You're listening to the piano part, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they're bringing the piano into the 21st century.
In the first half of this episode, we spoke to Dr. Marilyn Nunken about her career as
a concert pianist, recording artist, and her love and passion for piano music by living
composers.
Check out our YouTube or podcast channel if you missed it.
And now, the conclusion.
You mentioned about bridges.
So you talk about that in a research article, Performance Practices, which was written in
pretty recent, right?
And that article, I'm going to post it on the description section for the audience,
but it was very inspiring.
So you're comparing two artists, and then one of them is your teacher, David Burge.
So first of all, I'm curious to know about him.
And it sounds like he has such a great impact on your career as a pianist and musicologist,
of course, but as an educator as well.
And one of the things, like I'm an educator as well, I ask myself, what does it mean to
be an educated musician, trained musician in this new era, especially after this very
difficult two years we had?
What does it mean?
What sort of skills, what sort of training, what sort of knowledge we have to have, what
sort of function we need to be involved in, right?
Then I think you mentioned that in one of the videos I saw that David Burge mentioned
that the reason that contemporary music did not reach listeners was not because of the
composer but the fault of the performer.
So he has this strong opinion about being a performer.
So could you just tell us a little bit about Mr. Burge?
He is a wonderful teacher for me.
I worked with him for only two years, which always makes me feel that if you come in contact
with a great teacher, it can be for, doesn't need to be for.
When I see people who want to stay with their teacher for four or five, six, seven, eight
years, we love our teachers, but often the gifts they give us, they give us fairly quickly
and it can last a lifetime.
An excellent lesson.
I think always with teachers, it's about the quality of the time that you spend with them
and not the quantity of time you spend with them.
David was an extraordinarily provocative person.
He really, really believed that the function of the performer is to serve the living composer.
He didn't like being called a new music pianist.
He thought that's what all pianists should do.
I mean, he was trained with classical music.
He studied with, you know, Berks was a Belgian pianist who very much came from the lineage
of Liszt and the virtuoso playing.
And David, I think, really saw his role wherever he went as promoting the composers of his
own time.
And this could be a great colleague of his, like George Crum, who was his colleague in
an early job at Colorado College, or it could be just anyone that he met.
He played, he was not about who is the greatest composer to play, but felt that with his traditional
repertoire, always to be performing new works by people he met.
They could be very important people.
They could be student composers.
He felt that was necessary in that if performers did not do that, they were late.
And he just had this perspective that he thought it was great laziness only to play pieces
for which there was already established performance practice, but that performers needed to be
out there creating new performance practices and making connections with composers.
I think that counters what might have been a very typical view a few years ago, which
was that contemporary composers don't know how to write for piano.
And that this is, you know, and it's true, there's many composers who don't write well
for piano.
But there are many composers, like as I found with Tristan Murai or somebody who writes
for piano.
And that's probably, I guess David would say it would be lazy to hear, to have a couple
bad experiences with contemporary pieces and say, well, there's just nothing here for me.
He always felt there was something for every pianist in the contemporary repertoire.
He was a tremendous, a tremendous influence that way.
He also very much believed as I do that technique is natural and that most performers, pianists
do not play well because of things which are, let's say, based on too much tension or extraneous
motion, extraneous gesture, negative things that they have acquired.
And if you can excise those things, the natural technique is a healthy technique, which is
more about uncovering the natural technique within a person, not imposing another kind
of thing on top of them.
He was an extraordinarily powerful player, but also just a terrifically relaxed player.
And I guess one of the great images I have of him is him walking on stage for a concert
and he was like six foot four, an incredibly skinny guy.
And just sort of would just stride on stage, sit down, start playing.
Just like, there was this energy, just this complete, he didn't sit down and get set and
get ready.
And he used to laugh at what he said at the pianist who would sit down on stage and look
for God, when they started to play.
Looking up and getting in the, because I remember mentioning it to him and he said, if you're
standing backstage and you're not ready to play, he said, you should have been ready
two weeks ago.
You should not be getting into the mood as you sit down.
You should have been there two weeks ago and be ready to sit down and show it.
And that lack of attention.
He was an awe-inspiring figure, but certainly there was that sense that what we do is very
direct.
