Hello everyone, welcome back to the PianoPod. I'm Yuki Miisong. I'm Clara Zhang.
For anyone listening or watching our show for the first time, welcome!
Clara and I are both classical pianists and piano teachers from New York City.
This podcast is for anyone who plays the piano for fun, loves listening to the piano music,
or for someone who is currently pursuing a career in piano, works in the industry professionally,
or anyone who is simply curious about the world of piano music.
In each episode, we interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the music industry.
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So our guest of today's episode is Dr. Marilyn Nanken, pianist, Steinway artist, musicologist,
and director of piano studies at New York University, Steinhardt.
My alma mater, actually. I attended there around 2007-2008 and I already had my undergraduate and
master's degree in Florida and I was working as a college professor in Florida, but I just decided to
pack up and put everything in my Honda Accord and then with the U-Haul trailer in the back and
decided to drive. It took me two days to get to New York City just because I couldn't speed up so much
with the U-Haul and then I got to New York in January, the coldest time of the month of the year
and it was like really shocking, you know, coming from really relaxed Florida, sunshine Florida,
and then getting into New York City in such a cold day, but the experiences, the classes I took,
and then the classes I took, and then the piano lessons I got, and then all the other training I
received from NYU was just so priceless and especially with the people I met and so I'm
very, very excited to be able to interview Dr. Nanken after, gosh, 15-16 years. So I'm so excited
to be able to reconnect with her. Yeah, and you have also, you've known Dr. Nanken, right?
That's right. I met Dr. Nanken once in person about I think 2008, 2009, you know, it's just like you,
I actually, I had this fascination of studying at NYU for some reason when I was young, maybe I was
watching too much Friends, you know, so I just, I almost like wasn't like particularly thinking,
oh, Juilliard or Mahanet School, obviously those are beautiful schools, but when I was in Kansas,
I really just, so I emailed Mr. Samuel Bernstein at the time and actually came to study with him,
2005 audition there and got in and they hired me as an adult faculty, but I was very young. I was
like just a little over 20, 21 years old and my teacher in Kansas felt that if I came to New York
by myself alone at that time, I would get lost. So I went to UMass first and then I came back
to New York and I met up with Dr. Nanken to discuss further on the PhD program and so since then,
I've been following her journey and she's such an inspirational pianist and teacher, mentor,
you know, and a professor. So yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, same here. Yeah. And then as we
were learning about her for this episode, like, oh my gosh, she is, she is just an amazing woman. So
so I can't wait to reconnect with her after over a decade and since I graduated from NYU, so
to end to hear her personal stories, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, she is here. So let's
get the show started. 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. We are delighted to
introduce our guest of season two, episode 13, Dr. Marilyn Nanken, pianist, recording artist,
Steinway artist, musicologist, and educator. Dr. Nanken has regarded as quote, a determined
protector of important music end quote by the New York Times and quote, one of the greatest
greatest interpreters of new music end quote by American record guide. She has performed at the
world's most prestigious concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim
Museum, and the Theater Booth du Nord in Paris and Chicago Symphony Center. The composers who have
written music for her include Michael Byron, Richard Carrick, Priya Chia, Jason Ecker,
and many others. Dr. Nanken is the author of the Spectral Piano, published in 2015,
and Identity and Diversity in New Music, which was published in 2019. She has recorded more
than 30 discs and has published articles on various topics regarding 20th century music.
Dr. Nanken is also an educator since 2006. She has been a distinguished faculty member
and director of piano studies at New York University's Steinhardt School. So today we're
going to cover the topics including Dr. Nanken's early years as a student pianist, her career as a
recording artist, educator, musicologist, and we also talk about her latest projects and so much
more. So Marilyn, we're so honored to have you today on our show and being able to interview you
during this, especially this special month, the Women's History Month, and personally I'm so happy
to reconnect with you after 15 years since I graduated from NYU. It's wonderful to see you
and to be speaking with you. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to my world. Thank you.
Thank you. So you know, because I graduated from NYU, so we have to talk about NYU. We have to start
with this COVID. So it must have been such a challenging two years for you. Well, I think
so many people have suffered during the last few years and it's been, I think, very difficult for
those of us involved in the performing arts for whom live performance is so important and I've
always, always been a performer who treasured really meeting audiences and playing for people
and playing on particular pianos in particular spaces and that form of connection with the
audience. So I personally have found it very difficult. I've never become a big fan of
listening online and remotely. I think that's been the whole art of live performance has taken on a
different meaning over the last few years. And I also think as a teacher, all of us who teach
students have really missed that connection with students and hearing people working with them and
being sort of bodies in real spaces. You know, thank goodness things are changing and opening up.
