sound.
This is the reason for the sound.
And that's what it's about.
So that's how I guess I've been doing all this stuff.
And, you know, my brother's very funny.
He's a lawyer.
And he said, you really don't care about what other people think.
And what do you mean?
Because you just, you're clear with what you believe in.
And I said, yeah.
I said, it's my business to be involved in my business, not somebody else's.
And I understand people love to get into everyone else's business.
But that's not, that's never been me.
Maybe that's why I can do the broad scope of things that I enjoy doing.
Wonderful.
Well, now then you also performed at some of the most prestigious venues as a soloist
and performed traditional to contemporary music sometimes as well.
And also piano concerti.
I think I believe there's one concert coming up.
You're performing Ravel, no?
Ravel concerto for the left hand.
For the first time in my career, it's Ravel's 150th birthday next year.
And I thought, okay, I'm going to do it.
Okay.
I can play either.
You know, I've played the G major concerto many times and I thought I've never played
the left hand concerto and I've always had this thing for it, but the opportunity didn't
arise and I didn't feel that I was where I wanted to be with the piece.
And I kind of asked some people, I proposed it and everyone said yes.
So it's coming out for the first time in January.
And that's an experience.
It is truly an experience that does not equal anything else.
I played Rachmaninoff third, Prokofiev third, the other Ravel concerto, all these other
big things.
And this is from another planet.
Can you elaborate a little bit more?
Well, you're dealing with only one hand, which if you close your eyes, you sometimes think
there are three hands because Ravel was so clever in how he did things, but he was near
the end of his life and having, you know, not mental problems, but problems in his brain,
you know, with a disease.
And some days it was good, some days it wasn't good.
And this piece, I find rather apocalyptic that when it starts, it sounds like it's coming
from the depths of a sleeping volcano someplace and you just feel the rumblings of the earth
shaking and you're trying to figure out what instrument is that that's playing these
sounds down there at the beginning.
And by the time the piano comes in, it's outrageous in the most extraordinary way.
And you feel this battle of creation.
It's probably with his own personal experience, what he was going through, because there's
not much else in his repertoire that's like this.
Little moments of other pieces, of course, because he's still the same composer, but
that he went off and did something for only the left hand.
He kept his honor, he kept his dignity, he stayed, it was integrity.
He was true to himself.
You know, a lot of people think it might be flashy.
There is nothing flashy about it.
It is profound music.
It tells a very deep story and that's, it's a completely different experience than the
G major concerto.
Movements of that, which are the first and last movement, the second movement is of
another place, but in a different way, much more light.
The concerto has a lot of darkness, but at the same time, these huge bolts of light that
shine through and you feel the tension, which is in the creation of it all, which I find
fascinating as a mature musician, not as a 25 year old, nothing wrong with being 25,
but you know, certain things in life by the time you get to where I am now, you've been,
you've experienced quite a bit, so you can bring all that to it.
Oh, exciting.
Always tackling on new pieces is what keeps us really motivated and young too.
And yeah, but it's not easy.
Right.
You stay involved with this process.
And now that I can, a little hindsight, I look back and I see artists, similar age to
mine, same place, whatever, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to be a musician.
And same place, whatever, you know, time wise in the career, they got to play the same six
concerti for 35, 40 years.
I don't think that would have worked for me.
I am not that person.
I couldn't do it.
I was told when I was 20 years old, you should leave school and go directly to the
Metropolitan Opera House.
And I just looked at the person, I was a faculty member and I looked at him like,
oh, you're very talented.
I said, yes, I might be, but I still have many things to learn before I go jumping
into a, on a ship like that to be eaten alive pretty much.
But you did or you waited?
No, I didn't.
I, I, I, people said things and suggested things and I thought about it and I thought,
no, that, that bothers me inside.
I had to listen to me inside and when something is put in front of me, I'm usually a
pretty good judge about determining whether or not does that make me feel good?
Is that throw me off center?
Am I doing strange things to try to fit it?
And that's, that's a tricky thing because there are people who want to work, you know,
and they're told, we'll get you this job.
We'll get you this job.
Well, I want to play this instead.
Well, you got to do this job first.
Opera singers, they end up singing the same bloody five roles for 30 years.
And then you get bored out of their minds and they don't practice well and they don't
try things and then, you know, some crazy staging has other ideas and they haven't
been doing their work.
So they get in trouble.
I think they're just kind of, you know, sleepwalking through things after a while.
Or to keep renewing, refurbishing, renewing your commitment over and over the same
repertoire all the time.
There are things I play now that I've played for since I was 12 years old.
Wonderful.
But you have to bring it to today and bringing it sometimes is really a lot of work.
I played the Sweet Berga Musk last week in Atlanta and I decided because all the pieces
were written by young people in their twenties to talk about my relationship to music and
everything.
The amount of energy that I had to put into that a week before trying to, because I made
the decision late, of course, I still have it memorized, get it to where it's speaking
from me today versus me doing a karaoke version of what I had done before.
That is, either you love doing that or you don't.
And I'm not that person who's going to try to play it again.
Right.
Yeah.
Because you keep reinvesting in yourself, no?
Every day is a new day.
You got to play it again.
Every day is a new day.
You have to work.
That's hard work.
Life is real.
When life comes along and throws you something that's real life that's really not pleasant,
you somehow have to deal with that and all these other things at the same time.
It's a great journey, but I know I'm happy.
Wonderful.
All the dreams, the pieces, I think, oh, I'd love to play that.
Most of them I've been able to manifest.
Oh, my goodness.
That's a dream come true.
It is.
It is, and that you get to enjoy it.
Some things I wish I would get more than one chance or that it could come back around.
But I'm not that old.
I still have a chance for it to keep coming back.
And I hope this works for another 20 years.
So what are some memorable moments as a soloist, like pieces or maybe events?
I've listened to your Liszt Transcendental Etude, Poulenc improvisations, which are so lovely.
Aren't they those amazing pieces?
That was because I was trying to put together a program called Dances and Improvisations.
And this all happened, the pandemic, as horrible as it was,
it really put things in your face to deal with them because you didn't have anything else to do.
You had to confront what the reality was.
And for the first couple of weeks, I probably sat around here and was sad and cried and all those different things wondering, what am I going to do for a job?
Nothing was working.
And then I had a little meeting with myself and said, you know what?
The last time you played Bach in public was in 1980.
I think it is time.
This is coming back.
And you will have to excavate because that is truly from another lifetime.
And I brought back the second French Suite.
And a lot of the time, sadly, we're all trying to do things with a lot of pressure on our batteries.
To get it ready, to be ready, and then to put it away and run to something else.
Well, during the pandemic, there was none of that.
You had all the time in the world.
You had hours and hours every day.
So I sat with it every day.
And Bach is usually one note at a time.
And I had to find my relationship with that music where I am today.
Where I was three years, four years ago.
To confront all of that and whatever these things, ideas we have about the world music as a pianist.
And all these different things.
And it was quite eye-opening.
Those were my dances.
And then the Vos Noble e Sentimentale of Ravel.
I wanted those.
That kind of came together.
And then these Poulenc improvisations, when I found those.
It was...
And I found those years ago.
And decided, you know what?
This is part of this program.
It's got to be such original pieces.
He always said his piano music was not very well written.
He thought his piano writing in the songs was much better.
So he was talking down about his solo piano music.
And I wanted to prove him wrong.
Also, I realized that you are so engaging.
You're not just performing and do the traditional bow.
Maybe that was for streaming.
But you were also explaining about the selection of each piece.
Which is really untraditional.
But people are starting doing it.
Because otherwise, most of the audience that you deal with.
They have no idea what you're playing.
I mean, a lot of people...
It's like...
Come on, I remember when I was in school, in the library.
There was a card catalog.
One day the card catalog disappeared.
And they said, oh, we have computers.
Look it up that way.
I didn't know what that was.
I didn't know what a cell phone was.
There were no cell phones at that time.
Didn't take pictures when we were on tour.
You went, did your work and you came home.
So all these new things for the older people came in.
And so trying to figure out...
All right, who knows what about what?
And when you choose a piece of music, you have to find what can...
If you want the room to have people from 15 to 85 years old.
Then you've got to find what in that will spark a little bit of interest for the young ones.
As well as the more mature, the traditional audience in this country.
And I'm very tough with people about that when they do talk.
And I said, don't talk longer than the piece lasts, please.
Make it quick.
Tempt us, lure us in to make us more open to listening.
That's something that...
I was asked...
What was it?
Almost 35 years ago by Johns Hopkins University.
I was a new faculty member at Peabody.
And someone contacted me and said, we'd like for you to go out and lecture
on music representing Johns Hopkins.
At all the alumni associations in the United States.
And I said, wow, okay.
Well, what should I talk about?