What we do is very natural.
You don't need a big show to play passively.
You really write about his story comparing to his, I guess, contemporary pianist, Mr.
Miller.
Those two have completely different paths, yet there's a common interest in music or
how.
So the article I read, there are three words, three things just popped out of in my head.
It's the access and self-preservation and audience engagement.
So those are very, I mean, never ending discussions as musicians since the beginning of this music,
music, I guess, creation.
But as an educator, what do you think about all these three very important topics, especially
let's focus on self-preservation?
I'm not sure.
To me, my interpretation of that word was how we can sustain ourselves as musicians.
That's a topic really that we need to discuss, especially we went through some really horrendous
two years.
And so that and self-preservation as in maybe preserving the tradition of classical music.
So if you could just briefly tell us what you think.
Sure.
I think you're so right.
And I appreciate you reading the article so carefully about David Burge and Robert Miller,
who I didn't know they were contemporaries.
They were both great interpreters and living composers.
And David Burge was someone who was sort of almost a musical populist.
He was always traveling small towns, large towns, different communities, different styles
of music, really reaching as many people as he could.
And Robert Miller, just as a contrast, was a New York based, very successful lawyer actually
for his job, who in his sort of spare time, of course he was brilliant, was a great pianist
concertizing at Carnegie Hall, at Rickenhall, basically New York, Boston and Princeton,
working with an extremely select group of composers and playing for very elite audiences
and making wonderful recordings.
They both made incredible recordings and were terrific, in some ways terrific models.
Well, there aren't a whole lot of models sometimes we look for, but models for myself of pianists
who played the music of living composers.
But yeah, so different, right?
So how does that play into the idea of self-preservation?
I think one of the ideas, how do we sustain ourselves, that I think is in common to these
two different types of performers, it's important about finding your community, finding your
people.
To create a career where you sustain yourself as a musician, you have to have that sense
of purpose of what is the music you play and who are you playing it for?
And I think sometimes when I see young grad students here at NYU or in the field, that's
a hard thing to decide because when we're educated, we're told, oh, you play everything,
you play Bach, you play romantic, Baroque, classical, maybe 20th century, maybe new music.
And who do you want to play?
Well, I want to play for anyone.
You have this idea we want to play for everybody.
But it's a crazy kind of career path.
We can't play all music.
We can't play all music for everyone all the time.
It's hard to find anyone to listen to us sometimes.
So the idea, I think my thoughts on the self-preservation, to sustain a career, you have to have this
idea of what are you in it for?
What is the music that you care most deeply about?
And what are the strategies you can develop to bring that to people who either already
appreciate it or people that you want to bring that to music to who do not have access to
it already?
And so again, it's about connecting with the community.
So someone like Robert Miller, maybe people might say, well, it's very elitist, but he
connected with composers, with listeners, with funders, with presenters.
He was able to sustain a very limited kind of career in a way because maybe it was a
narrow group of people, but it was a very deep group of people.
It was a little seam of gold that he had there.
And I think actually in classical, we call it that music, a lot of classical music is
like that.
It's a very small listenership.
It's a very devoted listenership.
And how many people will go see the complete Beethoven sonatas?
It's a group of people who want to hear those pieces again and again and again, played by
different performers, different ways, the niche, but it's a very rich kind of niche.
Or you might have a player who says, well, I want to play that music, but I want to play
it if people have never heard it before.
I want to go out to places where it's not played every season, you know, at a big hall.
I want to go and play it in a venue where nobody hears piano music a lot.
And I want to introduce people to these pieces.
So sometimes it's about repertoire, sometimes it's about audiences, but about finding a
community of listeners that aligns with the repertoire that you love and the role you
see for yourself as an interpreter of the music.
So I suppose in order to talk about self-preservation, we really have to have these specific goals,
you know, about what our role is.
I don't think there's one role of a pianist, but it's about finding the particular role
for you.
Do you think we should be more equipped as a pianist?
This is the really difficult question, right?
Because to be honest, school tuition is not really something that, you know, we really
have to talk about it.
You know, we have the student loan that we owe after we graduate and we have to be very
creative in terms of how we sustain ourselves, literally.