Actually at NYU, we have been in person for piano lessons for most of the pandemic.
Facilities were open and because it's just two people in a very large room, we were able with a
lot of health protocols to continue a little bit of in-person work. But I think the whole landscape
for performance and teaching has been really altered over the past two years and many of us
would like to see things go back the way they were. But of course we have learned a lot over the last
two years and that's really transformed the way we see what we do. Yeah, it's so as much as we
reminisce about our past, but things happen and but sometimes these challenges bring us something
of course beneficial to us too. So we can talk about more about that. And also I want to talk
about this new building where you are right now. Beautiful building of this piano department at NYU,
which was not the case during my time. So I'm actually really proud and I got to visit so many
times at this beautiful building that you're in. Just especially downstairs when you go,
the state of the art practice rooms. So tell us like when did that happen? Oh my, it's hard to say
exactly when that happened. I would say probably maybe seven or six or seven years ago. But already
it's been a while, but we are here at Third Avenue, East 11th Street. It's a facility that
piano studies shares with the jazz program. So we really are very, it's very exclusive in terms of
making sure that it's very limited in terms of who has access to the pianos. And as a result,
we can take really good care of them, really control the humidity and the exciting things
like HVAC to make sure that the pianos are really cared for and protected and that the people who
are playing on them are really respecting the pianos and using them in a way that's beneficial
to the pianos, which so often at institutions are inadvertently abused or neglected. So it's a little,
it's a very special place here. I should add that opening next year at NYU is a huge new performance
facility at 181th Street. And that has been under construction for the last probably four years,
but that will have a full theater with fly space, practice rooms, I believe a swimming pool.
Enormous building, which also have public space, be open to the public, but it's a huge project.
And that provides also for NYU students and for the community, what will probably be, you know,
a very big center for culture and performance here in Greenwich Village. And I believe we're
purchasing something like 75 pianos for that space. Wow. Amazing. That is so incredible.
That kind of thing has the capacity really also to change the neighborhood, right,
to transform the cultural life of this area. So it'll be really exciting to see performances
beginning again. And that project has been delayed a little bit because of the pandemic.
But if anyone is driving around the neighborhood of Houston and Mercer, you'll see this enormous
building that has gone up and it's pretty incredible. Wow. So but are you, the NYU is
going to keeping the current? Yeah, we will be sharing that facility with the Tishville for the
Arts and of course the University of Health Access, but a lot of our musicians, our ensembles, orchestra
and musical theater, some of that will move into that bigger space, which also then will open up
other theaters, smaller spaces, like the Low Theatre on West Fortescue to pianists and things
like that. I hope. Wow, that is so exciting. And it's actually really fitting for that,
the characteristic of NYU, the state of the art and also the community-based
culture that I got to experience. I think NYU is always struggling with the neighborhood,
the historic neighborhood village and reaching out. There's always that bit of tension I think
you have in a lot of places where you have a university and the sort of bone and gown,
the idea of how can we serve the community better. But I think this facility has the potential for
bringing the arts to a lot more, a lot more people. Oh, wonderful. It's so great to hear and it's so
great to catch up after so many years. As we were learning about you more through this, to prepare
this interview, I got to know so much about you and you're just an incredible artist. And the one
thing is you just never talk about yourself so much. So we really want to know about you. For
our show, we usually start from the early days because we're very interested in you as a person,
as an artist, how you became who you are. So what was that childhood like? Did you grow up in musical
family or what was that first piano lesson like? Wow, I don't come from a family that's music,
I think, musical in a professional or a serious sense. I started taking piano when I was five
years old from just the woman around the corner from my grandparents. It was not a serious or
disciplined kind of teaching. And I think that reflects the belief in my family. We also lived
in a small, in a village in a small town in the Midwest. I think it just reflected the belief that
as part of your education or as part of being a well-rounded person, you would learn how to play
an instrument. My dad played the accordion when he was a kid and had stories about playing accordion
for his mother's friends. Or my great uncle was a very enthusiastic amateur pianist who
taught neighborhood kids. My great uncle, I think played the clarinet when he was military. But
it was very much a playing music just for the fun of it and not to be serious. And so I enjoyed
playing a lot, but I also was not, I didn't have to be asked to practice. I liked to play,
but I was never in a situation where I had a lot of quality control or telling me this is the right
way to practice or this would be the right way to hold your hand or something like that. So I think
it was a case of just sheer sort of love of playing that got me to a point where my teacher
would just sort of give me music like, oh, why don't you play this? Why don't you play this? I
think we see this sometimes when we're teaching talented kids, oh, can you play this or give this
a try, check this out. And so I developed to a certain point where people say, oh, this is a
talent tile. Why don't you start doing competitions or why don't you learn pieces and give little
recitals or things like that. But it was always very, I think, in the spirit of just exploring
whatever talent or love I had for the instrument without an idea of being professional in any way.
