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 21st century.
Welcome back to another episode of the PianoPod. I am Eric Hunter.
I am Clara John. I'm Yukimi Song.
Our guest today needs no introduction. We are very excited to have Frederick Chu on
our show, who is an international concert pianist with performances on five continents
in venues such as Lincoln Center, New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Châtelet
in Paris, and the Mozartium in Buenos Aires. He has recorded over 30 albums. He is the
founder of Deeper Performance Studies and recently a distinguished faculty member at
Carnegie Mellon University and the Hart School. His non-traditional and innovative approach
to art, including interdisciplinary collaborations and integration of new technologies, distinguishes
Mr. Chu as a 21st century pianist. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Frederick Chu.
Yay, welcome. Thank you so much.
It's a great pleasure to be with you.
Frederick, I wanted to start off with a little anecdote. I'm sure you don't remember, but
I actually played for you in a masterclass many, many years ago.
I thought so.
Yeah, I know. I didn't mention it before now. But yeah, I was thinking about that and you
made a big impression on me in just this one class. And I wanted to share that with our
listeners. I'll probably paraphrase you very badly, but I remember we were working on some
Bach and you were having me work on a passage and you told me, don't think about whether
it's good or it's bad on each repetition that you do, but think about what is my ideal that
I want it to sound like and how much closer or further away from it am I getting. And
that really stuck with me. That became an integral part of my practice after that, just
from that one masterclass. So I wanted to share.
I'm so happy, first of all, you saved it for the show, this big reveal, which is good.
You got a reaction shot. And second, I'm very honored that you have a memory of that that's
stayed with you, that's helped you. My goal in playing and teaching is to leave a memory
and that obviously worked. So I'm really happy to hear that. And what you're saying is great.
And that's a point that always comes up. A lot of people, when they play, nobody likes
to make mistakes. But of course, a mistake is a great doorway into understanding something
about your playing. I mean, nothing happens by mistake. A mistake happens because it's
supposed to happen that way, for whatever reasons, all the things that you brought to
it caused that to happen. And if you take the opportunity to look at it, instead of
judging and saying, Oh, that was good. Oh, that was bad. And somehow being attracted
or detracted from it because of some value judgment, then you're not going to learn as
much as you can from that moment. And it's really about learning. And anything that we
play no matter how good or how bad, if there's some learning that we can extract from it,
then we've improved ourselves, then we've added to our knowledge base and we're higher
for that. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. At the time, I think I had a very harsh inner
critic, which I feel like a lot of musicians struggle with in their practice at one point
or another. And you got me to kind of view it from a larger perspective. You know, as
a natural part of the process, mistakes, mistakes are inevitable. That should really be in quotes,
right? Because a mistake is not a mistake. Like you said, it shows you where you are.
It's information. Right. And, and it's just another step on your journey towards becoming
an economist. Also something for pianists, we have to do a lot of our work alone. And
even a lot of our end goal is done alone. We perform solo stuff alone and we're very
much in our own heads. And, you know, to be very self-critical is a great thing, but it's
also a very dangerous thing in a, in a vacuum, in an isolation from others. And that's also
something that I found for myself. When I started teaching, when I started working with
others, there's so much that I learned from trying to communicate and communicating badly
and then figuring out good ways to communicate. There's, there's so much to learn from just
being forced to interact with other people and communicating things. And that takes you
a little bit out of your bubble and gives you that perspective. So that's, that's also
very important. Yes. Well, thank you. I just, that's become a permanent part of the pianist
that I am today. Well, thank you very much. All right. So can you tell us a little bit
about your background, how you came up, you know, um, your early studies and then, you
know, how that transitioned into your career? Yeah. I think my, I think my early, like first
10, 15 years is probably pretty typical looking. Um, I, I would, my parents are both immigrants
from China, a very strong work ethic at home, uh, not very social in the sense of, you know,
having sports and all these kinds of things to do. So, you know, like just doing a lot
of good homework and a lot of good piano practice.
Yeah. Good. The Chinese practice, you know, that kind of thing. I, I, I feel like music
was something that I gravitate gravitated towards more because I was able to accomplish
things, but not because I, you know, like saw a piano and said, Ooh, I want to play
that thing. It was something that I could do well at it was suited. Uh, and I just moved
ahead and I think a lot of people recognize that, especially, uh, uh, Asian, Asian American
background, they, this idea that if you do this step well, then you go onto the next
step. Of course you do this step well. And then you find yourself suddenly on this treadmill
and you're at, at a far reach of that treadmill. And then you wonder, Oh, how did I get here?