So I've been asking some guests about should the school teach students about different
ways, like maybe different software that they need to know or in a more practical way?
So what do you think of that?
I know it's a little difficult question, but I think absolutely.
I mean, I think just teaching, I don't want to say just teaching music, but the ideas
of how to create a career and how to create an interesting individual career, it's not
ethical not to teach these things.
I really feel an ethical obligation.
It's not that there are too many musicians, but I feel sometimes there are too many pianists
graduating who all are playing the same music and have the same general idea about what
their function is.
I'm going to teach, I'm going to do some chamber music, I'll do some solo music, I'll do this.
I teach a class, a professional development course here in piano studies.
And a lot of times people all seem to have the same basic career goals.
And there's just not room for so many people with such general ideas.
So I often try to work with the students.
What kind of audiences do you want to play for?
What type of music do you really want to play?
What are ways you could reach people that are not just the typical ways of reaching
listeners?
And I think it's important to consider that for schools to teach these different skills.
And it's not just marketing so much as helping students realize it's important to be obviously
a good well-rounded musician, but the most unique career opportunities are not going
to go to the most well-rounded person.
They're going to go to the person whose work captures people's attention and interests.
And often that is, it's not fair, but it doesn't always go to the person who has the largest
repertoire.
Maybe the most compelling way of putting it out there and communicating with listeners.
So that's, I think, really important.
I will say when we talked about my recording of Tristan Murey and that was, when I made
it people didn't really know who I was, which is fine.
I wanted to make the recording.
But after that came out I was the only pianist, and I still am in some ways playing that music
in this country.
So it resulted in a tremendous amount of opportunities because if people wanted to hear that music,
they had to ask me to play it.
So it's a way of saying that if you have something that you do which is special, the opportunities
will have to come to you because there's no one else who does that.
And so I think it's that idea of specificity does not need to be about contemporary music,
but there's this wonderful story.
The American pianist Richard Bullig was a pianist in the 1930s, a wonderful, wonderful
American who went and studied in Europe and came back to America and played his first
performances of Debussy and Scriabin and Schoenberg.
Richard Bullig, a fabulous legacy.
But there's a story of John Cage as a student, like 19 years old, camping out on Richard
Bullig's driveway in California, wanting to hear him play Schoenberg's Opus 11, the
three pieces, which were written in 1909.
Richard Bullig was the only person who played them in the country and they hadn't really
been recorded or anything.
And John Cage literally camping out and waiting for him to come home and asking him to play
these pieces for him.
And it's that sense that that's the greatest tribute to any player is that someone wants
to hear what you have to play.
And so I think especially in this day and age when there's so much recorded music, we
want to encourage our students and for ourselves to find something that we do which has that
uniqueness that we believe is that special, people will need to come to us for.
You are really training these musicians that come to grad school at NYU or even undergraduate
and they are playing these new music.
First of all, I'm curious of the audition process.
It's a different school, right?
I also actually, 2005, I was going to study at NYU with Mr. Bernstein.
But at the time I was very young and my teacher in Kansas was so worried that I decided to
go to UMass Amherst.
But then I met you I think a couple years later and then talking about the PhD program.
And I think this as a young musician, sometimes it's difficult for us to really know ourselves
as can I do this?
Or is this the right decision?
Or is this even a responsible decision?
So how is the audition process like for you as a mentor or faculty member, how do you
choose these musicians?
I'm curious.
Well, I'm fortunate to have wonderful colleagues as well.
So we're not looking, I think maybe one thing we share, we come from different backgrounds,
different traditions, different ideas.
I think we are not looking for one kind of pianist, but we're looking for I think more
and more that the ideas, again, looking for people who are interesting personalities,
have a singular voice, who have a unique way of playing.
That's just becomes live performance, getting back to this idea, when there's so many recorded
versions, so many things online to see, wanting to develop artists who are worth seeing live,
where it's a different kind of voice is very important.
It's funny because we're not a new music department.
And I say that because actually I'm so dedicated to what we consider your traditional discipline
technique.
I find programs which focus on only contemporary or put a big emphasis on only contemporary
music often, they lack some of the traditional technique or the emphasis, which I think is
so important to actually playing the instrument.