And when I was about, I don't know, it must've been about 14, I had changed to a different teacher
and she recorded one of my lessons sort of secretly, like I was doing a run through of
something, I don't even know the piece, and she recorded it and sent it to Interlochen music camp.
I guess they were looking for students who might want to apply for a scholarship or maybe to play
for some master class or something. And so it turned out I was accepted to play in a master
class with Leon Fleischer. I didn't know who Leon Fleischer was and packing up the car, you know,
the middle of winter and driving up through Wisconsin up to Michigan. It's a totally different
world. And suddenly realizing there are all these serious musicians, you know, my age,
people who were really, you know, they were there going to boarding school, really practicing,
really taking it seriously and looking at brochures for conservatories. And so for me that was very
eye opening because I think I just sort of got there by the skin of my teeth, you know, really
whatever, you know, I hate to use the word talent because it's very much a commodity that we deal
with in music, but you know, basically just on talent managed to get that far. And then I realized,
wow, maybe if I get disciplined and I actually learn what I'm doing and maybe I could do this,
maybe I could go to school for music. So I was at that point really, I would say 14 years old,
I think. And I went to Interlochen for one summer, to the summer camp and found that quite a culture
shock. And I still do a little bit in that I was just suddenly surrounded by so many people who
had been serious for such a long time, had been trained for really early age and, you know, really
to me, it seemed so knowledgeable and confident and refined. And I was really, you know,
I was really, really awestruck by that. And I did not feel particularly comfortable in that environment.
Really? Oh my goodness.
It's strange because I think when you are, there's, I think many of us love playing and there's a point
when that enthusiasm and that passion becomes more about how hard are you willing to work
and becomes more about comparing yourself to other people and concerns about preparing audition
material or concerns about competitions. And that sometimes, you know, it infringes a little bit
on that early love we have for what we're doing. And I definitely sense that kind of conflict
between doing something you really enjoy, like a hobby, something which is more like your life is
going to be, your career is going to rely on this. And are those things compatible or not? So I think
I was very aware of that when I got serious about music. But sounds like it just comes from in the
organic way that you reached your, let's say career and career path. I think it was very organic.
It's a good word. But I also think, you know, when you, when I meet people who've had a more
disciplined teaching, upbringing as a musician, of course, I went down a lot of blind alleys. I
overcome technical issues, you know, having a less disciplined path to where I am. I think I was
always very aware of things that perhaps were missing or things that I needed to take care of
or something like that. So I think I always have a slight bit of envy for people who had a more
rigorous. Right. Really? Wow. I mean, I think especially at that age, right? You know, this is
actually quite unique, right? Because like today, you know, all of your students, I'm sure a lot of
the students you meet that they start training, you know, such early on, right? Like in my generation,
the long, long age, you know, everybody started training when we were like two years old. So
I think sometimes that organic, you know, vibe, it's actually missing. Right. So this is beautiful.
It's strange though, because also even I have such wonderful colleagues here at NYU, but of course,
they've come through very different educational systems as well. You have my colleague, Jeffrey
Swann, you know, plays a complete Beethoven sonatas or, you know, my colleague and Terry
Antiparizzo, who comes from the real Georgian tradition and the training she received in
Eastern Europe in that time. So you see people who come from very different pedagogical backgrounds.