Well, what about the history of rock and roll?
And I remember looking at the phone like...
And it really upset me inside.
I didn't say no, but I...
Oh, okay.
Let me think about this.
And I hung up the phone and I thought, and I talked to a couple of friends.
And one person, very wise, just said very calmly to me,
Mark, if you're going to speak in public about something,
you must have a relationship with someone who's a rock star.
You must have a relationship to that topic.
You cannot read something.
You cannot read somebody else's story.
You've got to find your...
Because if I'm engaged, I know the room is engaged.
That I do.
That's how communication works.
And when people sense that I'm engaged, then that works.
Trying to find a program.
And I came up with A Night at the Opera,
which made people think of all different things,
whether it's the Mark brothers in their crazy movie,
or something modern today and talking.
I have talked about the history of opera and the crazy stories
and the crazy singers and the Chopin-Bellini
and playing a Chopin ballade
and then playing a Liszt transcription at the end of The Waltz from Faust.
But in an hour that you put all this in there,
everybody in every situation in the room was always thrilled.
There was something there for everybody that I believed in.
Nothing filled in, just to kind of take up space,
because you can't do it for real.
You can read things.
Not very interesting to people.
The Hungarian Franz Liszt, who was a man of the world,
spoke many languages.
He was one of the great pianists of the 19th century.
And he has credit for creating the piano recital.
This idea that they put a piano on the stage
and that one person comes out and plays it all night
and you all sit here and listen.
Some of these programs, when you go back and look,
they lasted three to four hours.
It's a long time to be there,
but this was the only way that people could hear music.
He wrote a series of the transcendental etudes,
there are 12 of them.
The first time around it was so difficult that no one could play them,
except him.
So we had to revise them.
Then he revised them a second time and no one still could play them.
So finally we got to the third version.
This is one of those pieces,
I'm going to describe.
I'm also curious about your recital at the Lexington Bach Festival,
Bach and the Art of Improvisation.
What is this all about?
The Lexington Bach Festival,
I think next year is their 25th anniversary.
It's up in this little town on what lake is that here on?
I don't remember for sure, in September.
And Bach is the thing.
Everything is, it doesn't have to have Bach,
but you try to have something based around that
and the music around it or something that relates.
And so the dances and improvisations were part of that.
So my improvisations are based a lot of the times on the American songbook.
I can do an improvisation out of nothing,
just make up stuff that doesn't bother me.
I mean, it's fine, but I haven't gone that far yet.
I haven't programmed that yet in public.
It's always something because I want people to feel,
I want them to have something that I, my take on it.
I play the song Moon River.
I have a certain thing in my head that I hear with that song.
I don't know why.
For a while, it's been a few years, it's in the same vein.
And I didn't realize what I was doing the first time I did it.
It just kind of happened on the stage and I was
rather alarmed by it in a good way.
Wow, that's something.
So I keep playing with it and maybe the next time I play it,
it'll be completely different.
And that's where that came from.
And you're in a church with 250 people.
With a beautiful piano, a beautiful acoustic, and they are there for music.
And I was given the great opportunity to be able to share that.
Yeah, but you know, playing improvisation is, it takes a really courage.
I mean, as much as playing Chopin etude, Liszt etude, they're very difficult
and they perform live takes so much practice and everything.
But improvisation is another thing, but you are known to do that.
And you've played, you also play like in your solo concert toward the end.
Don't you play like a transcription of...
I play transcriptions of different things and sometimes
on-chores that I play with orchestra.
You know, there was a night in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania during the pandemic
and they were given permission to have a concert.
Pandemic and they were given permission to have a concert in October of 2020.
And I thought, okay, and this was the beginning of this.
The first time the Bach was coming out, I agreed to do it.
But I decided two days before I would go to Philadelphia
and play this at the home of some friends.
Well, of course, we had all the COVID restrictions
and people wanted to be safe.
They opened all the windows and the doors to their house.
We have people inside.
Some people sat outside on the lawn.
Some people sat on the front porch and I played wonderfully.
I finished that, got the next day, got up, packed my bags,
was looking at my phone to see the directions to drive to Harrisburg.
So I was going to play the following night in Harrisburg.
And I looked at the phone.
I kept my glasses on my face.
I'm carrying two pieces of luggage down a staircase with my glasses on,
which are only to see close up.
I looked down and I thought I saw the steps.
I did not see the steps clearly and I fell.
So I'm plummeting down.
I only missed two steps, but it's a wall
and I didn't want to smash my face in the wall.
So my arm came up and stopped that and this arm was back like this.
And I landed and my friends are screaming, are you okay?
Are you okay?
Because I landed with all of my weight when you fall two steps.
And no, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
And I took my step to the car and I thought, I wonder if my leg is going to be my ankle,
my foot, you would think I landed on all of that weight.
There should be a problem.
There wasn't a problem.
I got in the car and drove for an hour and a half, two hours, got to Harrisburg,
got out of the car.
I felt fine.
I said, well, lucky me.
That certainly woke me up for the trip.
But then when I got to the hall and started practicing on the piano,
I realized that my right arm would not move quickly left to right.
They just, I didn't have the, I didn't have freedom in the muscles.
The muscles had kind of seized up a little bit.
And so playing the, was it on Dante's Pianato in Grand Polonaise of Chopin,
you are moving a lot.
It's a lot of left to right constant motion like that.
And I just couldn't, it didn't feel comfortable.
So that concert then turned into Bach, Ravel and Poulenc on the first half.
And the second half was all improvisations on the American songbook.
There were 49 people in the room because the government said at one point,
you can have 50 people.
Then the week before they said 150 people and it dropped down to 35.
And by the time they made their final announcement, it was set and people didn't buy,
they couldn't buy tickets because it was, but we had 50 people or so in the room.
And that's where that came from.
That entire evening sat there on the stage for half an hour.
And I told them very, as clearly as I could, I said, I have no idea what I'm going to do.
This is all a surprise to me.
I said, I'll, I think it will be clear when I'm finished with each group.
I'll probably play three different sets.
They were absolutely thrilled, but we looked back at it, how important music was during
the pandemic for people.
It was so important.
I didn't realize how important it was for me.
The performance of Bach that evening is on YouTube.
The French is there.
And it was the very first time I ever played the piece in public.
And that is there.
And there are things in it to this day.
I'd sit there and listen going, I don't know where that came from, but I had to trust that
music was going to carry the day, carry the evening, so to speak.
It was, it was, it's an interesting thing.
It was, it's an interesting time to be in that place and people that you can feel they
want music and to take these old songs, which I know all for whatever reason, I memorized
words back when I was a child.
I learned all these songs out of books, what I was doing.
I just sat there and played and learned all the words.
And it really is kind of strange that a little, you know, eight, nine year old is doing this
type of thing.
That's what I did and no one ever said it was hard.
I'm just playing an instrument that I know very well and I know their instrument, you
know.
Right.
So that's how you started like doing improvisation as a child.
You flipped through all these songs and...
I flipped through these songs.
I remember I got a hymnal from the church.
I would open it up and put it there on the piano and thought I was playing it.
I knew the hymn.
Look at the words.
I probably couldn't even read the music well.
I was playing something.
I said, this is how it goes.
Right, right, right.
No one ever said stop doing that or no, that's wrong.
Don't do this.
Don't do that.
A lot of people are fearful of, oh my goodness, that's going to destroy the hands.
Oh, that's going to do this.
Oh, they're going to have bad habits.
Oh, they're going to have this.
I was never taught by fear.
And a lot of energy that people had to deal with with me.
There's no doubt.
My dear teacher, Anne Schein, she said to me a few years ago, I said, what was it like teaching me?
And she goes, the energy of six people.
I never thought of it.
I just loved what I did.
And I mean, she suffered through many times when I had three vocal recitals to play.
I was supposed to be preparing my master's recital.
And I played three recitals in a week with three different singers and then had to get in there and learn the Barber Sonata and Schumann Fantastica and all that stuff.
And I did.
But it didn't make everybody calm around me.
There were those who were trying to guide me.
They had to really watch.
They knew when to lean in to say, hey, you've got to take care of this.
But I learned, you know, that I had to learn how to do it.
I learned how to do this, but I learned, you know, this is why I think I can handle it now that I understand I look ahead.
I don't wait for one project to be finished and then look at the next project.
You can't.
Right.
The Ravel Left Hand Concert does not happen in three months.
No.
It is little bits and pieces.
And sometimes I don't play it for two weeks.
And then I come back and I realize, wow, all the work I did is still there.
My body and my mind and my spirit all came together and it works.
But did you have any like improvisation lessons from like a jazz people with a jazz background or no?
No.
Wow.
No, I just did it.
I remember it was probably in the late 90s.
We were having Thanksgiving at Jesse Norman's house in London.