So we don't have, when we audition at NYU, I changed the audition requirements that we
require obviously a Baroque, classical, romantic, and a piece written before 1945 and then just
simply a piece written after 1945, which had not been the case before.
And it seems like a very small change to ask for something written in the last 65 years
or something, but it's actually quite true that many pianists still, they play a piece
of Debussy or Scrabbin, that's their 20th century piece.
And so to say, a lot has happened.
So what becomes very interesting at the audition process is there's plenty of total pieces
written after 1945 as well.
And so what I find actually, when people audition here, that their choice of the work written
after 1945 really shows a lot.
And we see a little bit, maybe a student say, oh, I'm going to play Bach, Prelude and Fugue
or Chopin-Ballade.
The pieces we love from the earlier historical repertoire, which show a great deal, but then
sometimes the piece they pick that's more contemporary, it's a little bit more of a
question mark.
What are they going to choose?
Composed you've never heard of.
Is it going to be a little piece?
Is it going to be a big piece?
Is it going to be a tonal piece, a minimalist piece, a spectral piece?
Is it going to be, there's just so many different ways of, is it going to be a neoclassical
work?
There's even like Poulenc lived to 1969 or something.
I mean, it's funny.
So we get it.
I find that the choice of the work written after 1945 is really revealing.
And it does often show something a little different about what that player likes to
do.
It's funny because I've sometimes said if somebody really didn't want to play a piece
written after 1945, they could play John Cage's 433 and just half a minute to not do anything.
And that would also be such a wonderful statement.
I think, I'm not going to do anything for this.
And that would take such courage.
And I think I would have, it would be a different kind of respect for a player.
So I feel that asking people to make that kind of personal choice is part of the audition.
And I know that we often look forward to what is that mystery piece going to be?
The piece where there isn't such a prescriptive attitude about what might, you know, a lot
of pianists, they'll play Ligeti etude or maybe they'll play Lennard Bernstein.
There might be more traditional choices.
There might be something really quite unusual.
There might be a piece written by a student composer.
Sometimes the student will bring a piece.
It will be like, what is this?
Who is this person?
Tell us who this person is.
And then we learn something at that audition too.
I think for a long time, maybe in previous generations, there was an idea that we cannot
evaluate students playing new music because we don't know what it is.
But you can tell, always, you can tell how a person plays the piano.
You can tell technique and color and sensitivity and expression and all of those things we
pick up on.
Even when we don't know the piece, we can overwhelmingly tell if it's a good performance,
right?
Because it's not like a new music sounds the same.
Of course it doesn't.
And so even when we don't know the piece, we can still learn a lot about the performer.
I think in a way, it also shows, really, as a classical musician, sometimes I feel like
we work so hard, but it's hard to step outside the box.
I remember when we were younger, your teacher would say, well, you can enter a competition
with this piece or that piece, but this piece, you definitely will feel more comfortable.
That one, it's new, but it's different.
Are you able to handle it?
So I think it really shows the character of each musician.
And that is really beautiful.
So now, and I also mentioned this earlier, being it's Women's History Month, and we've
seen some beautiful posts.
And I'm someone who's very interested in music history.
And I changed my name to Clara.
When I came to this country, there's a certain idea.
And I used to post on Instagram.
Every single day, I find a composer's birthday, and I find some true facts.
And I saw all these.
So tell us a little bit of this project you've been doing with Women's History and what influence
have you brought?
It's funny because social media is always what do we do with social media?
What do we do with visibility?
And I try to, when I post you, I try to put up things that I think are thought-provoking.
Last year during the pandemic, I just like many other people not sleeping well.
And when we had Women's History Month, I think I had the idea, I'm just going to try to find
a woman pianist or composer musician that I respect and put them up every day, one every
day for the month.
And last year, my real goal was not to pick the usual suspects because I think, of course,
everyone, we always do Martha Argerich or Alicia del Rocha or Myra Hess or Annie Fisher.
I mean, there's some people that we teach more than others.
And Oryklar Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn, those people that we say, oh, well, those
are our sort of go-to women composers or pianists, people we think of.
And I wanted last year, I thought, I'm going to just hunt around being up in the middle
of the night and whatnot.
