A stretto piano is any instrument with keyboards that has keys that are narrower than the conventional
size of piano keyboard, which can be calculated different ways.
Most piano keyboards with 88 keys are 48 inches.
My reduced width keyboard is 44 inches with 88 keys, but my colleagues around the world
and other people have established a new way of measuring, and that is with an octave span.
So the octave span of the conventional keys is 6.5 inches.
Stretto pianos are different dimensions, but 6.0 or 5.9 or 5.5, and there are even some
people making smaller ones.
They can be in any kind of keyboard instruments, electronic instruments, wood and metal pianos.
They don't have to have 88 keys.
Welcome back to the PianoPod.
I am your host, Yukimi Song.
Thanks for tuning in for the second half of Season 3, Episode 17, with a guest, Hannah
Ryman, pioneer and advocate of stretto pianos and creator of the International Stretto Piano
Festival and stretto piano concerts.
In part 2, I asked Hannah more specific questions about stretto pianos, such as how easy or
hard it is to adjust from a regular piano to stretto, and where can we have access to
stretto.
You will also hear about the exciting Stretto Piano Festival she is hosting in New York
City during the summer.
Don't forget to listen to part 1 of this episode on your favorite podcasting platform
if you missed it.
Before continuing the show, I want to welcome everyone listening to the PianoPod for the
first time.
I am a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a
thriving and meaningful community of the classical music industry through this podcast.
Please visit Yukimisongsio.com to find out more about my work.
In each episode of the PianoPod, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting
new ground in the industry.
Please rate the show and review it on your favorite podcasting platform because every
rating review will help people find my show.
So my friends, here is part 2 of the PianoPod's season 3 episode 17 with Hannah Ryman.
Please enjoy the show.
You are listening to the PianoPod where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.
I wondered what it's like to adjust from the regular sized piano to the stretto in terms
of playing wise.
I mean, you know, for someone like us with smaller hands, it feels easier.
But however, we were trained in such a way that we have this muscular sort of memory
of let's say I can sort of feel the octaves now without touching the keys, right?
So how is it to adjust from especially you can go back and forth between a conventional
sized piano to stretto piano.
What's like to adjust?
It's much easier than most people would imagine.
That's like the biggest argument.
I mean, I studied with Hermann Diaz, who was the pupil of Claudio Rau.
And I remember Mr. Diaz always used to tell me, you know, when you get the right technique,
it's natural.
And what's natural is easier to adjust to than what's unnatural.
To play the natural way.
And you know, it's when you're doing something that really fits you.
I mean, actually, what you're when you have something that's too big for you, you're adjusting.
You're adjusting and adjusting and adjusting.
Have you played harpsichord or forte piano ever?
So you know, you play like, you know, Goldberg variations or some Bach.
It's not that hard to go from the harpsichord to the piano.
I also studied with Ben Cooper, who was, you know, this big tall man.
He was a great pianist, but harpsichord was his instrument.
He played, he changed all the time and he was big.
So I think it's a much smaller deal than most people think.
I mean, if you're playing virtuoso material, of course, you've got to spend some time
practicing.
It should be memorized.
You should use your eyes.
You know, every now and then when I'm playing Claire de Lune, I really like the big keys
because I got started.
You know, it was just like, it feels good actually to move that way.
It feels smaller, but it is easier.
I think everybody who has one of these pianos will attest that it's not difficult.
We can ask all of them at some point.
Yeah.
And then I was watching some of the videos that was posted on the organization, what
is it?
Pascpiano.org and some of the pianists, like when they first experienced the Stretto pianos,
they were in tears because just the sensation that they felt, they didn't have to make
their hands bigger.
They felt natural.
They felt like, and then one of the pianists was like crying and she says, wow, my hands
look bigger.
Yeah, they do.
They do.
You think, wow, this is what it feels like to be a big man.
This is really interesting.
Now let's talk about the International Stretto Piano Festival.
So what's the mission?
Where does this festival take place and when does that happen?
Well, I decided to create this festival after a composer from Germany gave me a piece of
music that I could not play the first chord.
And I thought, I want to play all the notes in this chord.
If I'm going to play this piece, I'm going to premiere this work.
So I decided I would only play it on my piano with little keys.
And I said, you know, I'm going to invite other people.
Let's have an event in New York.