And so I often feel that I, yeah, it's not there. Well, I'd say it's one of many ways to become a
pianist. You mentioned about technique, you know, around that time when you were a teenager,
you know, maybe you felt a little insecure. But to me, when I heard your recordings for the last
few days, I mean, I've been listening to your recordings pretty much every day. I love the
tone production. I don't know how you do it, the crystal like, but it's not cold. It's just something
warm about it. I don't know how to describe, but it's just so comforting as well. At the same time,
very specific technique that you have, how did you develop that? Is there, was there any
method you encountered or teacher? You know, it's funny that you use that word crystal. And I
share a tiny anecdote, but my very first mention ever in a newspaper for a review was when I was
in school and I played as well as the Eastman and performed on some student recital, Luigi Della
Piccola's Quaderno Musicale di Anlibra, which is a beautiful set of miniatures from 1955. And the
reviewer used the word crystalline to describe my playing. And I was so touched. And I thought,
that's such a wonderful word because it is kind of the sound I would hope to have. Something that's
very clear and etched, but yet at the same time have a kind of shimmer to it. What was so
disappointing was when I first came to New York, my first New York review, the reviewer for the
New York Times also used the word crystalline. I was just crushed because to get two press quotes,
which is the same word is absolutely useless. And so it was a word that I, I really liked being
applied to my playing. And yet when I first was starting out, I was just crushed that the word
was used more than once because it would have been so useful to have more than one word to use for my
talk about the press quotes. But, but you know, it's funny because I tend not to like a lot of
piano playing and I'm not a pianist that loves to listen to recordings of piano music. I find a lot
of piano playing quite ugly. And I find writing for the piano quite ugly. And I think that
having a beautiful tone is not that easy on our instrument. I find, I didn't like to go to a lot
of piano concerts. My inspirations for how piano sounds maybe come from very few recordings, you
know, very few recordings, very few instances, and maybe even more of an ideal sound that I want to
have more than a sound I've really heard. I know my, my teacher, my main teacher, David Burge,
who is a great mentor to me, he very much believed that the sound a person has comes from
either their body, their, their physicality, their anatomy, that a big, big man is going to have a
very different sound than a smaller man or somebody with a certain kind of anatomy and approach to
sitting at the piano. That's where that individual sound comes from. And he really believed that,
and I do too, that if a person is, is relaxed and playing naturally, they will have a natural sound
that is theirs. And no matter how much you want to sound like someone else, I mean, you, if you're
playing the piano in a natural way, you're going to sound like yourself. And the goal is not to
develop someone else's sound, but to find, you know, your own sound as a musician. So I think
for me personally, trying to find beauty and balance and a kind of softness, a soft, a soft
feel in an instrument, which is inherently percussive is always a, a, always my goal,
and always to find a kind of beautiful resonance has been something I'm very interested in, in the
piano, not so much a lyricism or a melodic, like not so much the singing quality, but the quality
of, of resonating, vibrating, and the sense of that instrument really being alive and being able
to somehow convey that to the audience. Do you receive these inspiration, let's say,
tone production from different, listening to different instruments? I suppose there is
something to that, different, maybe not so much instruments, but different kinds of music. I
remember being very influenced by when I heard Skriyaben's poem of ecstasy with the orchestra
playing that, the tremendous kind of lush quality and, you know, feeling a little sorry that my
instrument maybe doesn't have that, but trying to get that, or to hear something like the cello solo
in Messiaen's quartet for the other time, a wonderful kind of vibrating quality that a
beautiful cello has, or an incredible singer, you know, somebody like, I don't know,
something like this, or even, I love to listen to music of other cultures, listening to gamelan,
and wonderful kind of shimmering sound, gamelan, or listening to, I don't know, gagaku, Japanese
gagaku, or something like this, or Korean pansori music, or listening to these different kinds of
timbres, and realizing how there's that kind of richness, and trying to get that richness and
variety out of the instrument that, you know, I happen to know how to play. I think that also
just comes back to this organic, you know, idea that we were talking about, it really, it seems
to me, and also when I listen to your music, it's just so different sometimes, you know, you can
feel the music comes from the heart, it's very genuine, it's very, you know, real, and I think
that there's something really very different in this day and age we live in, right? So you are the,
I'd say, champion or queen of contemporary music. So when did you discover your love for
the music of living composers? I suppose a very early example of it, which is a little strange,
is my, I had this great uncle Milton, who, as I said, was very passionate amateur player,
and he had hoped, so he was my grandfather's brother. So he was a young man in the
40s, 30s, and 40s, and he had a real passion for the music that was new at that time,
he gave me some bar talk, early Elliott Carter, anything atonal, he was really, he was really
interested in that, and he would give these little concerts at his home, because he was not a
professional musician, like Sunday afternoon, and he had some friends, he'd play a little solo music,
and maybe some chamber music, and have a singer, and kind of these crazy concerts,
Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg, and I do remember bar talk, and all kinds of stuff that to him,
that was new to him when he was young. So this was in the 1970s and 80s, now when I was hearing it,
and so those composers were no longer alive, but he had a real passion for this stuff that somehow
nobody really knew anything about. It was all new to everyone. Our family is not musical family, so
here's my uncle, very enthusiastically churning away at some atonal music, and I was like our
crazy uncle Milton, but he was very enthusiastic about it, so I think early on I had a sense that
there were these types of music that were out there that other people didn't know about,
that weren't part of the classical world, and they could be a lot of fun to listen to, sometimes
they were strange, sometimes didn't make sense, especially when he played it, it was never
note perfect, and I used to sometimes turn pages for these little musical performances in his living
room, and it was so hard to follow what was going on. That's very difficult. Turn pages for contemporary music.