Find some examples of maybe not the pianists that we know about and maybe the ones we have
recordings of, but these women who have stories that are compelling stories to learn about.
And I learned so much.
And this month, putting up people, you know, pianists who were emigres, people who are
immigrants, people who were displaced during the war, women whose careers were cut short
because of family concerns and because of the place of women.
But these fantastic stories of performers who really toured Europe, who worked with
important people, who works were dedicated to.
And a lot of them are simply just lost to history because they didn't record or they
didn't teach enough to create a lineage of students who would sort of venerate them and
talk about them the way we talk about some other pedagogical traditions.
So not to say that these are the most important people, but to look at their stories.
Everyone has a story.
And maybe part of this is my questioning.
We always want to question the stories we're taught and to question who our maros are and
why are we taught what, you know, our field of piano performance and pedagogy is very
dominated by certain kinds of traditions and stories.
And they are untrue at all, but they're one version of history.
And so I suppose my musicologist sense, music historian sense is always asking, well, what
are the other stories that coexist and what are the other kinds of narratives that we
can think of, which especially for women pianists, we don't have models like that.
We don't have so many of those stories.
And maybe this is getting into dangerous territory, but certainly a lot of young women pianists
damage their hands and suffer injuries trying to sound like a male pianist and play the
piano in a way that is maybe not the way physically.
So that's the idea of searching for different kinds of models that might be more appropriate
to which we might be more sympathetic to, I guess, in Women's History Month.
That's true.
Wow.
I'm learning so much really.
You know, I am definitely one of those people.
Sometimes I look at your posts and I'm Googling more and learning more.
And that's actually true.
I didn't even think of this being like, you know, when I was younger, I did have very
skinny arms.
And so that was always kind of a thing.
I felt like I couldn't really find the music that I felt.
And that was also very picky with the song.
I didn't really...
This is all making so much sense.
And I tend to try to inspire my own students as well.
I think sometimes as educators or even musicians ourselves, you know, we all have to be...
Inspiration really is the most important thing.
It doesn't matter how good we are.
If we're not inspired, it's hard to keep on going forward.
So what you're doing is really tremendous.
I was going to mention one other thing with this, the deal of female women as role models.
But I say early on when I first became serious about playing, one of the first things I did
of course was get tendonitis as a young teenager.
I was doing a lot, suddenly exploring a lot of technique, having male teachers, suddenly
lots of playing.
And you see this a lot.
And the idea about finding the repertoire that is right physically and expressively
and developing technique and approach to the piano that is individual is something that
I think is important.
You know, artistically we talk about, but also just in terms of physical and mental
health, that's a very big issue.
And certainly with young people, we see a lot of issues as musicians with psychological
stress and physical.
We need to pay a lot of attention to that.
Let's talk about your latest future project.
One is you just released a CD album called Syncopated Musings, which music of mainly
Scott Joplin.
So which is a really big shift from all the other pieces, but come to find out.
I guess Joplin, Mr. Joplin and then Schoenenberg and Charles Ives, they're the contemporary
composers right there.
They share the same era.
So can you tell us a little bit more?
Absolutely.
Well, the early 20th century is such a rich, right, a rich, rich time period.
And I came to Joplin's music a strange, strange way.
Obviously the closest thing I really played before doing this was Charles Ives' Concord
Sonata, which, you know, refers to ragtime and American popular music in it.
But during the pandemic, I really became very serious about Joplin and his composers he
worked with, his contemporaries.
When we had the lockdown, so many people found changed their plans and I had to stop
performing.
And I suddenly was at home with my upright piano, which is not my instrument of choice.
I wasn't able to come to my studio to work.
And I found I was not able to keep playing the same repertoire.
I found a different instrument.
I wanted to have a different music for that piano.
I didn't feel right just playing the same repertoire on this different instrument for
no reason without any chance to perform it.
And we've always had this book of Joplin's piano music.
In fact, that's right.
Maybe people had it's a very, it's a very, it's a very traditional.
How sweet.
I had this in our house.
My husband is actually a very big fan of early American music.
And I thought, oh, to start looking through this, you know, just to play every night,
just to keep playing.
And I'd never really spent time with the scores.
And I just sort of fell in love with the notation.