It was, everything was shut down in 2021.
This was pre-vaccine.
And I decided that I would have an online festival.
Actually, I think it was like Ron Losby and I were talking about this.
He was the one who said, let's put your piano in a public space and see what happens.
So the pandemic was actually had a lot of silver linings for the Stretto Piano because
the church where the piano was, the gallery space was pretty crowded before the pandemic.
And then suddenly I could practice there every day.
And I brainstormed and I was like, yeah, let's have an online festival.
I've been playing all these online concerts.
There's a company that was doing online streaming concerts.
And that was what led me to contact Rhonda and Carol, Rhonda Boyle of PASS Piano.
She and Rhonda and Carol and Erica Booker created PASS and Carol Leone, as I told you,
is this wonderful professor and pianist.
They've got the worldwide network.
I had the idea and I had a location and the Stretto Festival was originally completely
online because we couldn't have live audiences.
And we had 18 concerts, people from four different continents.
We grossed $8,600.
There were 400 people in attendance.
We did not market anything.
This movement is so powerful.
And when I told Ron that, I mean, I could hear the silence on the phone when I said,
we made $8,600, Ron.
I think he was, didn't know what to do because he didn't think we would have success.
That was year one.
And then the second year we had 32 pianists on five continents and I had many more live
concerts with live audiences.
I switched locations because we outgrew the first location.
And at that point, the world was opening up more in 2022 and people didn't want to be
online quite as much.
So I tried to tap into, with my friends in the entertainment industry, what's happening
online and what's happening live in person, people want to go out and hear concerts.
So my intention is to, for the next two years, is to make the festival more and more in person,
definitely in New York and wherever else we can do it around the world.
And hopefully have some solidarity with whatever those spaces are.
I'm, you know, I'm hoping I would like to propose that to the community.
But meanwhile, this year we have in-person concerts in New York and then we have uploaded
virtual concerts during the festival period, which is July 15 to 23, 2023.
And you know, we are working very hard at it now in between all the other things that
we all do in our careers.
I have a fantastic new assistant whose name is Julia Furlan.
She graduated with her master's having, you know, playing a strato piano for years.
So she's part of this community.
She now lives in New York and I really enjoy working on this with her.
In fact, I'm hoping that we can have a few minutes with her on this podcast and she can
talk about her experience in university.
Here we have Julia Furlan, pianist and editor of the Violin Channel.
And she is actually a fellow Brooklynite and we're very close to each other.
And also she is Hanna's assistant.
So Julia, thanks for being here today.
Thank you for having me.
I'm so excited.
Yeah.
And then the reason I wanted to include you in this episode is that you do use strato
piano and actually received your master's degree in piano studies.
Yeah.
With, yeah, with strato pianos.
That's amazing.
So tell me your journey as a pianist.
How did you discover strato pianos and end up getting a degree with strato?
My story started out a little sad in a way.
I was in college and playing around six or seven hours a day and the overuse and the
constant, you know, it's a piano performance degree.
You're playing a lot.
And by my junior year, I started getting some really bad tendonitis in my forearms.
And I think part of it and what doctors were telling me, they basically said, you should
just stop playing.
After dedicating your whole life to playing an instrument and your whole college degree,
that wasn't really an option.
I think I remember vividly playing Rachmaninoff's prelude and B flat major and just thinking,
I wish I had a bigger hand.
It would be so much easier.
Those loud octaves and chords were so uncomfortable and was creating so much tension.
So I got through the degree with quite a lot of painkillers and physical therapy and you
know, all of that.
And by the end of it, I heard from a friend that the school in North Carolina called Salem
College was offering a degree in piano performance that specializes in injury preventive technique,
which isn't very often offered in many places.
So I got on the phone with the director.
Her name is Dr. Barbara Listercink and she was walking me through, you know, they do
a lot of retraining for injured pianists and you do an overhaul of your piano technique,
basically.
And she mentioned during this phone call, oh, we have these small narrow keyboards that
we allow our students to play on.
And I was shocked.
I said, what is this small narrow keyboard you're talking about?
And when I went down to North Carolina to try it, it was one of the most emotional experiences
I have ever had.
It was a combination of so much happiness because it felt so much more comfortable.
The forearm tension was barely there after years of dealing with it.