All the players would be in a different bar, you don't know when to turn, but there was a very
exciting, adventurous spirit to that, which I think when I went to conservatory, I definitely
didn't get that impression on a lot of performances. Obviously, in a conservatory, a very competitive
environment, nobody is going to be laughing when people are in different places in the score, and
that sort of, even the sense of adventure and discovering something new is not always what a
conservatory is about. Conservatory is about conserving a tradition and discovering older
traditions and learning about them. And so I, for myself, discovered playing music of contemporary
music at my own time when I was at Eastman, and there were friends of mine who were composers in
my class, and they could not get anyone to play their music, because in that environment at that
time, which is the late 1980s, the students are practicing for auditions, they're practicing for
juries, they're practicing for lessons, and they did not have time or any motivation in general to
pick up a piece of new music written by a friend of theirs to play for a concert. There just wasn't
that sense that that was anything that was worth spending time on. They could not bring it to their
lessons, their teachers wouldn't teach it to them, there wasn't this promise of what will playing
this piece get me. And so I began to play some of these pieces, and I found that I really enjoyed
working with the scores. I thought it was exciting to look at, and I really liked working with my,
I don't know how to say peers, my friends, working with people my own age to ask them questions
about the score, and I liked the feedback, because what I was doing was very valuable to them.
That was, I think, maybe more than anything, the sense of having a purpose, that my performance of
these works was really important. It didn't really matter if I played Beethoven's first piano
concerto, no one was waiting for me to play that piece, or I was in the studio at that time when I
started, where all the students were playing the same pieces. They were assigned the students the
same places, and I thought, well, what does it matter if I play this piece? I didn't understand,
you know, these were obviously learning pieces, or pedagogical pieces, or pieces to learn because
if you play this piece, you learn how to do certain things. But I found myself learning to do
different things, and play and develop a technique by playing pieces written by people my own age.
And I think maybe one of the most important moments was I had learned a piece, I think this is,
and I think my recording of it helped this young composer win an international, get a prize.
And I thought, wow, you know, it changed his life, for a young composer to get a spot on an
international world music days, or I can't remember exactly now the prize, but it was a performance
which really made a difference to that composer in terms of setting him on a career path. And
yeah, and so then suddenly it was like, wow, a performance from somebody like myself could
change someone's life. And I was never going to change Chopin's life, or Beethoven's life.
Those are already composers with, it's a different kind of activity to play their music. And so I
suddenly realized that by taking whatever gifts I had and applying them towards, you know,
living composers, it's like a whole different kind of ripple effect. So that's where that sense of
wanting to do that came from.
Wow, thank you. Yeah, I never thought of that way, but it's true, huh? Wow. Yeah. And then also,
you get to learn the piece from the composer, like living composer.
It's, when you ask, you know, about developing a technique, I have to say I've learned my,
most of my technique on pieces by either composers who are still living or composers who used to be
living. You know, one of the early pieces, big pieces I learned with David Burgess, for Sonata.
And I learned to do a lot of things on that piece. When I came to New York in the early 90s,
I, with two composers, started a contemporary music ensemble. We just wanted to play music.
