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| The German made Perzina grand piano |
As it is every year, my Piano Guild audition, which was held last Friday at 4 p.m., is the most important day of the year for me. It is the culmination of a full year of work and is the only opportunity I get every year to get an opinion about my playing from some highly qualified person who is not my teacher. This year was particularly anxiety provoking as it was by far the most challenging program I’ve ever performed, 8 very difficult pieces and 20 minutes of continuous playing in front of a judge who is a concert pianist and who grades your performance. (By contrast, almost all other students play only 2-4 pieces.)
Every year, I’ve had super-qualified judges. The National Piano Guild brings them in from all over the country. This was my fifth audition and each time I have gotten a judge who is a retired concert pianist who at some point in their career had been internationally famous and who had played Carnegie Hall at least once. So it produces more than a little stress to play for someone of that calibre, certainly more than a little stress to demonstrate everything you’ve learned all year in just a few minutes.
But my anxiety is improving. My first year I started sweating this 5 weeks before the event. I was assigned a judge from Atlanta, Georgia who was considered one of the greatest jazz pianists in the world. I played an elementary jazz piece for him and he was really impressed. He not only gave me an "A" but even offered me his home phone number in Atlanta so I could call and talk about jazz and share my progress.
The second year I didn’t start sweating until a week before. I had a piano professor from Kent State who had attended Julliard, played Carnegie Hall multiple times, and was completely poker-faced. This performance was particularly distressing since I was plagued with a lawn crew running a big tractor right outside the audition room. Every 30 seconds there would be a big vrooom!!! It was particularly maddening because they started mowing just as my audition was beginning and, since the judge took lunch right afterwards, by the time she started again the lawn was finished. So I was the only student that day that was hassled by that mower.
I was so discombobulated by the experience that I didn’t know what I was doing or even what I was playing. I just sort of went on auto pilot. I had gotten an "A" my first year so I was bracing myself for my first "F" this year. I hoped maybe I’d gotten extra credit for putting up with that blasted tractor but then it didn’t help matters at all when Pam informed me that this lady had been a particularly tough judge, giving many of the kids who ordinarily got A’s lower grades instead. I did tell Pam about the tractor and she was sympathetic but reminded me that it was part of our training to learn to ignore distractions since you never know what’s going to happen during a performance and can’t let some unusual circumstance throw you. Pam had always recommended that during the week of performance, we practice a lot with the TV and radio blasting so we get used to playing in the midst of a lot of commotion. So, of course, in that final week, that’s exactly what I do. I turn the living room into the most obnoxious sonic factory you can imagine and practice and practice that way. Despite all that, I still felt I had been treated unfairly and was getting ready to protest when Pam handed me my report card. The poker-faced lady from Julliard had given me my second "A." "See?" Pam said. "Practicing with all that noise really paid off!"
My third year I started stressing only two days ahead of time. I got a lady from New York who was a female version of the jazz pianist, could not heap enough praise on me and gave me my third "A." But last year really took the cake. My judge was a lady concert pianist from Los Angeles. I played 7 pieces for her and she started gushing over me before I even started my second piece. Her response to my Bach performance: "If Bach himself were here, I believe he would say you played that exactly the way he would have liked it played." And she just kept carrying on as if I was the reincarnation of Beethoven, telling me repeatedly that I was the best adult student she had seen and to please stay with it because I’m only going to keep getting better. So I got my fourth "A" and what made it particularly sweet was that Pam informed me that she had been a particularly tough judge, had even given one of the kids an "F" this year, though she admitted this particular child deserved it.
Last year, having passed the audition for admission to the first level of intermediate studies, I was officially graduated from the elementary level curriculum, six courses designed to be completed in anywhere from six to ten years depending on your level of commitment. I was graduating from elementary after 4-1/2 years of lessons. It was time to embark on the six intermediate courses. Since I had done so well, last June Pam decided I was ready to compete for 2nd level Intermediate this May so we picked 8 pieces for last Friday’s audition which, even a year ago, I already knew were going to be supremely challenging and a quantum leap forward in my progress.
I spent most of the last month having significant doubts that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was not ready for this and felt totally ill-prepared. I am still so deficient in technique and theory. I have barely scratched the surface on learning the 25 scales, the mastery of which are essential for proficient sightreading. There are also 60 Hanon exercises that are a mainstay of all piano schools and which rigorously train your technical skills so that you can handle more complex pieces. I have barely gotten started on the first two Hanon exercises. In addition to Hanon, there are also all the Czerny and Chopin etudes that are also designed to help you master the technique required for advanced pieces, all of which I have yet to even look at. But in studying these eight pieces this year for 2nd level Intermediate, it has become increasingly obvious that I have hit a wall that I will not be able to scale until I have mastered the Hanon and Czerny exercises.
