Don't your fingers get tired?

a friendly question and answer page for the curious....

questions may be directed to michael@pianonoise.com

Hey, Michael! Don't your fingers get really tired after a concert?

Not really. I generally practice for at least four hours a day (used to be six but I started getting lazy) so a 90 minute recital program, while it can be exhausting, usually wears out my brain a lot faster than my fingers. Of course, the fingers can get pretty worn out after a long day of practicing, but it also has a lot to do with what I'm playing. If it's something with about eight billion notes in it, they'll get tired a lot faster than if it's, say, Mozart.

How do you memorize all that music?

Like everything else, it takes practice. I memorized everything I learned when I was young, and the more one memorizes, the more one learns to memorize. I had a good memory as a child, but I didn't start out being able to play six hours of piano music from memory. (That, incidentally, is something I specifically set out to do on more than one occasion.) It helps tremendously if you understand thoroughly what you are memorizing, in terms of musical form, harmonic progressions, and so on; sort of like having a zip drive, for you tech people, or being able to summarize what you've read, and fake parts if you have to to keep going. There is a University in the Middle East that requires its entrants to be able to recite the entire Koran from memory, which I've heard takes about three days. They have to start learning it very young and keep at it for many years. It may sound like a feat of genius, but I think it's mainly about discipline and perseverance. With regard to the astonished people after a concert who ask me this question, the answer is a lot like my answer to the previous question. If you've learned to memorize that much material, a 90-minute program doesn't seem like that big a deal, though it still depends largely on the types of pieces you are playing. Some of my colleagues at school panic when they get close to recital time because they haven't tried to memorize their pieces yet. Learning it without memorizing it and then trying to tack that on at the last minute is a great way to cause panic. But then, I was a lousy sight-reader in my youth, so I tended to memorize things quickly so I wouldn't have to look at the notes! Apparently I also had terrible vision, but that's another story. 

How come all the great composers are dead?

They aren't! A slightly more accurate assessment of the situation might be to ask why all the famous composers are dead, which isn't true either, but it comes closer to the truth, and there is a good reason people have that perception. It usually takes a while to gain fame, particularly the kind of fame where virtually everybody has heard your name whether they are the least bit interested in what you actually do. Everybody has heard the name Beethoven, though few people could whistle more than the first eight notes of his fifth symphony or get caught dead at a symphony concert. Beethoven has become an image, an idea, more than simply a composer. This usually doesn't happen until a person has been dead long enough for the mythmaking process to take hold. Usually in one's lifetime it is enough to be controversial--loved by some, hated by others. Our most famous presidents, Washington and Lincoln, where hardly loved by all their countrymen, as you might think watching them sell cars every February. No rabid Republican's criticism of Clinton or any unmovable Democrat's hatred of Bush comes close to what some of their contemporaries were saying about them. And fame has its own timetable. Beethoven was well known throughout Europe well before he died. Brahms lived long enough to be generally thought of as the leading composer of his time, as did Haydn. But Schubert was only known in his native Vienna when he died at the ripe old age of 31. Mozart was respected, but not as highly as some of his contemporaries, and Bach was dead for a hundred years before he became an institution. One of America's most innovative composers, Charles Ives, dead since 1954, is still largely ignored by his countrymen. On the other hand, Scott Joplin had the luck to have a popular movie set two decades after his death to ignorantly use his music as a "period" soundtrack and became a sensation once again, fifty years after his death. As in most fields of endeavor, a musician can name and greatly esteem the important contributions of many composers the rest of us have never heard of.

Once we divorce fame from the strength of one's contribution to humanity (I'll bet many of you don't know the name of the guy who discovered a vaccine for smallpox, thereby saving millions of lives but can name the last celebrity accused of murder in an instant) we are back to the question of who is actually composing good music today (and might be famous for it tomorrow). Those interested in finding an answer to this question can check out a variety of online sources, including The Living Composers Project, The League of Composers, The American Composer's Alliance, and The Composer's Forum. The catch is that while the composers are there (many with their own sites and a variety of ways to hear their music) you will have to decide for yourself who among them is great, although some of them have already achieved major reputations in the music world. Some of these contemporary "giants" will appear on this site eventually, and while I won't guarantee everything you hear here will be great, it is certainly worth listening to, which makes it pretty darn good.

Was Liberace a Great Pianist?

When I was in elementary school, I would sometimes perform in school assemblies. My fellow students, impressed, would refer to me as the next "Liberace," who everybody knew was "the greatest pianist in the world." That should tell us something about our society--that we have to have a champion of everything, even in an area where such rankings are miles away from the real issue! Since I had heard that Liberace was so great, I asked my parents to take me to see him. After the concert, most of which Liberace spent in talking about how fabulously wealthy he was, I decided I didn't care much for him.