We just wanted to play music of our friends and people we knew or composers we thought,
you know, should be heard that nobody was playing. And I learned most of my technique,
if you call it a technique, way of learning the piano, way of from playing things, whether it's
Frenny Ho or Milton Babbitt or Schoenberg or people who are teaching in New York or young
composers. I think that's most of how I learned to play was confronting new scores and also,
like you just mentioned, working with composers. So saying, you know, I, how do I play this or how
do you want this? I remember very clearly, I worked with a composer, Joshua Feinberg, who's
my own age, who now teaches at Boston University. And then he's also, I think, in Berlin. But I
remember playing some of his music, which I recorded and playing something. And he was like,
that's not mezzoforte. You know, having this sense of, or playing for composer Jonathan Harvey,
having grace notes in his score. And you say, well, those grace notes are too fast. You know,
I can't hear them. And, you know, they're having composers express really personal thoughts about,
no, do this, do this, try this. I don't like that. The way you want to play that, that's not what I
meant. Try to get what I'm after here with that kind of specificity. Really, I think,
helped me learn different ways of approaching how to play the piano, how to interpret things.
I think also just for the younger pianists, when we are, this reading is like changing my mind so
much. I'm so inspired. I remember when I was first arrived in Kansas, when I went there when I was a
teenager by myself and didn't speak language. And I had this friend who was a cellist, but then he
decided to make this piece where, you know, we had to play a little and we had to speak in Chinese.
And then my friend and I were just speaking whatever we were deciding, but it was a very
contemporary piece, you know, for me, like growing up in China, I've never had experience with that.
So I think that now looking back, it kind of even boosted my confidence a little, you know, because
since language was not like, you know, entirely there yet and having this experience, I, yeah,
this is a really, and then, you know, fast forward recently when I was working with, so we interviewed
some of my good friend, my friend, Paulo, at the Manhattan School. And, you know, I remember we were
playing this piece that he wrote not too long ago and that the really just the whole detailed
oriented, you know, he, and it was really such a beautiful learning experience. So, wow.
What you say about confidence, you know, when you have to do something for which there, there
isn't a performance practice, there's no one saying this is how it's done or here are these recordings,
you know, here's what you are after when you have to make those decisions. It's scary. But when you've
made your decision, you know, you, you own it, you know, it's your version of that piece. And I think,
you know, I was able to develop more of a sense of confidence from developing a way that I began
to interpret things. We've been listening to your pieces, your recordings over the week and my,
personally, my favorite is the Tristan Muraes, the Complete Piano Music. And actually, it just turned
out that this album earned the record label company Divine Arts best-selling title. That's,
that's amazing. But could you tell us more about that? Pieces are really, of course, he's, he's a
French composer, so has this Debussy, like Ravel, like French school. But at the same time, there
were at times that was just startling, like, totally, like, out of nowhere comes this harmony
or something just scared me almost. So could you tell us more about the album? Maybe you got to
know the composer. That's a, that's a great, great question. It's actually one of my favorite, yeah,
hard to pick favorite, but probably one of my absolute best experiences making that. Although
I have to say it's, it's the Complete Piano Music and Tristan Muraes. And Tristan, his birthday is
today, actually. Happy birthday, Tristan. Oh, my goodness. One of the ironic things about playing
living composers is he has written over the last few years, like four more piano pieces. So sadly,
it is no longer the complete music of Tristan Muraes. It's a two CD set, but I have just recently
gotten these new pieces from his publisher and look forward to learning them. He's also written
since then a piano concerto as well. So there's a lot music, but Tristan Muraes is a fascinating
composer. I did not know his music at all. And in about, must have been 1999, I was running this
chamber music performance group, Ensemble 21 here in New York. And we were asked by the Guggenheim
Museum to do a concert of contemporary French music. And we were grad students at the time,
and myself and two composers that ran the group. And we were like, wow, you know, what's, what's
going on in France? So I really didn't, that really wasn't the kind of music I knew much about. I was
playing mostly American, very difficult American music, kind of associated with Milton Babbitt,
or Eliot Carter, you know, very atonal, virtuosic music. And I was playing a lot of maybe British,
what they call the new complexity, a really complicated, virtual, so atonal music, which I
love. But that was what, that was sort of my thing when I was in grad school. So exploring my technique,
and that's what people thought I was good at. And so we found this group of French composers,
and it was called Spectralism, it was a movement, it kind of started in the late 1970s
in France, but it was this kind of return to very romantic kind of music, return to almost the feel
of Impressionism with a new focus on harmony, right? So after, after so many years of atonal
music, or music that was more about sensing the complexity and virtuosity, music would just kind