Was really impressed in odd way with the music that I'd never spent time really listening
to or looking at.
Those are kind of elegance.
And I don't use it we're disciplined, but the scores are very particular.
It wasn't my image of what ragtime music was.
My idea of ragtime was kind of bar room piano and people in funny hats and you know, this
more the idea of a popular music.
Whereas when I looked at the scores, I thought this looks music written by a very intelligent,
serious, thoughtful composer.
And so I was playing a lot of the pieces and I actually was playing a lot of the pieces
written by Joplin with a collaborator.
And this was something Scott Joplin I learned was part of a community of very well trained
performers.
He was a singer.
He was a violinist, a quartet player.
He was not only a composer, but a teacher.
And Joplin moved in a circle of other very well educated black composer, performer who
toured, who wrote, who taught.
And in many cases when these other composers like Scott Hayden, like Arthur Marshall, Joseph
Lamb, well Joseph Lamb was not part of that community, but when these composers wanted
to get published, Joplin would say, well, let me, I'll work with you.
We can put both of our names on it and it'll get published faster, make more money because
my name is on it.
Because Scott Joplin was so well known and these other composers were.
There's all these pieces written by Joplin and someone else.
And it's very interesting as a performer to try to figure out how much is really Joplin
because Joplin has such a distinctive style.
And then like Scott Hayden, it's quite different.
And sometimes you can really tell who wrote what or sometimes it's really clear that Joplin
didn't really write much of it at all, but his name is just on it to attract more players.
So I'm really interested in playing this music, which is musically challenging.
It's interesting.
It's virtuosic.
It was a challenge for me because it was entirely different than what I'd been doing.
And my husband who is very musically savvy, but not a professional musician, and not a
musician really, but very good listener.
He said, well, why don't you present this to your record company and see if they'd like
a recording of Joplin?
And I thought, well, I don't know, does the world really need this from me right now?
But then the more I listened to other existing recordings of Joplin, I thought, you know,
I feel like I have a different take on this.
I feel I have something I want to say, which is always what we're after.
Is there something that we can provide to the musical universe that's not already out
there?
And the more I listened to other recordings, I thought, you know, I really, I don't really
like some of these recordings so much.
I would like to have my own say on how maybe this music goes.
So I contacted the same record company that did musicals just down the road.
You go back into my music and the producer there is like, I love Joplin.
It's just so funny because suddenly I find people come out of the woodwork that quite
a lot of people like Joplin, but it's also one of these things that in a conservatory
environment is not quite accepted, right?
Has this idea of being more of a popular, not a classical, what does that mean?
You know, there was actually a student here at NYU who said, I didn't think we were allowed
to play Joplin.
And I thought that's very strange.
I mean, why would we say that?
You know, so part of me started thinking, why is it that we are not allowed or encouraged
to play this music or to take the music seriously?
So that became sort of a little mission of mine.
And so we put together this recording during the pandemic under, wow, actually recorded
it at NYU.
Wonderful but so much of this was done.
We didn't record it remotely, but editing, doing notes and communicating without really
seeing people.
But I'm very, very proud of the project.
It came out last month, so it's the music of Scott Joplin and his collaborators.
It also includes a few of Joplin's solo compositions that he wrote.
And this is available on all music streaming services and also Amazon.
You can purchase a CD.
That's right.
Go to the diviner.
We're definitely going to promote this.
Joplin, I remember a few years ago, a friend asked me to help promote Joplin on WQXR.
He actually shared the same birthday as me.
So I was very interested in his story.
And he's also on the Lower East Side, I believe, when he was in New York for a while.
He did come to New York.
Exactly.
What's very exciting for me is that I'm going to be playing this summer at the Joplin International
Festival in Sedalia, Missouri.
So wow, that's awesome.
Very exciting to, again, like New York, which we think of as this great cultural center,
but actually to go to Joplin, where Joplin settled, where these people lived, and to
reach a different audience.
It's an audience that venerates this music, that loves this music, that is not coming
to it from the same direction that I'm coming from.
For me, it's a different kind.
So I'm actually really excited to meet these new audiences and to talk about what I do
in a different way.
So I think in a sense, it's very, always important to be trying, trying new things.