And then the other emotion was a little bit of anger, if I'm being honest, because I had
never heard of these and I couldn't help but think, oh gosh, you know, what could I have
avoided if I had known these existed?
And I had come from a pretty top notch musical education.
So I was just shocked that no one had known about these or, you know, educated myself
and my colleagues in it.
So yeah, it was quite an emotional journey.
But once I found the narrow keys, I kind of haven't gone back since.
So Salem College seems to be really open to this idea.
But did you have a hard time convincing them in terms of getting your master's degree with
Stretto?
Actually, no, it was pretty encouraged because there are all of these studies that show the
benefits of playing on a smaller keyboard.
So my teacher actually quite encouraged it.
And it's important to note we played on both.
So I would practice maybe like half my time on the Stretto piano and then my other half
on the conventional keyboard.
And I even did my master's recital on the conventional.
But I practiced for it basically on the Stretto most of the time.
And you would be quite surprised how easy it is to switch in between.
It's really not.
Yeah, I was going to ask.
I'm very curious, like switching from, you know, Stretto.
I think that's one of the number one questions that people probably would ask, right?
I'm sure you have a similar question.
That's why probably a lot of people will have a little doubt about Stretto.
But that's my next question.
What's like from switching initially from standard conventional pianos to Stretto?
So we actually in our practice room had the conventional right next to the Stretto.
And I would use the Stretto, especially if I was like feeling a little tightness in my
arms that day and everything would go great.
And then when I wanted to switch to the bigger key, I would say it would take me 15 to 20
minutes to recalibrate.
It's way quicker than you think.
Your hands and your body know what to do.
I think people have the conception that, oh, gosh, it'll mess me up.
It really took me.
It's very quick.
The hardest thing for me was the jumps and the leaps.
That's the main thing that you have to practice getting again because that's such an exact
movement that you have to do with your arm and hand.
So I have the master's recital to prove that you can practice on a Stretto piano most of
your days and then two weeks prior, start working on the conventional one and play a
recital on the conventional keyboards.
So lastly, what's the message for our listeners who most of my listeners probably do not know
the existence of Stretto pianos and plus probably while listening, just like when I first heard,
it's like a little bit of a doubt in my mind.
How is this possible and how I didn't hear about this till now?
Yeah, I think the message is that when you think about all of the other instruments that
people play, most of them can have different sizes, especially for children.
They have children's size violins and so on.
And piano is really one of the few that don't have a different size and don't accommodate
other small hands.
When you think about it, the narrow key can really benefit not just children, but college
students that are playing big standard rep with small hands.
It could benefit a professional pianist.
It could really open up a whole new world of repertoire for pianists that didn't otherwise
think they could do it.
Yeah, the main message is that they should be more accepted and should be more known
about and the beautiful work that Hannah's doing with Stretto piano concerts and the
festival.
Our main mission is just to get more awareness.
And when people see professional pianists performing on these instruments, it'll be
a no brainer.
They're like, oh, one of my favorite pianists performed on that.
That should be an accepted instrument.
And we're just working on the steps to make it not as niche and just more commonplace.
That's wonderful.
And then I'm glad that you're part of this movement of Stretto pianos.
You can see it from the musician wellness standpoint.
So many schools and universities these days are focusing on musician health and they'll
have a month or they'll have resources for their students.
And I do think having Stretto pianos in your piano department can help with that and would
be a part of that and would be a really great idea to include that option for your smaller
handed pianist.
We have universities all over the world now that have these pianos people don't know
about and they're getting degrees and they're playing repertoire that they would never be
able to play without these pianos.
So I brought the PASC website up.
PASC stands for Pianist for Alternately sized keys.
And it's a great resource.
There's one page that tells you where you can play these pianos and I'll just whip up
a few names.
Universities and music schools in North America at the top of the list SMU Meadow School of
the Arts in Dallas, Texas where Dr. Caroleone teaches.
She has many pianos with narrow keys.
University of North Texas, Denton, Texas Tech University in Lubach, Texas, Salem College,
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, St. Olaf College in
Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Oh yeah, the professor there, Jess Johnson, she's a fantastic pianist.
She's had been part of our festival for two years.
University of Central Oklahoma, San Diego State University, Tina Chung, fantastic pianist.