Nevertheless, the man had a major impact on American society, and, for the middle of the twentieth century, he was most American's only point of contact with a pianist. This was mainly because of his personality, not his playing. He was certainly first and foremost a showman. He didn't just play things that sounded difficult to the average ear, he told everybody how hard it was. He had a pretty good sense of what would impress people, and he did it. But as pianists can tell you, often a rush of notes up the scale or a bunch of fast notes that sound hard, really aren't--and a lot of things that are much more difficult don't always titillate the ear. However, unlike present pianist-idols like Yanni or John Tesh, who don't seem to me to have better than average piano playing ability, Liberace seems to have had a pretty impressive technique--he didn't do a lot with it, but when he needed it, it was there. His runs are smooth, and his octaves impressive. It seems to me that I heard someplace that he trained at Julliard.

He may have been an impressive technician, but was he a great pianist? The word great, if it really means anything at all, implies to me that he would have to be not only capable of the technical feats of pianism, but also able to interpret great music with the passion and understanding needed to make it move our souls--that he would possess the insight required to reveal it to us whole, and not be a mere machine. Liberace was not a poet, nor did he try to be one. He enjoyed being a showman, and answered his critics by saying that their criticisms wounded him so much that he "cried all the way to the bank." Many classical artists would call this "selling out"--playing stuff that didn't demand much of the inner man, or the real difficulty of pianist technique in order to make money enchanting people who didn't know better.

I would like to have heard him try to play something of substance before I judged whether he had this poetic ability or not, but perhaps the answer lies in the fact that he didn't take that road. What he did, he obviously did well enough to make millions of people interested in him, and this seems to have been his primary goal. He was under no illusions about what he was doing. A quote of his that I included a few months back on the Pianonoise banner reads "My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggles. Naturally I condense. I have to know just how many notes my audiences will stand for. If there's time left over I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the keyboard."

There have been pianists doing this for as long as there have been pianists. Liszt, possibly the father of the piano recital, was largely a showman, though he also wrote some works of substance and perhaps genius (and real technical difficulty, by the way), and Gottschalk, who you can read about on this website also falls largely into this category, though his compositions are sometimes sufficiently intriguing (his life story certainly is) that I occasionally play them. I don't have any venom against showmen, I just wish they would ask a little bit more of their audience--and worry a little bit more about giving something to that audience besides the thrill that goes with imagining that their hero did something really death-defying, particularly when they didn't! 

But the real difference is in the attitude. Rachmaninoff (who could really play) said once that "music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" whereas, Liszt said magnificently "I am the concert!" 

There is always something greater than the performer. Let us not forget it.

What is that blinking light on the piano for?

That is so airplanes won't crash into it.

Well, that, and the fact that it is attached to a humidifier whose function is to keep the large wooden soundboard which forms the "bed" of the piano (if it is a grand; in an upright model the sound board is in the back, vertical) from drying out. If you look under the piano, you'll find a pan of water there. This helps to keep the piano in tune. Temperature changes, but more particularly changes in humidity, can be murder on a piano's ability to stay in tune, or even remain playable after a while, and a piano in a large space may suffer enormously from rapid changes in humidity. At my church we have such a device, which I maintain each week by watering our 6 1/2 foot Yamaha. I tell people that it is so the piano will grow into a 9 foot Steinway.

If the light is blinking, it means the pan beneath is out of water. That, I am proud to say, has not happened to our piano in months, despite the fact that people keep unplugging the humidifier. If you see a piano with a blinking light, remind people to water their piano.

Who is your favorite composer?

I get asked this a lot. I haven't got a good answer for it, because I don't think I currently have a favorite composer. On the other hand, there was a time when I ate, slept, and breathed Mozart, and a time a few years later when I ate, slept, and breathed Brahms, but as I've aged and begun to compose myself, I find that the music of the past is often wonderful, but does not have the last word on everything the way we all seemed to think it did at the music conservatory. That and the fact that I've become so familiar with the "standard repertoire" that I have it memorized (including the complete piano sonatas of Mozart and all the piano works of Brahms--or at least I did once) that it does not enchant me as it once did--at least, not so often. I frequently cannot listen to classical radio because I've heard those pieces so many times (like yesterday, when they played it the last time!). These days I tend to explore more and to try pieces which are more obscure or more modern. And to play my own stuff. But I always play some Bach, and Brahms, etc.--or at least I return to them periodically, and am glad I did. In one sense, I wonder if it really matters that much since there are hundreds of gifted pianists playing this repertoire, and still not many who want to listen to it, and besides, if I have a unique creative voice I should use it and leave the Beethoven interpretation to hundreds of others. But I am still drawn to this music much of the time--I just don't worship it the way some do. There is a reason that it is considered great, and I'd like to think I know why.

One's tastes and obsessions change over time. I've only had the confluence of circumstances that enable me to do a lot of recordings for this website over the last couple of years (since about 2004) so the recordings index represents only a snapshot of my recent situation (and then only when I was finishing my degree and out of practice)--all of that wonderful Mozart and Brahms is lost--perhaps I will return to it and post my renditions. At the moment I am finishing a project to learn (and record) the complete works of Michael Praetorius. I have spent the last couple of years fascinated by Renaissance organ music, and, as a result, the index is skewed toward that style of music. I've also had some difficulty making decent recordings of piano music, so there is more organ music on the site. As a church organist with more time on his hands than when he was finishing a Doctorate in piano, I'm getting to know that massive repertoire more and more also.

michael@pianonoise.com