And for me, that moment of turning around and looking to see where I had been and deciding
what to do going forward, didn't happen until I was in my mid twenties. And by that time
I had already gone to the Jacob school in Bloomington. I had already gone to the Juilliard.
I had already won competitions. I already had a manager, you know, so it wasn't like
that. It was not a conscious choice until I was in my mid twenties. And there was a
moment where all of a sudden everything came to light. And this was when I was, um, struggling
a little bit, uh, first arrived in Paris after finishing my studies and, you know, Paris,
of course is incredibly inspiring place. And particularly for classical music, I think,
uh, and I was there for a year, at least that was the plan. And that year started off all
of a sudden in catastrophe. And I found myself almost homeless for seven months and certainly
piano, kitchenless, bathroomless for, for seven months. I had no idea. Uh, there, I
knew that I was going to end up okay. So it was just a matter of getting through these
months, but it was pretty traumatic and certainly very, very different than what I expected
and different than what I wanted. And that was a very difficult time, but it was during
this time that I was going all around Paris, looking for practice spaces and arranging
with various contacts. You know, can I practice your place tomorrow? Can I practice your place
next week? And one of the places was a little, uh, teaching studio in a private building,
uh, near the, uh, gallery Lafayette, uh, Chausse-Denton. And that happened. I came to the building.
There was a plaque on the door that said Chopin lived here from 1833 to 1836. So he was 23,
26 years old when he lived there. I was 24 at the time. Somehow everything that I had
studied up until that moment in history class, all the things I had read, all these facts
that we load our mind with as pianists all of a sudden came to life. It was like, Oh
wow. Chopin's a real person. Yes. Chopin was my age. I happened to be on this street in
Paris that was probably still with the same cobblestones paving the street. And certainly
this was the building. I'm going up the stairs. Perhaps Chopin put his hand on this rail and
just like I am. And even though the life was completely different, all of a sudden I was
able to connect and empathize with Chopin as a person and everything came to light.
And all of a sudden everything that I was doing was put into a very different perspective.
And I realized, wow, I had this training. It's brought me to a point where I can obviously
have some expectation of being able to achieve something. And that was when I doubled down
and really decided, okay, I'm going to be a pianist. I'm going to do what I can with
what I have. And all of a sudden I started practicing more. I started developing other
ways to practice. I started seeing every moment in my life as an opportunity to practice and
to enlarge the idea of what practicing means to not just the time I spent sitting at the
piano moving my fingers, but also non piano playing time and non music time. All of that
was just feeding this system that allowed me to play the piano.
Yeah. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I know for you non musical activities
are a big part of the way you practice, right? And contribute to your music making. And I'm
particularly interested in how you got this idea and how you drew the connections to see
how it was affecting your musical output.
Well, it was during these seven months where I literally was not practicing piano. I mean,
not in the sense that I was expected, you know, that I had come to expect and need kind
of emotionally need those hours of practicing at the piano. I wasn't getting that. And so
out of desperation, I tried all sorts of things like making a to do list of passages that
I really desperately needed to practice in the limited time that I had. And then the
to do lists got me to open my scores to find things. And then I was basically doing a kind
of improvised score study through that exercise. And then just the extreme emotional experiences
that I was having during these seven months. My life was pretty normal, you know, like,
you know, happy and sad and nervous and whatever. But up until that moment, it wasn't life or
death. And it wasn't, you know, extreme stage fright. When I did go on stage during these
seven months to play or to record something, it was just harrowing. Because even before
getting on stage to see how I was reacting, I had convinced myself that I could not be
playing at my best. Because obviously, I had not been practicing what one needs to practice
in order to play at one's best. So it was just a self defined thing. And then of course,
the self fulfilling prophecy, I didn't play well a lot. And then the system kind of reverts
to the mean and all those years of training made me play okay. It helped me to, I don't
forget C major scales just because I'm nervous. And because I haven't practiced C major scales.