She's also going to be playing with us for the second time this year.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, piano preparatory department of Southern Methodist University
in Dallas, Grace School of Music Dallas, and then in Europe, in Stuttgart, in Manchester,
England, in Nuremberg, Germany, Australia, in Melbourne.
You know, it just goes on and on.
And Cape Town, South Africa.
Every time we have a meeting I hear about another location, another university that
has narrow keys and I hear about students who are benefiting.
And if anybody wants to hear the testimonials, you saw a short clip of our sizzle reel, you
can go to the StrettoPianoConcerts.org and hear what people have to say.
And studios, universities, homes, yeah, it's arrived.
Thank you so much.
So StrettoPianoConcerts.org where you can find all these wonderful information if you're
curious and I would love for everybody to be actually on it on this, on her project.
And importantly, PASCpiano.org because there are a lot more statistics and years and years
of research and the graphs and the articles.
We are really focused on performance, but we dovetail with PASC piano a bit.
Yeah, I just, I want to focus on the performance and getting people to come to things live
and PASC piano can give you even more information about electronic keyboards that have smaller
keys, the universities, many, many things, much more information.
And we'll be collaborating in the future.
Great.
Hannah, where does this passion come from?
I mean, with this StrettoPiano, I mean, it comes from your own experience as a pianist,
I'm sure.
Well, it does, but oddly I was a very happy pianist, you know, from being a small child
until I grew up.
I just loved playing the piano and I didn't consider my size a problem.
I think that kind of confidence has served me because I don't really feel discouraged,
you know.
I'm also a singer and I have all kinds of different outlets for my music making.
If anybody ever told me that my hands were too small to be a pianist, I just didn't believe
them.
I loved making music.
My father taught me my first Bach in Beethoven when I was a small child and I just loved
playing.
So your dad was a pianist?
My dad was a doctor.
He was a very good amateur pianist.
He had a harpsichord.
He played the organ.
His friend in university in Heidelberg, Rainer Schütze, was a harpsichord maker.
So he had a kit and he built a harpsichord that I grew up with.
He had this Steinway, Homburg Steinway piano that I inherited.
My father passed in 2014.
So my dad was really a big influence on me.
He taught me to love the great German and Austrian composers and I wanted to play like
him.
And, you know, I'm also a multi-genre artist.
I've never been only in the classical world.
I sang in rock bands when I was a preteen and I sang in a punk band and I write music.
I do all kinds of different things.
I started making films when I became an actor and I don't know.
I think maybe the freedom that I've had not being boxed in, even though it limited me
to not like going for the classical career, I really feel like I've seen the entertainment
industry in a slightly bigger way.
And I love classical piano and I will always play.
But we have to realize that an innovation like changing the size of piano keys, the
classical world, you know, that's a very small part of entertainment.
And for this to be embraced by the world, we have to include everybody, all the amateurs,
all the children, all the people who play pop, all the people who could care less about
classical music.
It's a world of invention.
So I don't know, seeing that, I don't get discouraged easily by anything.
I never wanted to quit doing this.
I mean, I get tired of spending all this money and time and effort, but I knew that I knew
from playing and from, you know, more testimonials that I heard and things that popped up on
my radar over 30 years that this was not a waste of time.
But with all the time and effort you spent and also money too, eventually you'll have
a piano named after you.
Oh no, you keep me.
When I was in my 20s, I told my mom that I was like, you think there can be a Ryman piano?
And she was like, Anna, just forget about that.
Just go on your path and just do whatever you can.
So I forgot about it.
I can really see that that happened.
I was married to a man named Paul Coletti, who is a fabulous violist and a famous violist.
And I remember when I had to consider taking his name or not.
I was like, well, if I make a piano called Ryman, it's going to sound like it's going
to last forever.
But if I make a Coletti, it sounds very artistic, but a little delicate.
I want the German name.
That actually crossed my mind when I got married.
And now we're not married.
So, you know, I have my name.
We're still good friends.
He's still a very important person in my life.
Wonderful.
Wow.
So I want to talk a little bit about your career.
You have this interesting, as you mentioned, you have you are an actor, you do filmmaking,
you do compose.
You're also a teacher.
Right.
So especially I'm very curious about your project about Joni Mitchell, the famous Canadian
songwriter, singer songwriter.
And actually, you resemble her a little bit.
