My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt
After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
Do the maths. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?
What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.
What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you’ve always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?
What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?
What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of “I love you” until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?
I didn’t play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.
Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.
My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be “good enough”.
And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.
The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn’t it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they’re now entitled to becauseHarry Styles has done it.
Several posts over the last few months had news of amazing recordings being unearthed. Not the Alexander Bell ones (though they are amazing), but ones of Molly Drake, mother of amazing English folk singer Nick Drake. Turns out they were released a few years ago – along with “Family Tree”, which you can find on Spotify – but they’re new to me, and worth some time.
If you’ve heard any stuff from his three LPs, there’s plenty for you to recognise in her music and poetry. It was her piano that encouraged him in his first reel-to-reel recordings (such as Poor Mum, below). They’re very pretty. What an amazing talent to have had near you, growing up.
Love Isn’t a Right Love isn’t a right, it’s got to be earned
Love isn’t a right that’s got to be learned
Maybe you spent your natural life
Loving husband or loving wife
Were you loving and was your love returned?
Love’s nobody’s fool and nobody’s slave
Love won’t go to school and learn to behave
Ride your love on an easy reign
If love can go it comes back again
Love will haunt us from cradle to the grave
Love’s a whisper, love’s a shout
Love’s a flame that could blow out
Love’s all beauty but make it a duty
And love will lie right down and die
Love, love is a germ you never resist
Love loves the eternal will-o’-the-wisp
Follow him through the darkest day
Love will glimmer and light your way
But grab at him and he flickers away out of sight
Love’s enchanted don’t take it for granted
For love isn’t a right.
How Wild The Wind Blows The acorn carries an oak tree
Sleeping but for a little while
Winter lies in the arms of spring
As a mother carries her child
And never knows
How wild the wind blows
A thought carries a universe
A seed carries a field of grain
Love lies in the arms of change
As a joy carries a pain
And no one knows
How wild the wind blows.
Happiness Happiness is like a bird with twenty wings
Try to catch him as he flies
Happiness is like a bird that only sings
When his head is in the skies
You can try to make him walk beside you
You can say the door is open wide
If you grab at him, woe betide you
I know because I’ve tried
Like a butterfly upon an April morning
Very quickly taking fright
Happiness is come and gone without a warning
Jack-o’-lantern in the night
I will follow him across the meadow
I will follow him across the hill
And if I can catch him I will try to bring you
Why yes, happiness
If I can catch him I will try to bring you
All my love and happiness.
Written by Randy Newman and covered by AT LEAST 60 major artists, from Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and Dusty Springfield to Peter Gabriel, Katy Melua and even Val Kilmer(?)
I like Norah’s version, but you’re spoilt for choice, so have a play and find your own favourite (Nina’s version is Jamie Cullum’s Desert Island disc – it’s the song his missus, Sophie Dahl, sang him the first time they met).
Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it’s going to rain today
Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles
With frozen smiles to chase love away
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it’s going to rain today
Lonely, lonely
Tin can at my feet
Think I’ll kick it down the street
That’s the way to treat a friend
Beautiful campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra – series showing musical instruments from the inside to nail the feel of the music they play. Nice bit of CGI and that. Hot.
BONUS BONUS BONUS! Here, have a pianogasm on the house, courtesy of Lang Lang’s encore following his first performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2009:
Continuing the slightly angsty live music theme…(really lovely stuff this)
4AD and Jagjaguwar have collaborated on a live session that captures a truly unique Bon Iver performance, featuring Justin Vernon and Sean Carey. On recent tours fans will have become accustomed to seeing Vernon flanked by an eleven-piece band, with the swell in numbers lending a grandiose element to even his most delicate songs. Sidestepping expectations, the idea Vernon presented for this session was to provide a wildly different experience.
Recorded in AIR Studio’s Lyndurst Hall – a building that was originally a church and missionary school designed in 1880 by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse (designer of the Natural History Museum) – Vernon was joined only by Carey, with the pair positioning themselves opposite one another at two grand pianos. Although neither Justin nor Sean’s first instrument is piano, they were able to remodel the songs in a way that showcases their complimentary vocals and, perhaps more strikingly, a seemingly effortless ability to experiment with form and structure.
As such, fans are treated to jaw-dropping interpretations of several songs from both the new album and the ‘Blood Bank’ EP, as well as a cover of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. And interpretation is an apt word, as these songs are artfully abstracted from their original incarnations. Rather than layer the sound as on ‘Bon Iver, Bon Iver’, the focus is on paring back, in part evoking the minimalist approach of contemporary classical music, while remaining true enough to the source material to retain those elements characteristic of Bon Iver.
As on “Babys” and “Hinnom, TX”, Vernon’s trademark falsetto is positioned centre stage, framed by subtle and unexpected instrumental flourishes that render the performance simultaneously weighty and airless. It’s quite an achievement that songs so widely-known and loved in their recorded form are able gain in emotional impact, and stands as testament to Bon Iver’s singular talent.
1. Hinnom, TX
2. Wash.
3. I Can’t Make You Love Me
4. Babys
5. Beth/Rest
Director: Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
Recording & Mixing: Jake Jackson with Brian Joseph
Recorded in London at AIR Studios, October 16, 2011
“Hinnom, TX”, “Wash.”, “Beth/Rest” (c) 2011 April Base Publishing (ASCAP)
“Babys” (c) 2009 April Base Publishing (ASCAP)
“I Cant’ Make You Love Me” (c) 1991 BMG Songs, Almo Music Corp., Bird Blues Music, Hayes Street Music (ASCAP)
…walking in the park, or maybe at home just lying down and thinking, listen to this and see where it takes you. And then at the end when he finishes…the silence afterwards as the real world slowly filters back into your awareness. Beautiful.