And we had eaten upstairs.
And then after dinner, we start wandering downstairs.
There might have been 20 people in this little house of hers in the center of London.
And I went to the piano and started playing, you know, show tunes or American songbook, just improvising.
And a few minutes later, she's come down steps and you see this head kind of bend around the corner looking like, who is playing the piano?
She had no idea it was me.
And then I see this look in her eyes of, you do that too?
And I thought, oh, no.
And that was the beginning of it all because then the next year she was doing this Duke Ellington project.
Yes.
I was going to...
On our recital at Carnegie Hall, she wanted to do some of these Duke Ellington pieces with the Alva Daily dancers.
I mean, it was the most...
Not insane, but it was out there to finish a vocal recital with piano.
And at the end, they push everything around.
And then the last group of songs is with dancers and Jesse and me and a string quartet and a bass player and all this stuff going on.
It was something.
But I remember those rehearsals.
Ron Carter was the bassist.
Ron is the most recorded instrumentalist in history.
Three of us guys were still friends.
Grady Tate, a drummer.
Grady no longer with us.
They were playing.
And I showed up to the first rehearsal at Carnegie and we're in a rehearsal space.
And they come up to me saying, Mark, can you tell me how this is going to work here?
Can you explain this to me?
And I did.
I didn't know who they were.
This was 1999.
So I did not know who they were, what they'd done.
And I said, sure.
So we started talking about it.
And they were depending on me.
And I started thinking, well, OK, fine.
Well, after it was the concert's over, people started telling me, do you realize who you worked with?
And I said, we have Ron and Grady.
Cool guy.
Mark.
And then they explained to me.
I'm like, oh my goodness.
And they're asking me for things.
I'm over here listening, trying to figure out what do you play?
And Grady would be very funny about it.
And he was always very direct.
That's too much.
Why are you playing there?
Why are you playing the left hand?
Stop it.
And he would do this in rehearsal.
I mean, he would say things to Jessie.
Are you really going to sing it like that?
Oh, no, that was priceless.
He would say these things to me.
And while it would make me a little, because you play by yourself.
That's one thing.
You get into a trio.
You're in a quintet.
And you're dropping things in where they need to be dropped.
You're not doing something.
You have to sense where is the moment to put this down, to play this chord, to put what beat.
And I was lucky that I had these people who were around me, who said they were willing to say things.
Because I was their little liaison between the jazz world and Jessie's world.
I had to be the person in between because it's her show.
I'm watching what she needs and trying to get them to do what we need to make sure she's happy.
But at the same time that I'm not trying to guide the group in a way that doesn't sound authentic.
So that's kind of where Miss Jessie Norman started singing these non-classical songs,
but probably inspired by your playing, improvising.
She had done some of this music with John Williams before.
They did some orchestral things.
They even recorded an album.
And there's a recording of her singing Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel.
If you've never heard that, you need to go and listen to it.
It will blow your mind.
You won't know who it is.
When I heard it the first time, I thought, who is this?
It's that good.
It's that was so far removed from singing Ariadne off Naxos.
But then she did an album with Michel LeGrand.
And that was fine.
Michel was wonderful.
He would always come to our concerts.
But he had his own style of playing and was really, really big.
But then when the Ellington Project started and then she started mixing a traditional
classical recital and choosing very specific, more popular pieces to place within that program,
not just at the end, but within the same group that you'd find Schubert,
Hugo Wolf, Poulenc, and Gershwin, for example.
That was just a random example.
But she made it work.
And that was, you know, we both started playing with that and trying to figure out,
you know, I get the list.
She'd send it to me and I'm like, what arrangement?
Oh, we'll figure it out.
You'll come up with something.
Fun.
Wow.
She wanted to sing Summertime the first.
We were at the Temple of Dandour as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
And she said she was going to sing Aida and she was going to sing Summertime.
I'm like, Summertime?
What do you mean Summertime?
What key?
Oh, I don't know.
Wow.
Okay, I know you're not going to sing in the original key because that's too high.
Okay, just sing the beginning.
And she closed her eyes and laid back and starts, and came in.
And I found the first note.
She sang a C sharp and I said, fine, you're an F sharp minor.
And I started improvising the song in F sharp minor, trying to find
this atmosphere that worked with her voice.
And the harmony and the color and the rhythm.
And the swaying and all these different things.
But there wasn't anything in the back of my head of, no, you can't, no, you can't,
no, you can't because no one ever told me that.
And I'm grateful for that because I know a lot of people who were told,
oh, no, you can't do that.
Improvising itself is not a comfort zone for so many classical musicians.
But at the same time, you are improvising with someone like Jesse Norman, right?
Jesse Norman, right? For me, it's very strange when people say, oh, I think they can't do it
or they're afraid to do it.
I think if you play Chopin etudes, if you play Beethoven's sonatas, you play the Debussy
Preludes, don't you have atmospheres for those pieces?
Or you just learn their notes.
And that's a big, big thing right there.
That people learn the notes and they never ask why.
Why these notes?
What did they, what's the composer trying?
What is the message behind all of this?
Why did they choose these notes to communicate this thing?
And did you, are people clear with what do you believe the composer really is trying
to put in the room?
Because we musicians, we put sound into a room to change a room.
And we can change the room by the color of sound, by how we phrase something,
by the volume of sound.
And when people don't do it, they don't learn their music well.
We have a physical part, we have a mental part, but there's also a spiritual part.
And these three things have to work together.
They must.
Because when we perform live performance, is those three things coming together,
they merge together and just, they must march into the room as one.
And a lot of people think they can take it all apart.
And I'm just going to work on technical things.
Well, you really can't because it's still a technical thing.
You really can't because it's still music.
If you learn technical things with no expression behind it, then what have you done?
You've created a pile of nonsense over here.
You can learn things by being expressive all the time.
And I was told very young, even when you're practicing slowly and everything,
it's still with intention.
It's still with expression, with meaning, because that's what connects you to the public.
That's what connects you to the music.
So you can have communion at that moment.
But with improvisation, they know the keyboard well, I would assume.
Though there are some situations nowadays when I ask someone, I say, what key is,
what key, what chord is that?
And I use this example.
We were in, she was playing in the key of A flat major.
And all of a sudden going along, a chord came up of D, F sharp, and A.
And I stopped and said, hold that chord, please.
Then they stopped and said, what chord is that in this key?
Is it F major?
And I said, shame on you.
D, F sharp, A.
You're a grad student.
You're not eight.
In A flat major, D major is about as far away as you can go.
It is just completely, it should take your breath away.
That's what the moment was in the piece.
But when I saw that that wasn't understood, how music is built, that harmony is everything.
If you don't understand harmony, how do you know?
In the sense of harmony, of how something is phrased, where is a release,
what are you building towards?
And that's monstrous for me, because that tells me everything about a piece.
I can learn so much just understanding the harmony.
And when you don't know harmony, I would be terrified about doing improvisation too.
Because you're on a certain chord, you listen to Chopin sometimes.
I'm sorry, when Chopin got older, the man, it sounded like he was on some special med.
He would take one little note and go chromatically with that one note on the inside of the chord.
And everything else would wander in another direction.
Great theory teacher of Peabody years and years ago in a class only on Chopin,
who analyzed harmonically all of these things.
And when you look to see how that man could hold something together with one little note,
and how he moved it through, and if you didn't know where that little line was,
all these other things are going, jumping all around, it made no sense.
And it became much more difficult, and you didn't understand
where is the tension in the line?
Because it's built in.
I mean, Richard Strauss does the same thing, that one little note just keeps running through chromatically.
And if you find where that is, you can hold it all together.
And I do when I improvise.
I'm feeling something that keeps me grounded.
I just don't randomly choose something.
Come on, this is like when people paint, when they
know I've created something new.
No, you haven't created anything new.
It's all, all of this is connected.
And before, and that's the beauty of it all that
these sounds have been around for who knows how long.
How they're organized.
That's why we have these amazing composers who do this for us.
I'm not going to do people.
Oh, do you compose?
Good Lord, no.
That's a whole other job.
Completely different job.
Then this Sacred Ellington program became like a concert program that you toured with
Miss Norman, and they also became a CD album, right?
No, the Sacred Ellington was never recorded.
I think they tried to at St. John the Divine.
Last performance with that, that was an amazing night.
But it was just, it was, it involved so many people with chorus and the jazz band and string
quartet and me and a dancer and Jesse and, you know, it was huge.
But it was one of the most thrilling things to get to do.
The works that we recorded were Roots, My Life, My Song.
Yes, okay.
Which involved spirituals and hymns and French music and Ellington and all these different
elements of her life.
She wanted to try to bring all of that together.
But that was one of those experiences when she told us, okay, this is what we're doing
and sent the list and I'm looking at this playlist going, well, what are these things?