of return to Impressionism as a great reference, because there is the sense of sonority and color,
and the joy in sound. And for this concert, we ensemble the music of Tristan Muraille, who's a
a one of the main figures in this movement of Spectralism, and Gerard Grissé, Muraille's good
friend, and they were sort of really associated with the beginnings of this kind of music. And
when I started playing Muraille's music, we played, I played a solo piece, one solo piece of his,
called La Mangere Gore, and one chamber piece for like five or six players, five players,
I think, called the Le Barque Mystique, the Mysteries of Hope. And I was just blown away by the
writing. It's like you, you put it under your hands, and you hear what comes out of the instrument,
and I was just, I just fell in love with it. And I think it's that sense of recognition, like, wow,
this is a person who knows how to write for my instrument. We have this feeling on different
composers, like it just, everything seems to work, the resonance, the harmony, the beauty, the
registers. I think all of us have played pieces where it's hard to get them to sound good. And
this is like, wow, it just, he knew how to work the piano, to play the piano, to make the piano
vibrate and resonate in a way that was so attractive. And I think we love this in
romantic music, right? I think a lot of us love to play romantic repertoire because it uses the
piano in such a beautiful way, with the use of the pedal, and really the kind of effects, and the
joy in the sound, and the beauty of the sound, which is different than playing, let's say Bach,
where it's a beauty of the music, but maybe it will work on other instruments. You can take a
Bach piece and play it with orchestra, string quartet, or marimba, and we still hear the beauty
of the music. But this was really music that was so specifically written for the piano. I was like,
what else has this composer written? You know, how can I learn more about this? And one of my
composer friends was like, well, you know, he's got a fair amount of piano music, but not that
much. Maybe you should ask him for a piece, and then you could try to record his piano music.
So it was really like a pie in the sky, kind of. Maybe he'll write something for you, and then there
might be enough for a recording in the old days. Maybe there's enough for a compact disc. Maybe
there's 65 minutes of music. That's true. And so I applied, I started to learn the rest of his pieces,
and applied for a grant, was able to commission him to write a piece called Les Travaux Les Quir,
which ended up being a massive piece, ended up being a 35-minute piece. And then for the recording,
Christian, who I was not super friendly with at all, I hadn't known him at all,
he found a piece he wrote when he was like 17 years old and auditioning for the Paris
Conservatoire to work with Olivier Messiaen. And he's like, well, this has never been recorded,
so maybe you'd like this too. So then it became this quite a large recording, including early
pieces that had never been recorded or even published at that point. And then going up until
a piece which had been just completed that year, really covering the scope of his career from about
1967 until maybe 2000 or something. So his career up until that point. It was a great big project.
I did work with him. He came to New York. He was at Columbia University teaching for a while.
I still do not have a super close friendly relationship with him, but pretty much a
relationship of interpreter and composer. And I found it incredible to coach with him because
Murai is so specific about what he does. He's just so, and I respect that tremendously. We
could look at scores of Beethoven and we look at those articulations and dynamic markings and
rhythm. How do you do that? How do you do that? With a composer like Tristan, he's so specific
about what he wants. And it's always been great. He plays piano okay, but for him to sit down and
try to show you what he wants is very revealing. And I've certainly become more specific in how I
play for working with a composer like that who's so demanding. And people who do not like to work
with Tristan Murai don't like, as he can also just be so relentlessly specific. And many composers
are like that. If they're alive and they're working with a performer, they want to get what they want
to get. And it was a fantastic experience to have. I was just finishing grad school at the time. And
it was, I suppose for me personally, it was also a career making recording in that it captured
people's attention a certain way, that music. And it helped me define a bit more what kind of
repertoire I want. Although I play lots of different kinds of repertoire, but I think
factual music and composers influenced it, influenced by that music. I love to play that kind of repertoire.
You mentioned so about grad school now and Columbia, you meant just I heard. So I hear that
you got your PhD in musicology from Columbia University. And what was the reason, like you
are already have this extensive work with as a solo pianist, a recording artist. I'm very curious
to know what was the reason of pursuing musicology and specifically what area of musicology you got
into? It's a little bit of a skeleton in my closet, but I am when I was in my undergraduate,
I think I was saying I was not entirely comfortable in that world of creating pianists.
Right. And I was not a good fit. And I left the piano program when I was an undergraduate halfway
through my undergraduate degree. I have a degree in theory, but I don't have a degree in performance
because I thought, well, I'm interested in so many composers. This is me thinking as a college
student, I don't want to leave music. I want to be able to play and teach and work with people. So
I thought maybe I'll go into theory because I'm not a composer. So I couldn't go into composition.