Yeah, like from her like in 1970s around that time of the picture, especially when she has
the bangs.
And I think I've seen your photos with the bangs.
And then I was like, oh, yeah, you look like Joni Mitchell.
Anyway, so you devoted your part of your career, interpreting, you know, her music, Joni's
music, and I think you created the show called Both Sides Now, which is actually the title
of her very famous song.
And as I was researching, Joni Mitchell actually, like, is encouraging you or advocating you,
like giving you like a lot of praise.
Right.
Or maybe it's a website.
I don't know if she herself is aware of my interpretations.
I'm, you know, I'm a very careful I don't want to approach her in a pushy way.
I the quickest way for me to express this is Joni Mitchell is a wonderful composer whose
music I love.
I think of her the same way I think of Beethoven or, you know, I specialized in Astor Piazzolla
when I was in my 20s and early 30s.
She's I love her music.
And the same way I want to honor those composers, I want to honor her work.
She's very famous in the pop music world.
You know, there's a lot of guard dogs.
It's a different world than classical music.
There's like all this music publishing and millions of dollars involved with, you know,
people of that stature.
I mean, some famous classical composers the same.
But you know, if if the opportunity arises that she hears our interpretations, me and
my band or, you know, me and my colleagues, I would love that.
The best I can do is just, you know, continuing to play her music.
I started that project for very deeply personal reasons when my dad was extremely sick with
dementia and like from around 2010 to 2014.
I mean, it's just and like as a musician, can you imagine if you didn't have a memory
anymore, if you just lost your memory?
I remember when my father, you know, he played the accordion, he played the piano.
Eventually, he just refused because he started to forget what to do.
And it made him so angry that he just quit playing everything.
But he would sing when I would accompany him.
And we you know, my movie has some him singing a song by Schubert.
I made a movie about him and the last three years of his life.
And the Joni Mitchell project is related with all of that.
I turned to a record called Blue that she wrote in the late 60s and 70s.
These were really special songs to help me heal from this terrible pain that I was feeling.
And that was how the project started.
But it was it was not as easy as I thought it would be.
And with so much work that the guitar player I work with, Michelle Temple, we decided to
continue performing her music.
And then I would hire more people to do the larger ensembles for birthday shows and bigger
shows to celebrate her birthday.
And it's been really very rewarding to play this music.
It really, it's really taught me a lot as a songwriter, as a musician, as an arranger.
I'm very grateful to her for all the amazing amount of work that she's produced over the
you know, she'll be 80 this year.
And it's quite amazing.
You also have made independent films.
You appeared in over 20 independent films and everything.
I mean, do you have like 27 hours a day or something?
And that you know, my acting career was also interrupted by my father's illness.
I had this dream too, that I wanted to play in movies.
I wanted to play piano in movies because I kept seeing all these actors, you know, pretending
to play or they have a body double.
I thought, you know, maybe I could do both.
So I went to acting school and then I fell in love with acting and I started playing
all kinds of roles.
And I realized that like, you know, this whole thing about playing to camera, there's like
this many roles with that.
There's like, there's, it's very hard to create that role.
Maybe I'll create my own film one day.
Who knows?
It was also, I think, I think it's important for singers to study acting because it changes
the performance, you know, of presentation of song lyrics.
A lot of opera singers have dramatic coaches, you know.
Yeah, I'm an artist.
I don't really fit into a box, but that was, it was a gift to me to become an actor and
to work in those films because when my father got sick, I thought, you know, I want to make
a documentary about my dad and his illness.
And it gave me the courage, you know, from working on these very small productions to
just do it myself in an inexpensive way.
Just, you know, work with cinematographers and get a camera myself.
So my film is for sale.
It's called My Father's House, a Journey of Love and Memory.
I have a distributor and I learned a lot from that experience.
But that's, you know, it kind of dovetails with the Joanie project.
Wow, incredible.
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Let's continue with the episode.
So now I kind of want to more go toward the philosophical questions.
I want to know your vision of the classical music industry.
So what's your thought on keeping this classical music itself relevant and then thriving in
this fast-paced society, especially in this post-pandemic era?
You know, that's such a great question, Yukimi.
And I haven't thought about it for years, but when I saw it on the list of questions
you sent me, I was like, wow, what a wonderful thing that you're doing asking people about
this now, because life does race ahead and classical music was built on this foundation
of being in the moment, creating notes on pages that we didn't use iPads for.