What is this?
I didn't even know what it was.
I said, where's the score?
Nobody knew.
There wasn't a score.
And then somebody showed her the saxophone player.
He turned in the rehearsal and said, here, and handed me a chart.
Okay, I know harmony so I can play a chart.
That doesn't scare me.
A lot of people freak out completely trying to read plus five and, you know, all these
minor ninths chords and this, that and the other.
And we started coming up with our arrangements.
Wow.
Now, as much as this episode is about you,
but it's at this point unavoidable to talk about your collaboration with Miss Jessi Norman.
We've already, you know, in length, you've talked about her.
So you must talk to us about because we are curious working with her, but also how did
this collaboration for us come to you and so on.
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Your collaboration with Miss Jessie Norman, we've already, you know, in length, you've
talked about her.
So with whom you collaborated and performed together nearly 300 concerts in 25 countries
and that's like more than 20 seasons, right?
20 seasons, right.
Oh my goodness.
I heard her play.
I heard her sing the very first time at the Kennedy Center in the spring of 1982, my first
year of Peabody.
And a friend of mine called me and said, I have bought the last two tickets for Jessie
Norman's recital tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon.
You want to go?
I said, sure.
Well, I had a car.
So kind of helped out.
I made that work.
So the two of us go down there, two pianists, and we're on the very last row of the Kennedy
Center in the very top corner, as far, the furthest away you could ever be.
And there we sat and she came on stage and opened her mouth and the wall started to shake.
And you're going, what is this?
And I had heard her at Tanglewood before live.
And that was amazing with the orchestra, but to be there and recital and to hear the pianist.
And when she finished, we got to the end, we stood up and everyone is exhausted because
we've had half a dozen encore and people screaming and beating their hands together.
And I turned to my friend and said, you know, I think I could do that job.
And she looked at me like, oh, okay.
And that was then I didn't think of it.
Well, I didn't know this, but Jessie Norman and my teacher and shine had known each other
from the 1960s.
Jessie had sung at her wedding.
So they were friends in Washington, D.C.
And in the 80s, when I was in school, people wrote letters to each other.
And she was writing Jessie letters telling about her family, her children.
And then she said, she told me this later.
She goes, I would mention you saying I have a wonderful student who loves vocal music.
And Jessie would write, oh, that sounds he sounds lovely.
And that was it.
You know, just, oh, my teacher's writing to a famous singer about me.
How in that nice, anything of it.
And then I don't know, but was 1992, 93, somewhere around there.
She wanted to have dinner one night.
We had dinner.
And she tells me that Jessie was going on a tour and that she had written her about me.
But Jessie responded with, well, Mark sounds lovely, but we've never worked together.
So they worked together for a couple of seasons.
And then I was playing in Brussels with Derek Lee Reagan, who sang in the movie Farinelli.
And we had a tour and we got to Brussels and we do the first half of our concert.
And I'm in my dressing room and all of a sudden someone banging on my door and I opened the door
and the promoter standing there and she goes, Jeff, Jessie Norman's pianist is dead.
He died in January.
She's looking for a pianist and you're it.
I'm telling her, I'm calling her tomorrow.
And I said, you know what?
That poor man's body is probably still warm.
It's Mark.
You know, and you're telling me this during my concert and people love to talk.
And I didn't know that I just met this person two hours before.
And I said, that's very nice.
Uh-huh.
Let me finish the concert, please.
And I did.
And she did do that.
So Jessie was hearing it from two sides at that time.
And then in May, I get a phone call saying that Jessie's looking for a pianist
and her office called and she said, I'm sorry.
And her office called and said, are you available?
These two days, three dates.
And I said, yes, I am.
I was, it was really sandwiched in perfectly with concerts right on either side.
And they said, okay, fine.
She'll call you tonight at 8 30.
And she called and she goes, hello, Mark.
I said, hello.
She goes, I hear we have some work to do together.
I said, yes, we do.
Did you get the program?
Yes.
Do you like it?
And I kind of laughed at myself like, what am I supposed to say?
No, please don't sing that.
Could you sing this instead?
So I showed up at her house a few weeks later in London.
She had never met me.
She had never heard me play.
And she took it on other people's word that I could do my job well.
And I showed up and we had our first rehearsal, which was fantastic.
And at the end, leaving the house and she puts her hand on my shoulder and says,
they told me you were good and they were right.
And I thought, okay, I didn't know whether I was being seduced by the famous diva or how to take it.
And I just had to go into your work and get back to work tomorrow.
And I did my work and we finished the three concerts.
And at the end of the third concert in Norway, she called me to her dressing room and I walked in and she goes,
I just have to thank you for being so prepared.
And I looked at her and said, well, isn't that, that's just what you do.
No, you wouldn't believe the nonsense that I've put up with for the last few months.
People who want to be on the ride, but don't do the work.
Think that the person who's singing or whoever you're working with wouldn't notice the difference.
So that's how it started, us being prepared.
Her sister was there.
Last week at the concert in Georgia and she said, yeah, give us people want to know.
And she's Mark was it because Mark was prepared and they got along.
And, and the biggest thing, I think that to work with someone who's already had a 25 year career in front of the world
and they're flying at that altitude and you're asked to join while the mission is ongoing.
There's no time to stop the career and let me figure out what I'm going to do.
It was up to me to be able to have the strength, the talent, the dedication, all those things to be able to get on the ride.
Already in motion, join without creating any excess weight, any difficulty for her.
The very first concert in Glasgow, people are asking me the stage people and the managers there.
Now, you miss Norman had worked together a lot. What is she going to need?
And I said, I'm sure that's in her, in her contract.
Why don't you just check that out? I don't want to forget anything.
I wasn't about to tell them it was my first concert because when they heard you play, they heard us together.
No one knew.
They thought that we had been together for years and that's just because we're both, we were both always very well prepared.
So that whatever happened, we could deal with it.
But the, you know, some interest, Cassie of collaboration like her part and your part, you know, ensemble, I hear it.
Earl Koenig.
Right.
Yeah, I heard that and Brahms and some other piece of songs that I heard online and I was like, oh, I'm going to do this.
The songs that I heard online and they're so together, they're so in sync, just so beautiful.
And I've done some of those pieces in the past and I really almost made me want to go back playing for singers again, because yeah, you know, those pieces are so fun as a pianist.
Song song cycles are so fun.
So but did you do like a lot of those song cycles together with her and did you also sometimes play Arias for her?
Like she was singing Arias from Carmen, Lila, things like that.
Not much more than that in recital, but, you know, lots of German repertoire, lots of French repertoire, even some Spanish, a little bit of Italian.
Lots of songs in English.
So that relationship with her professionally and then obviously you both became such good friends, I'm sure.
And so then I watched a short video clip of you playing Deep River arranged by you and it was at her funeral.
I think a very emotional performance and a lot of people are there.
So can you tell me about that event, occasion?
Well, a funeral is a funeral.
And for her, it was rather shocking and I spoke to the family and they said, Mark, if you want to play something, please.
Love you to do it.
And I said, yes.
And it was put as the very first musical tribute of a four and a half hour funeral.
And it went on for ever with people praying and sermons and eulogies and music and all these different things.
And I thought of all the pieces that we did together, that was something I think that could mean something.
And her sound in that piece was unique.
That was just the color of her voice with that piece, it worked.
And so I decided to put something together.
But it was, you know, in those moments as a musician, as an artist, you're trying to, you want to make the contribution.
But you're also your emotions have to be not kept in check, but you have a responsibility to the musical performance.
And to feel the pain in the room, you know, they called me from my dressing room and said, you're next.
And I walked out on, walked backstage and there was a woman praying.
Eight minutes later, she was still praying.
I said, please let me know when she's finished.
When she's finished praying, I'm trying to, I've got to stay in this place to be able to do what I want to do.
And feeling all of that, I mean, I've known, I knew the family for 25 years.
We shared holidays together and just, you know, showing up to play a tribute for someone because they were famous and you're famous.
Very different thing. Like, you know, it's a Metropolitan Opera when they did the big tribute for her there.
I played, it was very different for me than it was for the people I played for.
Well, thank you for sharing this beautiful tribute and stories with me and with my audience.
So now also you work with some other wonderful renowned singers like, you know, Janaye Bridges and so on.
What's the secret you will want to have as a pianist to collaborate with singers?
You have to play your part well.
You have to know it well.
You have to be able to, you know, the language you understand how a singer breathes.
If you can't sing the piece, if you can't sing the piece and play your part, then how's it going to work?
You have to be able to sing the song and play simultaneously because that is what's going to happen.
And the fun part is never do the song the same way twice.
Why? How boring?
You know, Arthur Rubinstein did not play the same way two nights in a row.