So I had a little bit more than my usual level of performance anxiety as, waiting to go to the recital hall on Friday, I prepared myself emotionally for my first poor grades. But before I go into that, I’m going to switch gears a bit and talk a little about pianos themselves.
THE PIANO AS INSTRUMENT
I give a concert at Lourdes every year in which I give what they consider to be a very entertaining lecture about the 3,000 year history of how the piano came to be invented and the 300 year history of piano music and developments in piano technology. I will be giving that same concert again this Friday when I repeat the performance I gave last Friday at the Evola recital hall in Bloomfield Township. Every year I tell my audience I’m sort of a unique beast in that I am a person who came to piano at middle-age and has stuck with it. There are tons of middle-aged pianists who have played since they were children and have spent their lives playing and are of professional caliber. There are also tons of children who study, and continue studying all the way through the advanced courses. Though few of them go on to study music in college, virtually all advanced piano students find that the discipline and focus that piano has taught them continues to serve them very well in their adult lives, no matter what other path they choose. It is no coincidence that a disproportionately high percentage of advanced piano students decide to pursue medicine and go on to gain easy admission to medical school.
But I’m an odd one because, even though I studied for a few years when I was a child in what was almost a complete waste because it was so unpleasant, and even had a couple of minor years studying with Tim Smith in the early 90s, I didn’t really begin a serious commitment to piano until 2007 at the age of 54. It is very rare for an adult piano student to make it past the fourth grade, at which time they decide they’ve learned enough and don’t care for the commitment that is needed to go beyond that. Pam has a number of adult students, only two of whom participate in recitals. One is a gentleman my age who started piano as a way of bonding with his granddaughter, who was an advanced student. She has long since gone on to other things, now a senior in business college. But after seven years, he is now completing the sixth elementary course. There is also a lady who has been studying for over ten years but has been settled in at 1st level intermediate for the last five years, and very content with that. Even at 4th grade level, you are making some nice music and most adults are content with that achievement.
I am not. My love affair with piano started in 1990 when out of idle curiosity I visited Evola Music on Telegraph and witnessed a professional pianist sit down at a $200,000 Bosendorfer grand piano and made sounds issue from that box of wood that I had never heard before. I thought I had gone to heaven and decided at that moment that I wanted to learn how to play that way. Shortly thereafter, I got with Tim Smith and, off and on over the next few years, he took me as far as fourth grade. When Tim decided to stop teaching in ’94, he referred me to two other teachers. I met with one who had the same strict attitudes that my childhood teacher had piano went on hold. Shortly thereafter, I started making Loopholes and another eleven years slipped by. In 2007 with nearly three years of the stress of executor work under my belt, I decided I needed a diversion so contacted Tim again who then sent me to Pam.
Pam started me in the first grade where I stayed for one month. Then two months in the second grade, six months in the third grade, nine months in the fourth grade. At that point I had sort of reached equilibrium and spent a year in 5th and a 2 years in 6th level before finishing elementary one year ago. Don’t be fooled by the term "elementary." Even at 5th and 6th level, you’re making some very impressive music and if I ever get around to putting the video of my elementary graduation recital on YouTube, you’ll be able to hear that elementary is way beyond "Mary Had A Little Lamb." In fact I’m confident when you hear the music you’ll say, "Wow, that’s only elementary!"
But truly I did not have to wait to complete elementary before deciding I was committed to this instrument. While studying with Tim, we had set an arbitrary goal of 2,000 hours of practice in order to achieve semi-professional status. That number makes a certain amount of sense. If a child who starts at age 5 is expected to put in 20 minutes per day, then 30 minutes starting at age 10, and an hour starting at age 12 going through senior year of high school - then, yes, if you add all that up it comes to just about 2,000 hours of practice that they will have completed by the time they finish the intermediate courses in senior year and are qualified for advanced studies. With Tim, I had gotten to just about 400 hours before everything went on hold.
When I started with Pam, I started the clock over again and declared my intention to do the 2,000 hours before deciding what the next step would be. That was in September of ’07 but, truly, by December I had already decided that I wasn’t going to do the 2,000 hours after all. I had decided this was indeed now a life commitment and that the 2,000 hours would only be the first 2,000 hours. I’ve been at it now for five years, just completed my first 1,000 hours two weeks ago, and hope that I’m good for another 30 years anyway. I should be pretty good in another 30 years. I should be pretty good in another ten years!