I still use a pencil and staff paper.
I think that's part of the beauty of great classical music.
When I started this project with Narrow Keys, what kept ringing in my mind was I want to
meet the next Mozart.
I want to put as many young kids in front of a piano that fits them and see who improvises
and writes great music.
That is, you know, okay, so it's going to be protected by copyright.
They didn't have copyright back in the 1700s and 1800s.
People shared ideas constantly.
You know, being married to Paul and playing all over the world with Paul, we didn't steal
from each other.
We didn't, you know, we weren't possessive about a phrase of music.
We wrote together.
And like, I mean, I'm not going to compare myself with Mozart and Haydn, but, you know,
they shared music.
They learned from each other.
They didn't have to pay each other fees to do this.
I truly believe that compositions that come forth from improvisation and from the activity
of playing is the most beautiful and pure expression of music.
I'm not against academic music that's, you know, like we used to call it plink plonk music.
That's just very mathematic and doesn't necessarily have recognizable melodies or harmonies or
rhythm, which is what I thought music was.
But whatever, the expression of passion and emotion that all the great composers, that
we continue to play and memorize thousands of hours, where that came from, those kids,
those young composers, I know they're out there.
I know that there's beautiful music that can continue to be flowing from people's hearts
and minds and hands.
And I guess I would like to see that celebrated in whatever way is possible.
And that was what changed the development of musical instruments.
Let's see if we can just have a little bit more fun with that and look into innovation
and new practices.
I don't think we're ever going to change the harmonies and the scales from Western and
Eastern music.
They're mixing together the Indian scales.
We both have East Asian blood.
I have Korean in case anybody doesn't know out there.
Everything will continue to mix together, but we're not going to reinvent the wheel
to an unrecognizable place.
Then also you do a lot of multidisciplinary project or creation when it comes to music.
But also you have this multidisciplinary career anyway.
You have your actor, filmmaker, composer, musician.
So under the umbrella of classical music, quote unquote, how far can we push in terms
of multidisciplinary works and performances, you think?
I know more and more musicians like myself who switch genres.
I think it's just much more accepted now.
There are people like Steve Sandberg, Chris O'Reilly, David Amram, who's in his 90s.
They're all going to be in the Strato Festival this year.
Some of them have been in the past.
I know more and more pianists who switch from jazz to classical and to playing pop, accompanying.
I think it's a much more flexible world today than it was when I was a student.
There are an enormous number of prejudices against me.
You can't be a Renaissance person.
You can't do all of these things well.
Again, I just didn't let it discourage me.
I listened to Joni Mitchell.
She doesn't have a genre.
She has dozens of records and they're all different.
They couldn't be put in boxes.
Now suddenly she's getting all this acclaim for that.
So, you know, I mean, business, creativity, those are the things that is the problem,
that those things butt heads against each other and putting people in boxes.
I think people are beginning to realize that they don't really care about that anymore.
You know, OK, so there's copyright.
You can't make money off of CDs or albums anymore.
Right.
What do you get like 0.0017 cents for every stream?
Like maybe after 20 years you might make 10 or 20 or 30 thousand dollars on Spotify.
It depends on who you are.
But I think in a way that has opened things up a little bit.
That business broke down a bit and is really disappointing for musicians.
But it's opened something up, it's allowed people to be a little bit more multidisciplinary.
I mean, there are many, don't you think there are many more multidisciplinary artists now
than when we were a lot younger?
Yeah, I've interviewed so many of them.
Even they have this really straightforward classical career, classical music career.
But then on the side, for example, they do a lot of multidisciplinary things and that
I did not know about.
You know, after teaching for 30 years, the other thing is, it's like, I think it's just
good not to have prejudices against each other.
Some of my students will only be classical musicians.
Some of them will only be improvisers.
Some of them will only, you know, sing a certain style.
You know, I don't think anybody should attack anybody else for being this or being that.
I think it's, you know, it's like you were talking in the beginning of our conversations
about equity.
People choose, they can make discoveries, have experiences and choose what suits them.
And if you can do more than one thing, there's nothing wrong with that.
What's the next step for you, for your career, especially with the stretto?
I had to face that if I really wanted to devote myself to this concert series and, you know,
put my pianos in a public space, I would have to make that the biggest thing in my life.