That's part of being, I think, an artist that you in that moment, you have to be able to fly.
And you want to play with someone who's singing.
Then if you don't know the poetry, if you don't know that pronunciation, you don't know what those words mean.
How can you play inside the word?
You're playing inside the color of a word, inside the sound of a word, how it's pronounced, how it's caressed.
And you think about all those things and you try to come up with probably, I would always, the joke was I would come up with a hundred different ways to play a song and then get to a rehearsal with Jessie and she'd come up with a hundred and one.
And I just kind of laugh and roll my eyes sometimes go, uh-huh.
Oh, fine. And then I could change something else.
And we both knew it so well that we could, you know, you start flowing together with it.
Then it's fun.
Who wants to do the same thing day in and day out? How boring. Sure. But that's it. You want to play for a singer? If you don't love words, do something else, please.
You've got to love all that. Singers can be a little crazy at times, just like a violinist can be crazy and a pianist can be crazy, but singers take a hard rap.
But as I say all the time, they're the only people facing the public.
The rest of us get to turn sideways, turn around, do all these different things. They are there facing the public, telling stories through these words, through this music, and they have to count on their breath.
When you get nervous, the first thing that goes is your breath.
And things get a little tight. You hear that and you have to understand what that sounds like and what it feels like.
I love when people, they love to make fun of singers. Pianists will do the same thing.
I said, well, good. Have you stood, let me hear you sing something. It shuts them up very quickly.
I was singing in public since I was four years old. But for me, it was just part of being, saying everything. Everything was sung.
And so my playing has that feature to it that everything was sung. And if you don't understand all that and what it feels like, and that's what I'm trying to do.
I want people to understand what it feels like and understand what it feels like to be in their shoes.
Those are not easy moments.
Jesse and I did the 10th anniversary of 9-11 at Lincoln Center.
You're in a hall with 3,000 people and you're doing, you're representing the country at that point.
Those emotions and the families are there and here you are thrown on stage to do seven minutes of something.
It's supposed to be perfect and great and expressive and free and like, okay, you got to get to that.
You got to get to that place very quickly, but you have to know where that place is.
Yes.
You have to know what that is. And that's how you build that when you do your work.
It's not luck. It's not, oh, I hope it's going to work out. Hope is 50-50. It's a lovely word.
Hope is 50-50.
Now I'm going to go back to you being the pianist, the soloist.
These are specific questions, technique and tone production.
Your performances are known for your expressive power and clarity and it comes to, when it comes to piano technique and tone production, how do you work to achieve that clarity of sound and curious about your thoughts on technique and service of the music?
Well, you have to know what you're going to serve.
We are serving.
You serve.
You're serving food.
It would be nice if it was well thought out and well put together and looks nice on the plate when it hits the table.
Not running if somebody running over saying, oh, I forgot this. Let me sprinkle this on. Oh, let me chop this on here.
No, I don't want to see all that.
Oh, I forgot chicken.
No, that's not how it works.
You prepare.
And with the piano, with the instrument itself, its capacity to do everything that you can.
The whole orchestra can do that is in your imagination.
If you want it to sound like a drum, you can.
If you want to sound like a flute, you can.
If you want it to sound like a clarinet and oboe, a trumpet, all of these different things that this instrument has the capacity to do.
And this is where I think the piano is an extraordinary for me that it is my pleasure to be able to do this.
It's an extraordinary for me that it is my playing field because all the things are there.
All those opportunities, anything that I can dream of can happen here.
And we're playing more than one note at a time, which a lot of people can only play one note.
We are dealing with harmony and line and direction and color and the shape of things.
If you actually understand what it is you want to communicate and understand why that piece was written in the first place, try to get into the composer's psyche about those things,
you then your body actually has the capacity to release and you can trust all the work that you've done.
If you've practiced and you know where that you know your fingering, fingering is hugely important.
If you don't understand great fingering, you'll never get a sound.
And singers are born with a sound in their throat, and that is their voice.
For pianists, we have to cultivate our sound so that no matter where you go, you still sound like you.
The freedom that you feel inside, you can then trust that your hands when you touch that keyboard, you're touching the keyboard for a reason.
Not just to put down a note, because when we put down a note, our next responsibility is how to get out of that note.
Because we must feel the release of that that takes us to the next, whether it's the finger door, whether it's three octaves away, that that release is not there.
Then you can't get to the next note. So it means your your your story has broken.
And the fluidity of sound of of line, the color you're pedaling.
There's so many young people now don't understand what the pedal is even for that it's either on or off and trying to explain.
No, no, no, there are about five thousand different variations of the pedal and how you can move it constantly to set off.
But you play the pedal with your ears and it gives the piano every piano has a certain capacity and your job in that little bit of time that you get prior to concert is to try to understand the capacity of the instrument you have.
And the hall that you're in and bring yourself, because can you change the way you play?
No. Technique easiest way to do something, the simplest way to do something. But finding what is simple in life is always the most confusing.
It can be the most challenging. It's easy to make something simple, complicated, but it's very hard to make something complicated simple.
And that's a whole thing for me, constantly studying and paying attention through the phrase to find out what is the simplest way for me to achieve.
But it means I understand what the what I want to achieve before touching the piano.
And that scares a lot of people when I say, oh, I can learn a piece before I ever touch a keyboard.
And people are afraid of that. I think why would you be afraid? You can't look at the score and hear things you don't have to hear every note perfectly.
But when I first played when I worked on Schoenberg Opus 11, the very first time.
You can't sit down at the piano and play it. It's too crazy. But you can still look at the rhythm.
You can see the shape of a phrase. You can hum all these things. You can make it up.
You learn the shapes and what a conductor's do. They spend their lives with nothing in front of them.
And they have to look at a score and imagine things how they'd like to hear it.
And that is the aim. Then I'm actually free to you'll hear me, you'll hear my spirit ringing in that instrument, through that instrument into the room.
If I've really had the time and the possibility to settle down.
You know, and that's that to me is where my sound comes from.
That I know where the release is before I play, but also know where the release is after I play.
And what is the journey to the next note and the next one after that? And how do things move as fluidly as possible?
But, you know, practicing slowly with expression. That's not everyone's favorite thing.
Oh, I know.
And for young people, that is really the hardest part, because I would have teachers tell me a long time ago, practice slowly, practice slowly and underline it three times.
And I thought, why didn't anyone tell me? Why didn't you tell me why?
Had you told me why? Way back then, maybe I would have understood a little bit sooner.
But then I think, you know what, my path is my path. Things happen when they happen. I arrive, whenever I arrive.
Some people might not have liked certain things at a certain time.
You know, and I've heard everything from, you know, the best to the worst.
I remember the reactions back in the day when I was in my process of learning how to organize all of this energy and all the things I felt and the ideas and the plans that I had in my head someplace for a piece of music and what I thought it represented.
And that's a, for me, that takes another artist, teacher, to understand.
Not just someone who teaches the piano. It's a wonderful thing to be able to teach piano, but to be able to teach artists how to actually stay an artist and not get caught up and confused and all that.
And to sense sometimes people, sometimes people bloom late. You know, I know this, the system, the media loves everybody.
The pianist is blooming at 16. A lot of these kids, 18 years old, they're stars by the time they're 30 years old. They don't want to play the piano anymore.
Maybe even before. They're burned out. They're bored with it. Why am I doing this?
You know, if you're all the list, Transcendental Atriids, when you're 18 years old, I'll be very curious to see what you're doing when you're 30.
Because life is, while it's short, a career is a long road.
And to be able to tell stories when you're older, it's fabulous.
It really is, because honestly, you just don't care about what everybody else thinks.
Wonderful place to be that this is my call. I'm going to prepare this. This is what I feel because of my life and how I've what I've studied and read and everything else about this composer and these pieces.
And then things work.
While it is admirable to play the notes, wonderful that you put down these notes.
You have to have a reason, because there are people who kind of work on playing the piano and then there are people who play the piano.
But we work so hard to play the piano to serve music.
And that's where an artist comes in that can you work with your gifts? And there are people who are frightfully talented.
You see these kids now seven, eight years old, and they're playing major works with what appears to be comprehension, which is astounding.
But the other side of it that Rubenstein talked about it a lot, that playing the piano is just part of your life.
It's a part of it. That food, that books, that painting, the architecture, all these different things, understanding where these things come from and why they why they're important.
Because we give concerts for what reason?
To show off what we do? And this is where it gets all lost. You know, you want people to come to these experiences and they should have an experience.
It should startle them sometimes when they discover their capacity to actually feel things.
I remember years ago in New York, I played a solo program.
And afterwards, there's a line for people to meet me. And it happened like two or three times. These businessmen shook my hand and then started crying.
And I thought, what is going on here? And it was just one of those nights where it touched.
It touched people in a way that they didn't realize they had the capacity to feel something.