So the basic tools were still there. And all of a sudden, I realized that I could still
kind of play. It wasn't terrible playing. And in fact, my memory was a lot better. And
I started to calm down. But it did take you know, it's like going through withdrawal,
it did take a number of weeks and months to get to the other side where I could look at
myself and say, Hey, the results aren't horrific. I'm still alive. And in fact, I'm gaining
insight into areas that I didn't have before. And what is that coming from? And that's my
natural kind of scientists side, just analyzing things and putting one thing after another,
you know, just structurally trying to recreate what's what was happening. And my understanding
was, okay, it was actually my my work with the score, my work without the score. And
then I started defining those things. I started reading stuff that you know, like the the
inner game of tennis and the art of motorcycle maintenance, all these also great book, all
these great books and and kind of philosophical disruptors. And that disrupted me, I was disrupted
already. So it was it was great to have that. And that helped me codify some things. And
I was wondering, many years afterwards, when I had kind of settled these things for myself,
I was saying like, why, you know, somebody could have taught this. Yes, somebody could
have at least given me some insight into this. And not just kind of depend on the random
encounter with a person who happened to talk about these things, or experience these things.
So I set out to create a curriculum, which turned into deeper performance studies, and,
you know, taking people through some of these seminal experiences that I had that really
give perspective that we don't get necessarily in school. Yes, we definitely want to ask
you about deeper performance studies. I have so much to say about that. What a wonderful
story. Thank you for sharing it. I think I'm going to latch on to the last little bit where
you said you wish somebody could have taught you, you know, one thing I'm finding as we
interview more people for the show, is a lot of people have this point where you learned
what you've learned, you put in the work, you went to school, did what you're supposed
to do, right? And then at some point, you're just flying blind. For whatever reason, nobody
can help you anymore. You're on your own, you faced with something that you've never
dealt with before. And, and for anybody listening, I just want you to know that that's natural
and normal and inevitable for many of us. But how you come out of that defines the kind
of artists you're going to be. Yeah.
Yeah. And I would say to encourage all pianists, I truly feel that it's there already. If you
can, if you have the experience of getting on stage and playing a Beethoven sonata from
memory for an audience, I mean, it takes a lot of work, a lot of different kind of work
over many, many years to be able to do that. And embedded in that work is all the stuff
that you need. It's just inside of you, you may or may not be aware of it. And you may
or may not be confident or even knowledgeable about how to apply that to anything else except
playing that Beethoven sonata. But it's there. If I think about somebody who goes to a country
and is immersed in that country and learns the language, they can leave the country and
still speak that language. You know, it's, they don't have to deal with things there
geographically in order to use some of the skills that they learn. And playing the piano
is like learning a language. It's a, it's a physical language. We have this understanding
and control and sensitivity to our body and strength and balance and timing. It's this
mental world where we're, especially for pianists, multitasking constantly. We're strategizing,
we're decomposing and recomposing things. We're understanding theory and architecture. And
it's this emotional life where we deal with students, we deal with teachers, we deal with
chamber music colleagues, we deal with a person you're playing for. You deal with a hundred
people that you're playing for as a group. You're dealing with an anonymous unknown listener
behind the microphone who may be listening 10 years down, a hundred years down the road.
We're thinking we have all these opportunities to think about these interpersonal, really
diverse interpersonal relationships. And how many people really get an opportunity to practice
these things, you know, to have the opportunity to get on stage and have full attention of
people even for five minutes to memorize something and to be a master and solo, you know, responsible
for something to have the day to day experience of discipline and delayed gratification to
arrive at being able to do something incredible. It is a rare opportunity. Most people in the
world don't even get the chance to experience these things. And we have all of that and
that's our life. And so I really think that that is one of the things for pianists to
encourage that encouraged me. And I think that's one of the great things. If you've
already gone through all those years and you're frustrated at the end, you have to turn back
and turn in and take those things and somehow appreciate them and redirect them. It may
not be in piano playing. It might be something completely non pianist related, but your sense
of discipline and your ability to present is going to aid you because you have it. Your
ability to coordinate your fingers to type, you know, like pianists generally are pretty
fast typists. You know, that's a lot of people don't know how to type. They're typing with
that's my wife. You know, that's, that's, it's kind of silly, but that is something
that we have an advantage over other people in that area. I think the most valuable thing
is that it's something really to appreciate and to draw out because that will make you
a better pianist. It will also make you better. Whatever. Yes. Whatever else you want to do.
I mean, I think one of the most important things anybody can learn in life is how to
learn and you know, serious study of musical instrument teaches you that. Because they
teach it teaches you humility. Among other things. You're making you know, like what
what piano performance does not have a mistake in it. Of course. And if you play something,
you know, God forbid you play something perfectly once. Does that mean that you expect it's
going to be just staying there and plateauing forever? Yeah, of course not. But a lot of
people don't experience that day to day. We experience that day to day and we've found
ways to deal with it. And that's a huge emotional strength that pianists have that musicians
have pianists in particular have that. That's why we have resilience. Great. Right. Wow.