Even if it's, you know, like I have to humble myself and put it before other parts of my
career.
But I need to balance that with the fact that I am a performer and that I'm a creator and
that is part of my identity.
So I'm, you know, it's a balancing act.
I'm trying to find ways to progress with all of those things.
But I feel like the time has really come to offer people a choice of key size.
And since my piano is the only one in New York that's been in a public space, I don't
really know in New York City where the other pianos with small keys are or if there are
any like my piano that we could have concerts on.
So I feel like, you know, it's time for me to devote myself to that.
It's very difficult in New York City with the price of real estate, challenges of real
estate.
That's really the biggest challenge in my life.
But I'm confident that it will happen.
And I encourage everybody to donate to our cause.
Come and play the piano, help us put it in a place and play with us, you know, have fun.
Let's do something enjoyable together.
That's what I'm devoted to right now.
Sounds great.
If you want to find more about Stretto Pianos and then the International Stretto Piano Festival,
please go to StrettoPianoConcerts.org.
But also you can check out Pascpiano.org to learn more about pianos of alternatively sized
keyboards.
And as a side note, because I know my producer would kill me if I didn't say this, StrettoPianoConcerts.org
is really important.
However, I am coming out with an EP this year.
You know, it's been put off for years because of the pandemic.
I'll have a new record this year.
I just released a single.
If you want to hear it, it's on my website.
There's a little teaser music video.
I'll be working on some music videos.
I plan to go to Los Angeles to do my Joanie show and we'll have more shows in New York.
And I'll be, you know, making a solo piano record as well.
I've been very quiet about that.
But that's something that I have been wanting to do for many years.
And it's time to do that too with my StrettoPiano.
So there's a recording that I made back in the 1990s that I never released.
And I'm excited about, you know, getting that music out too and just having the courage
to be seen as a classical player as well.
Wow, you are amazing.
Not a lot of people even can accomplish half of what you're doing.
So that's amazing.
That's great.
I hope that you'll come and try the piano when it's in the right place.
I know I would love to.
I would love to really attend one of the concerts or festival.
Get it in a space before then I'll invite you as soon as possible.
Right now the piano is in storage and I'm anxiously hoping to move it, you know, by
and have it in a place where people can come and try it.
Yes, please, please invite me.
I would love to try it.
So this has been such a fun and really inspirational conversation, Hannah.
And before I let you go, we have one more thing to do, which is the piano part rapid
fire questions.
And this is a part of the show where I get to ask fun questions to each guest.
So here's a little warning as silly as these questions may sound, your answers may reveal
who you truly are.
So ready or not.
Okay.
All right.
So question number one, what is your comfort food?
Bibimbap.
Amen.
Yes.
How do you like your coffee?
I drank a black this morning, but I'm usually I'm usually an oat latte or a half and half
person depends on the day.
Castle dogs.
Oh my God.
That one I can't answer.
I love both.
Sorry.
It's okay.
No.
Okay.
But Solomon, my cat, you know, whatever.
He's my roommate.
What is your word or words to live by?
Carpe Diem.
Live in the moment.
Presence now.
Yeah.
What is the most important quality you look for in other people?
Authenticity.
Name three people who inspire you living or dead.
Joseph Hoffman, Marie Curie.
And then the last person is going to be Elliott Sharp because I just met him.
I have many people, but I just met him.
He's a really cool composer.
Totally out of the box.
Just heard him play.
Really interesting.
So name one piece in your current playlist.
The Boho Dance by Joni Mitchell.
Now this is the last one.
So fill in a blank.
Music is blank.
My life.
Thank you for answering all these questions.
So this concludes this episode of the Piano Fault.
Thank you, Hannah, for joining my show today and then sharing your stories and insights
and expertise.
You can learn more about Hannah and her amazing work through her website at hannahraven.com.
And you can find more information about Stretto Pianos at strettopianoconcerts.org.
All the links are in the show notes.
And thank you to my wonderful audience and fans for tuning in.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform
you use.
Remember to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to my YouTube channel if you're watching from
YouTube and follow the Piano Paz social media to get the latest piano news via Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
I will see you for the next episode of the Piano Fault.
Bye everyone.
And thank you, Hannah.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
What a pleasure.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Thank you.