And this is your responsibility as the artist. Yes, I have a connection with music. There is no doubt about that.
I always have since I was born. I remember it from the time I was a year and a half. What was in my life and all that stuff.
And that you have, OK, fine. Do I have hand-eye coordination? Yes. Everyone else in my family played sports.
My father was a minor league baseball player. His brothers, they all played sports. And this hand-eye coordination was astounding.
My grandfather was an artist, but he couldn't make his living just doing that. So he created an outdoor advertising company in the 40s or late 30s.
And so it exists in there. But for me, that it went directly to music. Did I have other skills? Yes, I was comfortable playing the piano.
It didn't faze me. I enjoyed all that. I thought it was fun. But when you realize, wow, my responsibility is to work with this.
Not to not try to be famous with it. And this is where it gets a little strange because I'm sure the public wonders, well, who's the next young thing to come along?
Not what does this person who's been doing this for 50 years, what are they going to say?
I mean, that does happen. That does exist. But there's a lot in between that's kind of just filling spaces.
And that's a hard one to... It's a hard one. I had only played solo repertoire all these years.
I think I would not be this... I might not even be the same person because all the different things influence...
My solo playing influences how I play with singers. My physical skills at the instrument are strong enough,
and dependable enough, that I can play anything for the voice. The El Carniche is not something I enjoy playing because it was so horribly challenging on different pianos.
You know, you get an action that fights back. You can have a rough evening. But that's why you develop your strength and your coordination.
The mindset that understands how to get you through things when other stuff gets in the way.
I had a piano a couple of weeks ago. Wonderful piano! I sat down in the rehearsal on stage, and I played the first chord, and I heard...
I played the next chord and boom! And I went back and forth between the two chords, and it...
Every time after I hit, something like a little boom, boom inside the instrument. A beautiful nine-foot starwood. Gorgeous piano.
And I thought, huh. And I stopped and brought the stage people out, and they're looking at it like how dogs when they go...
turn their heads to hear something. And I thought, are you not hearing that? And then the sound person came out because it was being streamed,
and he's like, oh no, no, this is not good. I said, thank you. They wheeled the piano out. They bring me another one.
Really? Yes. Right before I'm getting ready to play a concert. So you end up completely readjust, recalibrate to be able to do these things.
And if your relationship with these pieces is not strong enough, it can take you down.
And some people can battle through and beat the piano down and type out all the notes, and everyone thinks that's wonderful.
And at the end of it, I'm going, but you're not going to come back. You were impressed in that moment, but you weren't touched.
There are two very different things. And that's a really tricky thing. And I think it's...
That's why I think it's so important to when I talk to people, I say, you know, it is important who you are as a human being.
This is part of the way you tell a story, that you understand what your responsibility is and how you tell these stories musically.
And what is your real intention?
Yeah. It's interesting to watch, especially now. Things have changed.
Sure, sure, sure.
For the last 45 years, which things do change.
Do you think it's a... You mean by technology? You mean how we live, how we think about life?
I think that we're further and further away from the origins of this music, especially the Western European music.
This country is further and further in time away because there are very few people now teaching with that connection.
And other people learn from someone who taught them about these things, but they don't have any direct experience.
I lived in France for 12 years. It doesn't make me some specialist in French or French repertoire.
I was in love with French repertoire when I lived in Pensacola, Florida, when I was 12 years old.
But that thing of something being closer, but as further out of sight, out of mind, it's not absence makes the heart grow fonder.
That's a lovely sentiment that people like to use, but out of sight, out of mind.
And then, you know, we're getting further and further away from all of this music.
And these kids nowadays, they have these phones constantly, iPads and all these things, which gives them 30 seconds of something.
And then we're on to the next thing. So you're never trained to listen.
You have your little experience and you laugh or you whatever, and you go, wow, and then you swipe to the next one.
Life is swipeable. The experience of life is swipeable. You don't like this one, go to the next page.
You'll find one that you'll find one that fits it for that moment.
And I'm very grateful that I didn't have all that growing up.
That I had to be creative and, you know, do something with your time and your imagination.
Doesn't mean kids don't. I know plenty who do. Their parents pay close attention, though.
But it's that's where this music lives. I mean, it lives way, way up here in the in the in a divine space because of its power.
It's the best of humanity and its power to connect us as human beings.
It's extraordinary. And to find people who actually are willing to let it live there versus trying to bring it down to them and to show everybody, look what I can do.
And the same goes with singing, too. There are people who make extraordinary sounds.
No idea what's over what. And I live for that same thing at the piano as I do in the human voice.
And that freedom and that vulnerability to be vulnerable in that moment to to go with what you believe.
And, you know, you're in love with somebody or something. You don't question things.
And nobody can tell you otherwise. Worst thing to do is tell a teenager or a 20 year old that they're in love with the wrong person.
All you're going to do is get an explosion at you at that point. Better just stay quiet.
And hopefully it just fades out like the other person who they're with. But to tell someone, no, you can't do that.
So it's. That's where and I think I know I know with it with no question at all, but in the sound itself.
Lies the truth. And to be able to trust that in your sound.
Is everything that you can bring.
And but to maintain that sound, your connection through that line, that's called your job.
It's like I can't imagine having when I talk about how an actor has to memorize Shakespeare.
And that every syllable. Has to have intention.
That just blows my mind. And then they laugh at me going, yeah, and every note that you play doesn't.
And then you realize, wow, we're kind of the same thing.
Except we're lining it up vertically, trying to understand harmony, but then we're pushing it from left to right, trying to make sure that it tells a story.
So it's a. Very interesting. Experience.
Trying to find your vulnerability. So I feel like I'm really getting a.
Master class here, so you are a great teacher master teacher, so you have this extensive work in education as well.
Plus, you created this workshop called singing in Sicily.
Which nurtures young artists and so can you tell us a little bit more about this program?
For many, many years, I've after I stopped teaching.
In an institution. I.
I tried to assess what do they really what the students really, really need? What do young singers really need?
Because a pianist, if you're getting to the conservatory when you're 18 years old, you probably been playing the piano for 10 years.
Minimum. You've been you've started your lessons and you've been there every week and you played your competitions and you've already played concerti and you've done all these things.
A singer when they're 1617 years old, they open their mouth one day at school or a church and sing everyone starts to cry. Oh, you should be a voice major.
And the next thing you know, they're singing for every bloody school in the country.
Trying to get in because someone told them they had a beautiful voice.
And then they arrive at the conservatory. They're put into the exact same classes as everyone else.
The clarinetist who's been blowing on a clarinet since they were 7, the flute player since 9, the piano since 8.
Everybody else is 10 years ahead of them. They're supposed to be able to read music, learn four languages, sing in these languages, learn how to move on the stage to where it looks natural for them.
All this thing, but with the same confidence as everybody else and take theory class and say history classes and they're on and on and on.
And I thought it really needs to be redone.
The curriculum needs to be rethought, but because we love the system, everybody loves to have a system so that it can be critiqued and certified by this association and this group and this group.
Well, if you're training artists, it's a very different thing.
That's just my philosophy. I have ideas as to how it can be redone to where the singers coming in would be dealt with completely differently.
Because they don't come, maybe sometimes the singer has played piano since they were 5 years old.
Well, they have a huge advantage. They might not have a voice, but what's the story?
How do you balance this playing field so people actually have a chance when they're in the institution?
After looking at all of that, I decided, you know what, why don't I just create something?
I choose people, four or five people every year, who I decide I'm going to bring them in.
I was in Sicily at the time with visiting friends and I talked about an idea for that project and they said,
and a singer who studies with me was singing in Munich and they came down to work on repertoire,
a role they were doing and came down to Sicily. I rented a little keyboard.
It all worked out. It was great. I had the space to do it.
And when I finished, they asked me, so what do you, how was it? What did you think?
I said it was incredible. So wonderful to be able to sit there and look out the window.
And there's the Mediterranean Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea out there, out the window as I'm teaching.
And I said, I'd love to do a project. I've been thinking, I've dreamed about it for years when I was in France,
but it was always housing people. Count on hotels. You can't count on people canceling
because then money is lost left and right with hotels. And I said that and they said,
oh, we can show you a building where you can house the kids tomorrow.
I didn't know that they had inherited from their father all these different buildings.
And so we housed it. They said, oh, you can house the kids here. There's enough room for four.
Bathroom, they have their bedrooms, they have kitchens. I said, okay.
So we did that up until the pandemic. And I invite four singers. I don't have auditions.
I hear people, I get messages word of mouth. Someone sends me a little video. Someone tells
me about somebody. I meet them all in person, face to face before I had worked with them,
before I invite them. So to find out is the energy good, because it's 10 days,
four or five people, and it's every day. You might get half a day off, but you are working
seriously every day. And it's intense. But to show them this is the work, there must be.