These are really, really useful information. Thank you so much for sharing all of this
with us. And I didn't know all this background, you know, when you first moved to Paris, but
it's amazing. I mean, I feel like I almost can draw a little comparison with myself.
You know, I moved here when I was 17 in Kansas and then I moved to New York when I was 23,
24. I had already finished everything and life was great. You know, I decided to be
a pianist when I was three. But at that point, I felt like everything was going smoothly.
You know, I think that's also the problem. But you don't have that big, you know, and
then you don't. And all of a sudden you arrive in New York, you're like, wow, it's like you
basically feel homeless. You know, like, no, you're here. Everybody's here. You don't really
know exactly how to get going. But here you are. You know, you just have to make something
out of it. So I am so inspired now because of that. And I have this a little bit of Chinese
background that I know your father is also from the city I was born in. What is and when
you went to Paris as well, I know you still do a lot of collaboration. For example, you
work with composer Gopin. And also, I saw this video. It was lovely of a French movie,
but they were singing in Chinese. Just because all of the musicians nowadays are all overseas
everywhere. You know, I want to hear your experience of drawing different culture and
then you were born and raised here in America, right?
I think that's definitely a strength of mine, having a Chinese upbringing, American culture.
And then somehow, I went to the middle point between the US and China and landed in Paris
and kind of immersed myself and I was drawn to Paris. I don't know why French was such
a draw to me, but somehow a fascination with it. I never studied it in school, but I decided
when the opportunity presented itself, oh, I'm going to spend some time in France. I
ended up living 12 years there and having a whole life, getting married, having kids,
becoming a citizen. And I think those three cultures really have forced me to look at
things from different perspectives. And I didn't know it at the time, but I think that
having three different points of view was very balancing and really kind of pushed me
into a lot of the thinking that I came to for piano playing.
And I think that those three cultures really have such strong and very different distinct
thinking styles, their perception of time, their perception of work, their perception
of beauty are also different. And perhaps you could have said that about any three cultures,
but for me, it really was very striking and is always a point of reference for me. Am
I American? And looking at this as American, what would I see? Am I Chinese? And looking
at it from a Chinese perspective, what does that mean? And French, how would they see
it? And I think that that kind of perspective just came very naturally to me from the very
beginning.
Wow. I can relate that so much. And I'm sure a lot of our audience, maybe later on watching
us from wherever they are right now, currently, during pandemic, I hear everybody's back.
And I moved to Kansas and without a word of English, so that was kind of became my identity.
So even to this day, people here in New York call me Topeka, Topeka Kansas. So it's a
very interesting thing. But I want to hear, I know you had a CD with Gao Ping and the
WC. Can you talk about the connection that you draw from? I mean, obviously, both composers
are beautiful.
Yes. Well, well, Gao Ping, I think he's a good friend. And I met him many years ago
when he was studying in Cincinnati, at Cincinnati Conservatory. And I heard him play one of his
vocalizing pianist pieces and I was just my jaw dropped and I was like, I gotta get I
gotta meet this guy. And I have to I have to play that piece. I have to somehow do that.
And he's such a nice person for anybody who knows him. He's he's so nice. During the pandemic,
I was in touch with him. I premiered a piece of his for violin and piano with my brother,
who's a violinist in the Chicago Symphony. And we were all at home and doing nothing.
And so I did this remote kind of collaboration with my brother to play.
He was on TV, right?
We interviewed him. Yes. And my brother was on a video screen and we were doing a live
virtual combination. And, you know, by that time in April, things had kind of calmed down
in terms of the pandemic in China, they had already kind of gotten it in control. And
so Gowping said to me, you know, can I send you some masks? Do you need masks? We have
a lot of masks. And I think we're at the end of our need for them. So I could definitely
send you a supply. I said, that's so nice. That's great. So he put it in the mail. We
ended up getting them in July. Because that's how long the mail was.
Exactly. I ordered some in the beginning too. Yeah.
And unfortunately, we still needed them in July. So that was not...