So definitely, I'm looking forward to that.
I would love to hear what are the advices you could give to young people, especially
after this crazy pandemic, you know, there's so many different ways of living, you know,
as musicians, we have to, what is your advice?
My advice would be for people, for young pianists and teachers to think about those unique narratives,
because we all will go into music and piano because we love what we do, because we love
the repertoire.
And in that sense, we're all the same.
In that sense, and even the idea of playing piano in technique, there's a sameness to
that.
You know, the instrument is unique, but there are good things and bad things.
There are ways to play the piano that are effective.
There are ways to play the piano that are technically not effective.
So there's a sense when we're all at a high level working well, that we're very much a
community of people who have a lot of the same loves and abilities and talents.
So the question becomes how to distinguish yourself, what makes you unique, whether it's
the repertoire, whether it's the people you play for, whether it's how you talk about
the music, whether it's how you put programs together.
It's so important for, in order for a self-sustaining career as either a teacher or a performer,
I think even as a lifelong music lover, to recognize what makes you different.
When I was small, I remember watching the Van Cliburn television and when they used to
show that on TV.
And I remember very clearly a segment in which the competitors in the Van Cliburn were playing
Chopin's first etude and they were playing away and the camera would zoom in on one set
of hands and then zoom out and it would be a different player.
And then it would zoom in on the hands and it would zoom out and be a different player.
And I know it was meant to show how everyone was playing so flawlessly, but the impression
it gave was that you could not tell one player from the other because everybody was playing
so fantastically well that they sort of all were uniformly excellent.
And for me, that was just sort of inspiring and also just entirely sickening because you
always want someone to remember what is unique about you.
And certainly when we love performances and remember good performers, it's for what is
special about them and not for what is the same.
Whereas we're aspiring to a high standard and a kind of uniformity of excellence, it's
so important for us to find and capitalize on what makes us different.
That's beautiful.
Absolutely.
Well, Marilyn, thank you so much.
I know we kind of gave you this bullet of questions, but we learned a lot and we appreciate
your time.
So now we want to move into this fun segment and it's called the PianoPod rapid fire questions.
We would like for you to answer them in the shortest answers as possible.
Okay.
All right.
It's really fun.
All right.
So the first question is, what is your comfort food?
My comfort food?
Comfort food.
My span.
Great.
All right.
Cats or dogs?
Cats.
Yay.
What is your word or words to live by?
The more I practice, the luckier I get.
Beautiful.
What is the most important quality you look for in other people?
Compassion.
What is the worst quality you want to stay away from?
Incompetence.
Name three people who inspire you, living or dead.
The writer, Michel Welbeck, a French writer, a very controversial Julia Child.
Okay.
Great chef.
And I'm trying not to pick pianists.
I know.
It's difficult.
Buckle of Havill, the playwright.
Name one piece in your current playlist.
That would have to be Carmina Burana.
Great.
Yes.
You're performing very soon.
Yes.
Name one book title in your library.
Currently reading Coming to My Senses, which is a memoir of Alice Waters.
You get only one song or piece to listen to for the rest of your life.
What is it?
Olivier Mercier's 20 gazes on the infant Jesus by Olivier Mercier.
And last question, last not least, music is?
Fill in the blank.
Music is what the sound becomes.
What the sound becomes.
Wonderful.
Last quote, it's actually not mine originally, that is the quote of the French spectralists
when they started their, became the spectral movement, the music is what sound becomes.
That is very, very deep.
Okay.
So thank you.
So this concludes this episode of the Piano Pod.
Thank you, Marilyn, for joining us today and sharing your wonderful stories and insights
and expertise.
And you can find more information about her on her website at Marylandnoncon.com.
I also want to encourage our audience to listen to her latest album, Syncopated Musings, available
on all music streaming services.
And also we didn't get to mention, but you have another CD album coming up, Morton Feldman's
Complete Music for Piano and Cello, which will be released in June with the cellist
Steven Marotta, so all the links are listed in the description.
Thank you to our wonderful audience and the fans for tuning in today.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please read and review on whatever podcasting platform
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We will see you for the next episode of the PianoPod.
Bye everyone.
Thank you, Marilyn.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.