So I created a nonprofit, 501 through Z, and I've been able to raise the money to do it.
Truly it's a huge blessing. And we've done seven years so far. And some wonderful,
wonderful singers, wonderful results. For many people, it's life changing. Because in
the school system, you're constantly running, doing this and doing this and doing this,
and they never get to stay. Which the reality of it all is, once you graduate and you get a job,
you could be stuck in a city for six weeks. I had students that that freaked them out
long ago, and they would call crying. I can't do this. I can't do it. I can't be here like this.
This is driving me crazy. I'm not at home. I don't feel comfortable. I hate this hotel. I don't like
my colleagues. You know, you're in an opera production, you could be there minimum a month.
And you're seeing the same people day in and day out. And here are human beings. Some days
they're good and some days are not. And when you're mixing all that together and you have to work
together, it's tricky. So I've used this opportunity, this gift, truly, to help them
to live their lives. And I'm very grateful for the gift, truly, that people have provided for me
to do this. And we have a great time. We do it now in Duxbury, Massachusetts,
down on the south shore from Boston. It's a little town I've been going to for 44 years.
I have very dear friends there. And when I was there visiting during the pandemic,
I was ashamed because they can't take care of the property where we house the kids in Sicily
because there's so many problems. There was a 7-story building, we'll have issues. And they
didn't have the workers and they didn't have the materials. And so I had to reinvent. I
didn't go to my apartment one year. And I'm glad that was only a one-time event.
And now we've been in Massachusetts for three years. And we're at a convent. And it is,
sisters said, please come, please, please, please. We'd love music, we'd love art.
We want you here. And we go and we have the best time. But it really is, it lets them feel what it
really is like to focus only on the stuff that they have to do. That they have to do. But there are
things, you know, it's like playing the piano. There are certain things you just have to do.
You want to get stronger, you want to be more coordinated, you want to feel this,
you have to do the work. You don't have a choice. I don't care who you are, I don't care how talented
you are. You must do that basic work. Boy. And that's a big factor of it, just pushing that
constantly. That if you're not enjoying this, who else can? And you have to practice that every day.
Not that it's, oh, this is so heavy. This is so hard. And it's very easy to get into that situation
if your life is tough. The situation is tricky for them. And, you know, I counsel people about it,
and they come to me asking, oh, this person or something, or this conductor. And I end up with
all sorts of ways trying to help people to understand. You can get through it. You have to adapt.
Not change who you are, but you have to change your reaction to things. So that you focus on
doing your job. Is the piano different everywhere you go? Yes, you've known that since you started
taking piano lessons. You have piano, your teacher has theirs. There's another one at the school.
There's another one at the church. There's another one in the back of a pickup truck. If you were
ever so lucky to be able to play in the back of a pickup truck, as I was when I was 17 years old
and got there, there were only maybe 72 keys. Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh. There were holes in some of
the spots where there should have been. And for whatever reason, I agreed in a park that I would
play for this festivity and there. Well, you know what? Nobody cares. You can complain all you want
until you might become more famous and respected, and then you get to choose what you'd like to have.
But you have to find your way because if you cancel every time you feel uncomfortable,
you won't have a job. And this is part of it, whether it's with singing, whether it was playing
the piano, that, you know, you're lucky enough to have a great instrument that you practice on all
the time. Fantastic. Good for you. You should play even better. About people say the other way,
oh, it's better to practice on a horrible instrument. That way when you arrive, you'll be
grateful for anything. I am not of that school. I do not want to practice that way. I have my piano.
It is a small miracle. I love it. It loves me back and it shows it shows me every possibility
that's out there. And that is, you know, that is why it was built the way it's built for me.
So now you also have a mentorship position or mentorship function at the Art of Preservation
Society of New York. Right. I'm on the board board board trying to. We talk about how to.
Why is this music relevant? What is there to learn? What is there to share?
What? How are we going to? How are you going to get people to show up?
And this is always the challenge because people come in trying to do things.
And I talk to them a lot about it and my students, I'm sure they watch this. They're
going to burst out laughing. It's lovely that you can do something. That's not the point. We're
not trying to show people that we do things. We're trying to be something through music so they can
their lives will shift a little bit for the better. Hopefully during the time that you're with them.
And with the Arts on Preservation Society this year for the first time, because we've tried other
things with me working with duet duos and it's tricky then because all my pianist canceled or
all this, all that and all that nonsense that goes on in this world. And so Blair asked me,
would I do American song? I said, sure. I love it. Why not? And I have a lot of experience and all
that. So he sent me videos of all these different singers and asked me to choose who would be in
the class. And I sat there that night on my couch listening and I texted Blair after the first couple
of people and I said, I think you sent me the wrong videos. These people are not singing in English.
And he writes me back, I'm sure I sent you the right ones. No, they're not singing in English.
This is not any, I don't understand anything. Finally, there was a song I knew.
I know all these composers, all the songs they write. All that I knew, I thought, oh my God,
people really don't know how to sing in the language they speak. So I chose the people
and then I told Blair, Blair's going to run a little bit differently this year. He said,
what do you mean? I said, I'm going to send out an email to those who I've chosen with homework.
That will be done prior to my class. I don't want to work with the first person and spend 45 minutes
with this person getting all of the stuff. And then the other's watching going, I have to change
this fast. I'm going to give it to them upfront. And that's what we did. And everybody had to come
in and whatever assignments I gave, and the biggest one was to recite their poem, their text,
from memory. Recite. Wow, was that not interesting? Mind boggling. How people could divorce themselves
completely from music and recite the poem like this. Oh, wow, this is great. I'm going to go
to the next one. They built nothing. They memorized some words. You know, but this is what,
if they've not been told that, that it's beyond that, then why would you, how can you expect that
of people? As an educator, it is your responsibility to inform people, to find the kind of people
you want to talk to. As an educator, it is your responsibility to inform people, to find the
kindest way possible. And writing, when I listed it all, I laughed and thought, this is good.
I think I'm going to do things like this more often, because it's always in a master class,
the first person gets hit with everything. The basic thing that you want to talk about with
peddling, with this, with fingering, with sound, with phrasing, and then the other people are
waiting their turn going, oh my God, and it freaks them out because they get in their head thinking,
oh, I have to change this before I get up there. I have to do this. And then it's not fun for them.
But if they at least have to show you some type of commitment and connection. Some people read
their poem with so much expression, it broke your heart. It was so beautiful. Others forgot what the
song was about, but came up with a whole new interpretation of the poem. So I got to see the
whole gap, which was great. But when there's a song involved, the composer chose the poem
because of what they feel about what the poem means. And that's what inspired them to write
that music. So your job then is to weave through two different things. Yeah, you have words in
front of you, but those words were set by a musician. And your responsibility as a musician
is to get into their psyche to find out why did they set it up. That's how you say those words.
And I find it fascinating, but to see how much they improved in three days,
because we had a class recital at the end of the week, that they stood up there and sang with such
incredible commitment, and they got to sing one song. Just the nightmare of all performance types
of things. You get one thing, you don't get to sing a group, you don't get to sing once and then
come back later and feel more warmed up. You had to jump up there and do your one little song.
And everybody delivered. That was, we talked about that afterwards, how every person raised their
level. That's all you can ask for is awareness. And I think that is a huge part of my job is just
awareness of getting people to realize, wow, there's another room to this house.
Yeah, there's a door there. Why didn't you open the door?
That'd be the first thing that I'd want to do. What's behind that door? I'd want to know.
But that's just the way I'm wired and everyone's wired differently. And everybody,
you know, some people might ask very nicely, I wonder what's behind that door?
When I'm probably the one to walk over and open it.
Yes. But that's all part of being a human being. And music does come from human beings.
It lives in a very divine space. But it's the best of humans, the best of humanity.
Just like great art is the very best of what we're capable of. And I tell people all the time,
we don't use music. You don't treat it, you don't use it. You serve it. It's a very different thing.
People use music to become famous. That's not how it works. It's the other way around.
You let it use you, you listen to it, it informs you. It can show you how to be a better human
being. When you listen to it and the clarity, when you listen to it, you're not going to be
a better human being. You're going to be a better human being. And that's the way it works.
And you listen to it and the clarity, when you sit and really pay attention in Bach,
you learn a lot about life. It's pure, it is so it's just, it's right there.
There's no craziness going on. But to be still enough inside to be able to listen,
to be able to listen inside, to trust that it's okay that they can just actually listen
to something in their head without having to see a video that goes with it.
Someone comes and brings a piece and they play it and I'm going,
have you heard this before? Oh yeah, I heard someone on YouTube. Well, who was it? I don't know.
I mean, wrong style, wrong whatever. And I'm going, you really have to look at, consider the source.