Yes. When they arrived, I was like, what's, what did Gowping send us? Like, what's going
on? But yeah, in terms of music, he also has, because he studied in the States, he has a
perspective of Chinese music from a Western perspective. And his father is one of the
great composers of traditional Chinese music. And so he's immersed in that. And so I think
we connected on this differing perspective approach to things. And I find his music is
that kind of bridge between Western and Eastern culture. And the combination with Debussy,
of course, was, I think, pretty natural. Debussy, the pieces that I chose were the ones where
he was discovering Eastern culture. And that was such a big revelation to him and to Europe
in general, around the turn of the 19th, 20th century. So I think that there were, in that
particular program, bridges from both sides that kind of met in the middle and exchanged.
And I was very, I was very proud of that, that particular program.
I really loved that. Yeah, that's, oh my goodness. So you see, sometimes I feel like there's
always connection between every culture. We are so far away, but somehow we are also very
much connected. And the last question I want to ask, Ashley, you heard, I mean, you went
to Juilliard, and also Juilliard opened up a campus in Tianjin, I guess your father,
in my hometown. And I have some friends working there now. And I actually knew someone who
was the main architect, designed it. So I kind of, like my father said, he couldn't
see, they used to drive up just to see, because they feel so proud that Juilliard decided
to choose Tianjin as the second. And I don't know if you know much about Chinese culture,
besides that we work hard, but there's also a lot of culture, especially in Tianjin, right?
We have a lot of musicians, we have a lot of comedians. So what is your take? What do
you think this means for the world? You know, now, you know, I see my friends have so much
more gigs than we have, you know, in Asia, in Shanghai, or in Tianjin, or in Beijing.
Well, I think, you know, I think China definitely is the future of classical piano. I mean,
there's my parents left mainland China in 49 and came to the States in the 50s. And
they weren't particularly exposed to classical music. But then when they were, they became
extremely passionate about it. And, you know, more Catholic than the Pope, that kind of
thing. Like all of a sudden, all of a sudden to have something revealed to you sometimes
can be more inspiring than to grow up immersed in it, you don't really appreciate what you
have. I think that was their case. I think, you know, to generalize very broadly, I think
there is a kind of that there's that dynamic happening in China. Piano music, the great
canon of 400 years of piano music is inspiring. It is incredible. Yeah, for sure. And to not
have it in your culture, then suddenly somehow have it at your disposal is a huge energy
force that can power, you know, a lot of things. I think that's generally what one you know,
I can describe Chinese relationship with with Western classical piano like that. And I think
that there is a sense of work ethic and a sense of discipline. And that that really
coincides well with the work that one needs to do to become a good pianist. Sure. So I
think that that general Asian kind of approach to to working and and and time even the concept
of time is very adapted there. But I do believe that there are some cultural vacuums, some
misunderstandings that can happen. I that for me, that really has inspired me to see
myself as as much as possible a bridge persona. Because I straddle both of those cultures
and because I I have been to China quite a bit and teaching there and hearing things
since my first visit in 1989. Wow. In 19 let's see. Yeah, 1989. Just before Tiananmen happened,
I was there for like a month for a residency teaching and playing in Beijing, in Beijing
and Xi'an. Okay. And, you know, and I've been there regularly since then. And it's
always been very interesting to see that the talent of the nine year olds that I heard
no matter what year I went, there are always these amazing nine year olds. Yeah, playing
Chopin etudes and then and Mozart slow movements. And just like, oh my god, unbelievable. Yeah.
But then as the students got older, they became more and more fitting the mold and the personality
was not there. And a lot of my work with the older students in China and people who have
studied in China and who I've taught in Europe or the States is opening that up. Like it's
there. The knowledge, the desire for expression, the personal voice is inside. But there's
not a there's no permission to let it out. There's no incentive to let it out. And there's
no instruction from from the schooling there currently to let it out. And it's it's interesting
to see, even over the last 30 years of my experience, that that's been a pretty consistent
situation. Right. So I really feel like there has to be this cultural opening that allows
all this training to to flower to blossom because it's an it's amazing the potential.
Yes. There. And as I said, not just for piano, you know, you have these hundreds of thousands
of trained pianists, millions of trained pianists, and they all think they're going to do something
in piano. You know, I hope not. But literally, business leaders, these could be cultural
community leaders, these could be inventors, these could be math, you know, these could
be so many things informed by by piano training. And that's exciting.
Yeah, and you say you have some right piano students even know right online that you're
teaching. So I'm sure that's this pandemic maybe is changing. So I'm thinking, yes, the
connection and the idea of who's teaching who and how and when it's all opening up,
which is I think a really good thing.
This concludes part one of our interview with Frederick Chu. Tune in next time for part
two, where we talk about innovation and programming advice for young artists and more.