It's very unusual. I was one of two theory majors at Eastman that year. And I did work with a
performance teacher, but I thought, well, at least I'll be able to study music and teach about music,
write about music and play music, have a career as a musician. And because I think at that time,
in that environment, what I was thinking of doing as a performance artist was not considered like a
legitimate career path. It is hard enough to be a musician. It is hard enough to provide work as a
musician about saying, I'm going to play this kind of music that nobody knows, by composers no one's
ever heard. And so the advice really was like, leave music or this is not the career for you.
And I thought, well, maybe I'll become a theorist and I can make this work. And then when I went to
Columbia theory and musicology were actually in the same program at that time. And so I went to,
as a theorist to Columbia, the idea of being able to study music and write about music and teach,
you know, teach, I guess, like teach ear training and teach analysis or something like this. And so
my dissertation is actually more of an analytical dissertation. And I was interested in looking at
psychology when we hear music that we don't know, what do we do? How do we understand it?
And it was looking at really complicated, atonal music. And when we hear pieces that just
don't resemble music to us, when we hear something like Sinakis or Ferney or something really, you
know, really out there, what do we do? For people, and I was mostly interested in that question, for
people that enjoy that experience, you know, what are they doing that people who don't like that,
what's going on in some people's minds? How do some people come to understand what is going on
with the piece when it's written in an entirely unfamiliar language? You know, I was sort of
looking at what had been written, you know, in psychology, cognitive psychology, about maybe what
are the processes people go through to understand music they've never heard before. There's actually
been a lot written about tonal music. And when we hear a piece and we find, let's say we're listening
to a Mozart sonata, and we find something surprising in it, you know, there's a funny moment in Haydn,
and we say, what was that? You know, what was that great guest? Or what the, you know, in Beethoven,
something comes back in the wrong key. Or, you know, there's a lot of studies about expectation
and how we learn musical patterns and how a lot of music we love plays with that knowledge
that we acquire. And so much of the interest of listening to tonal music is that there are a lot
of models we understand, but what's interesting is how different composers writing in different
ways, sheet sonatas or nocturnes or fugues or things like this. But I thought, well, what do
people do in an environment where it's not tonal and we don't have familiar patterns and models?
So that was my, that's where I was looking as a musician and as a potential teacher to talk about
that. How do we come to works we don't know to different musical environments? And how do we learn
to make sense of them? Or how do people learn, learn to understand new kinds of music written in
different musical languages?
Doesn't that give you very different perspective in terms of being as a performer, right? Because
you're thinking music from very different perspective. I'm sure that really is enhancing
and helping your performance.
I think it was very tight, you know, I think it was very tight. My work is a performer because
what do you do? How do you make a piece make sense when you look at it? What is the, what is the
story of the piece? What are the, I mean, in many ways, it's not that different than what we do in
a tonal piece, but what's the theme? You know, what is the idea? What is the emotion? What's the
character? What's the texture? What's the quality of the sound? What are the interesting harmonies?
What, when you hear a piece that is, that's going to make sense, what are those things that we need
to hear that will help us make sense? One of the great things about my teacher, David Burge, was
he had this wonderful ability to play just the most adventurous, strange, unfamiliar music. And
somehow he always made, always made sense. He always could sense him guiding you, you know,
listen to this, or this is important. This is what's beautiful. This is, this is the expressive
quality of this music. He was able to really do that in such a wonderful way that even when you
heard something very unusual, like Stalkhausen or whatever, it had, you sensed you knew, you were
being guided through the piece. And I was sort of interested in, you know, what are those guide
posts? What are the sign posts that help you make sense of newer and unfamiliar kinds of music?
So the degree is, the musicology degree, I started as a theorist, but I've become a historical
musicologist in my, since graduating my, as a performer, I've just always become interested,
now less in analyzing pieces, but more in looking at the piano repertoire and finding these
through lines and narratives that chase back from very contemporary composers back to the
Romantic era, but beyond really looking at this full history where there isn't such a separation
between what is old and what is new, but what are the bridges, the things that relate newer music
to more traditional music.
This concludes part one of the interview with Dr. Marilyn Nuncan. Tune in next time for part two,
where we focus more on philosophical topics, advice for young artists, and more. If you liked
this episode, don't forget to give us five stars and review on Apple podcasts.