You know, if I want to hear a great Chopin, they're going to be just a few people I'm going to think
of. They will all be very, very different in their approach. But I want to hear those people.
Doesn't mean I'm going to discard everybody else. But there's a reason why those people are known
for their interpretation of a certain composer. And that's a, you know, I have an affinity with
French music, especially with Poulenc. And you feel those things and that's something you don't
even know when you're young. People around you notice things and they just kind of quietly just
keep feeding you things that they know make you happy. At the same time giving you stuff that they
know is going to challenge you. Now we're close to the end of our conversation, almost, but we have
a few more. You have received three degrees from Peabody and then also later you were honored with
the Distinguished Alumni Award from Johns Hopkins University, which is not an award that they just
give out very often, but it's very rare that one receives, right? So could you share more about
what this recognition means to you? I was stunned. I was living in New York at the time when this
letter arrived and said the office of the president, I thought, oh, they must want money.
They're always fundraising at Hopkins and I opened the, and it was only one piece of paper
inside instead of the envelope and this letter and this little shiny brochure. And there it was.
And I was like, wow. And I reached out to, I knew two other people who had received it, musicians,
because Peabody became part of Hopkins in 1977. So I thought, what do you, one of them said, oh,
I played with the orchestra. Well, that wasn't going, that didn't work out. We talked about that
a little bit. And the other person was a conductor. So he just conducted a concert because he was
already on the faculty. And I said, okay, it was strongly recommended that I just play a recital.
And it was getting later and later in the 16 season. And I said,
well, why don't we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Peabody Hopkins Union?
And I'll play a recital in honor of that. And you can present the award that night.
That's what they did in October of 2017.
Congratulations. Well deserved with all the amazing career paths you have had and plus
all the things that you do with your students and other initiatives and raising the future
classical musicians. And also plus reaching out to the audience in such a way that they're also
being educated, right? Through your concerts and things. Yeah.
And that to me, I have a friend, she's right here on the fireplace with me.
The lady in the middle, you can see her, Ruth Jeskowitz, the concert that I played on YouTube
are the Dances and Improvisations Community Concert Series. That was for her 99th birthday.
That concert was. Really? Now she's 102.
Oh, bless her heart. Her dear daughter, Amy, in the photo
graph she passed away last year of pancreatic cancer. But Ruth is still with us, 102 years old.
And I had dinner with her a couple of weeks ago and we're sitting there waiting for her son-in-law
to arrive. The two of us that we've known, I've known her since I was 19. She said, Ruth,
you realize I'm now older than you were when we met. Because she was 59 when we met and now I'm
beyond that. And she laughed and she said, you know, Mark, you just have to be willing to learn
something every day. And I think this is someone 102 years old telling me the reason why we are here
is to learn something every day. And I live by that philosophy and I just want to say,
I hear you very clearly. You know, that's how I live my life. She goes, oh, it's very clear.
And it's true that this is we're here to learn. And if you've been given special gifts,
then your responsibility is to share those gifts. Not just give it away, but to learn
the best you can as to how you can share that. And I think that's the way to learn.
And I think that's the way to learn the best you can as to how you can share that.
And that's these are the people in my life from for a long time who've watched the entire journey
who we still laugh about things that happened 45 years ago.
And that's, that's what it's about.
Well, by the way, you look so much younger than older than 59. But anyway, that's my just my
63 and feeling free. Oh my goodness. You look so much.
Tell me this beard makes me look older as this. I don't care. I'll keep trying it out.
It looks fine to me anyway, but as still you're very young, but what sort of legacy do you hope
to create cultivate? It's important to care about something. Anything to really care.
Not just stare at it, but care to make sure to give it the chance to grow, to nurture,
to share it. Whatever it is you have, you know,
isn't our guest so inspiring. I'm sure you're enjoying and learning from every bit of this
episode. So I need to ask you two things. First hit that like button on YouTube or subscribe.
If you're listening on your go to podcast platform, then follow us on the Instagram,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and tick tock at that piano pod or behind the scenes content,
episode updates and more. Stay connected and inspired to celebrate the past, present and
future of classical music. You told me about Rio Ravel left hand concerto. So what else is in your
this season's? I'm playing a recital with the soprano Karen Slack. It's a program called
Dream Variations that I created for her and me. She is a great fan of Jesse Norman. She admired
the program that we did the five seasons, which mixed classical things with the more popular music.
And I put three pieces, one of Tina, Nina and Lena, Tina Turner, Nina Simone and Lena Horn
on the program mixed in with Schubert and Brahms. It's it's. Oh, that is lovely. That'll be for
Chicago Lyric. OK. And what's at the end of February? What else? I'm playing a solo recital,
a program that I created called the Roaring Twenties, the genius of youth. And all the pieces
are written by composers when they were in their twenties. Bartok Bagatell's Opus Six,
the Brahms third piano sonata that he had a third not at the age of 20.
The F minor sonata and then the second half is Un Bac sur l'Océan of Ravel, Miroir,
Boat on the Ocean. And then a piece that I commissioned 25 years ago by a dear friend,
David Shapiro in Philadelphia, Through the Eyes of a Child, because I was doing a program
based on that was the title of the program. The piece is written by our four children,
Kenneth Seidman and Debussy. But the people who were in charge of the series decided they didn't
want that program. They wanted something more traditional. So that piece was kind of left to
the side. And throughout all these years, I've tried to find ways to incorporate it, to put it.
And I didn't couldn't find the right moment. Now we finally arrived at the moment. So here it is.
Twenty five years later, it will have its world. With another piece by a young composer who wrote
when he was 19 in Harrisburg and then finishing with the Armandie du Soir of Liszt.
Oh, wow. Nice. And then where you said you're performing with?
I'll do that. Here in Baltimore, there's a private concert. This is on the Market Square
concert series in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the end of February. February is the week after
the Ravel. I played with them on 15 and 16 and then the week later on the 22nd, I played the recital.
Wonderful. Well, if you are ever in New York, please let me know. And I would love that in
your concert or master class or thank you. Yeah. So for listeners, please go to
markmarkampianist.com to learn more about Mr. Markham's solo chamber career and his concert
updates. And you can also watch some of the his solo chamber concerts we discuss in this episode
on YouTube. All the links are listed in the show notes. Mark, this has been such an inspirational
fun conversation. So before I let you go, we have one more thing to do, which is the piano
pod rapid fire questions. And I in this segment, I get to ask silly questions, but each
question is a little tricky. So yeah, but I really need you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Whatever comes to your mind in a second. Okay. No judgment here. Okay. Question number one,
what is your comfort food?
Oh, wow. Gosh, I love too much food. Ice cream. Sounds great. Strawberry ice cream.
Nice specific. How do you like your coffee in the morning? I don't drink coffee. Really?
I drink green tea from Japan. Oh, which which kind which green tea specifically do you know?
Tamari okucha. Tamari okucha. Okay. Now, are you a cat person or dog person? Dog.
Sunrise or sunset? Sunset. Summer or winter? Summer. What skill have you always wanted to learn,
but haven't had a chance to? Skydiving. What is your word or words to live by?
Hmm. Be real. What is the most important quality you look for in other people? Decency. Name three
people who inspire you living or dead? My teacher and Shine. Wow, they're just so many people.
Wow. Oh my goodness. Larry Smith, who's a dear friend of mine. He's no longer here. And Ruth
Jeskiewicz. Name one piece in your current playlist. Oh gosh, what if I said I didn't have one?
Oh, that's okay. I don't have a playlist. But do you have like a list of people who inspire you
to listen to your playlist? But do you have like any piece that you're listening right now? Like a?
No, because I'm always curious if I can find live performances of people. I'm much more interested
in that. There are songs that I hear. I was where was I the other day shopping someplace and this
piece from probably the 80s came on and I was in public, not even aware who was watching what I was
doing and I was in my own little world with some pop. It was it was I laughed. I had to laugh when
I left. I thought you really you've lost it now. Well, pop music from 80s is they're the best.
It's actually the best. Late 70s, 79 and on. Look out. Now filling the blank. Music is blank.
The best. Wonderful. Wow. So this wraps up this episode of the Piano Pull. Thank you, Mark,
for joining us today and sharing your story, beautiful stories and insights and expertise.
Once again, to our wonderful audience, you can learn more about Mr. Mark Markham and his amazing
work through his website at Mark Markham Pianist dot com. And thank you to our faithful fans and
listeners for tuning in today. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate, review it on your
GoToPodcast platform and give us a thumbs up button. If you are watching this episode on YouTube,
follow the Piano Pull on social media to get the latest piano news via social Facebook, Instagram,
TikTok and LinkedIn. I will see you for the next episode of the Piano Pull. Once again, thank you, Mark.
Thank you. Bye, everyone.