Andras Schiff is the pianist in this, Schubert’s Impromptu in F minor no.1. Don’t skip through it – the end doesn’t make sense without the beginning. Which is kind of true for many things.
“We still had in mind the idea of doing a Sao Paulo-style cabaret, with a piano in the middle, and we thought we ought to take it out into the street. But not just any old street – the Minhocao, that famous and much detested motorway that cuts through the heart of the city and is transformed into a huge playground every Sunday when it is closed to traffic.”
A beautiful selection by Thiago Pethit for Blogotheque. See all three pieces they filmed on the day here.
Before we start, I just need to take a moment to acknowledge this man’s fantastic arty scowly eyebrows and general coiffure. Very French(Canadian).
So, Chilly Gonzales (actually Jason Beck), taught himself piano aged three, classically trained at McGill University in Canada. His first band to get much play was Son, which was doing okay-ish with Warner Brothers until their difficult-second-album, which was too different (and had a song called “Making a Jew Cry” on it, which is…probably hard to sell to commercial audiences).
In 1999 he skipped off to Berlin and started working with the Kitty-Yo label. Did a bunch of rap and some keyboard instrumentals. Did quite well in clubs and festivals. But it wasn’t until 2004 that he kicked off with the stuff I like him for, releasing an album called Solo Piano (his best seller to date).
In the meantime Gonzales continued to develop as a producer and songwriter for other artists, collaborating on singles and albums with Peaches, renowned chanteuse Jane Birkin and budding indie star Leslie Feist. The output of the latter collaboration—Feist’s 2003 album, “Let It Die”– became a bestseller, won critical acclaim and industry awards, and became the basis for her breakthrough as a mainstream pop artist. Gonzales returned as a key contributor on Feist’s 2007 album, “The Reminder”, which was nominated for a Grammy and won a Juno Award.
On May 18, 2009, at the Ciné 13 Théâtre (French), Paris, he broke a world record for the longest solo-artist performance with a total time of 27 hours, 3 minutes and 44 seconds, breaking a record set by Prasanna Gudi. He does tour, but sells out super-fast, so get tickets the second you get a chance.
Anyway, listen to his stuff, see if you like it. If you like the album stuff, try the live stuff (it’s quite different, even if the songs are the same). Put it on to go to sleep, listen to it when you have a “friend” for a “sleepover”, whack it on the stereo in the car, or on a Sunday morning when you’re reading the papers and making coffee that’s a bit too strong and not quite hot enough. Either way, listen to it. Listen to it and admire his slippers.
Listen to this. It will go right down inside you, find any feathers that might be ruffled, and smooth them to a glossy, tranquil sheen. Depending on how much coffee you’ve had and what day of the week etc, it may also make you a little bit emotional as you gaze out the window and consider the fragile beauty that is life blah blah.
The famous Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 is in three parts. The opening section is for orchestra only and features muted strings. The first violins play with a dreamlike melody over an accompaniment consisting of second violins and violas playing repeated-note triplets and the cellos and bass playing pizzicato arpeggios. All of the major melodic material of the movement is contained in this orchestral introduction, in either F major or F minor.
The second section introduces the solo piano and starts off in F major. It is not a literal repeat, though, as after the first few phrases, new material is interjected which ventures off into different keys. When familiar material returns, the music is now in the dominant keys of C minor and C major. More new material in distant keys is added, which transitions to the third section of the movement.
The third section begins with the dreamlike melody again, but this time in A-flat major. Over the course of this final section, the music makes it way back to the tonic keys of F minor and then F major and a short coda concludes the movement.
The second movement was featured in the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan. The imagery used in the movie was of a lazy boat ride on a placid lake, and the limpid sound of this movement likely motivated its choice here.
If you can read sheet music, this might be where you want to go. (I didn’t know all that stuff about the music, by the way, it came from Wikipedia)
Quite simply a ROCKING piece of stop motion by Ninja Moped (they used to call themselves Rymdreglage but for some reason decided it was too difficult to pronounce). Some of it almost looks fake. It’s not. Keep watching to the end of the vid and they’ll tell you how they did it.
In another thing they’re working on, the Piano Project, they plan to build a giant crossbow and use it to shoot pianos into buildings, cars and trees and then film it at super HD. Sounds awesome.
Martha Argerich (born June 5, 1941) is an Argentine concert pianist. She hates being in the limelight, but is still widely recognized as one of the greatest modern-day pianists. The first hit headlines in 1965 when, ahed 24, she won the seventh International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw with a defiantly confident reading of Chopin’s Etude in C major (Op. 10, No. 1). At the time, besides being already a master pianist, she also conveyed an aura of a nouvelle vague actress, wearing conspicuous mini-skirts and continuously smoking cigarettes.
As critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker: “Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it.”
James Rhodes: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’ (The Guardian)
My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt
After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
Do the maths. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?
What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.
What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you’ve always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?
What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?
What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of “I love you” until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?
I didn’t play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.
Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.
My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be “good enough”.
And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of, that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.
The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn’t it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they’re now entitled to becauseHarry Styles has done it.
Charles Bukowski, hero of angsty teenagers the world over, instructs us to “find what you love and let it kill you“. Suicide by creativity is something perhaps to aspire to in an age where more people know Katie Price better than the Emperor concerto.
* James Rhodes performs at the Soho Theatre, London 25-27 July and 1-3 August.
As seen in The Guardian, spotted by Charlie W.
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