I don’t want to be a concert pianist, I just want to be able to play like one. And so I am unique. I am a student who did not come to piano until middle-age and am committed to going the distance for as long as I can. I am documenting the whole journey and I have already talked about my longterm project to write a memoir and produce a documentary film to be titled, "Beethoven’s Progeny: An Odyssey of Coming to Piano at Middle-Age".
A PRIMER ON PIANO MAKES
But there’s another major factor that makes me unique, not only among piano students but among professional pianists as well. I am fascinated not only by the music but also by the instrument, how a piano is built, and the various makes. It is a subject of endless amazement to me that one can spend anywhere from $200 to $2,000,000 dollars on a piano. Just like you can spend anywhere from several hundred dollars to several hundred thousand dollars on an automobile – and automobile enthusiasts will fight anyone tooth and nail who tries to suggest that the high-end cars are not worth every penny – I suggest the same is true of pianos. Concert pianists will insist that the high-end is absolutely superior to less expensive instruments and worth every penny. I’ll say this much. Unlike automobiles which begin depreciating the moment you drive them off the lot, fine pianos do not depreciate, they just keep getting more valuable. My tuner tells me that fine pianos take ten years of careful maintenance to mature before they are producing their optimal sound. Pianos are unique that way. They only improve and become more valuable with age.
But I would also suggest that if you put a 15 year old behind the wheel of a Ferrari, they will not get significantly better performance than from a Chevy since they will not know how to squeeze the nuances out of the machine. Using that same rationale, I’m not at all convinced that if you put an eight year old with no training on a $200,000 Steinway or Bosendorfer and have them bang out Chop Sticks, that it will sound terribly different than doing the same thing on our $50 Wurlitzer upright. Pianos are capable of almost infinite subtlety but it takes highly trained fingers to bring that out. That is why I have become so fascinated with the different makes. Other pianists may disagree with me but I do believe that a Steinway in the hands of a skilled player is capable of producing vastly superior sounds to lesser pianos. That is one reason I wish to go the distance. I want to see for myself whether the top pianos really do produce a significantly superior sound that makes their considerably higher price tags worth it.
Though I am considerably beyond "Chop Sticks," I do not even come close to having the skills to bring out the sounds in the finest pianos. I love haunting the Steinway Gallery in Commerce because I find the Steinway to be the subtlest and most responsive piano I have ever played. But as I mentioned last year, at Guild I was privileged to have the opportunity to play on Bosendorfer’s top of the line piano, the $400,000 Imperial. That was truly an ethereal experience. But, until I can play a concerto, will I be able to tell any difference between the Bosendorfer at $400,000 and the top Steinway at $200,000.
Plus I have another love affair going with the Italian piano Fazioli, which at $450,000 is the most expensive non-designer piano in the world. And said to be worth every penny by every concert pianist who has ever played one. But the closest Fazioli dealer is in Chicago, which isn’t exactly on my way to anything. That’s why I’m anxious to do an East Coast trip pretty soon. There are Fazioli dealers in DC, Philly, and NYC so if I go visit my brothers, I’ll finally have a chance to test drive this piano that I’ve been drooling over for years and hope to own someday (but of course, I’ll have to make it first as an internationally famous filmmaker before I can afford one.)
Meanwhile, I have been having an everlasting blast during the last five years researching and studying all the different piano makes. Tim Smith acquired a very fine Czech piano called the Petrof for Our Lady of the Lakes in Waterford last year and I have a standing invitation to play that one anytime. About three years ago, Yoko Ono gave Steinway permission to do a limited run of John Lennon’s white Steinway. It was a Steinway M which goes for $60,000 new but because of the collectible nature of this special edition, the Lennon Steinway was going for $90,000. They were so hot that they would not even let you see one. You had to buy it on faith, and they only made them once they were ordered. Given the fact that it takes a year to make a Steinway, that’s a lot of faith. But the deal wasn’t as unreasonable as it sounds. After all, it’s a Steinway so you’re going to love it. But in the unlikely event you don’t, they’ll refund your money since they have a hundred other people lined up to snatch it anyway.
That was my introduction to Steinway. I spent an entire afternoon playing every piano in the store, given a personal 45 minute tour and explanation of the Steinway process by none other than Tim Hoy, the President of Steinway Detroit, and just amazed by how much more responsive and subtle the Steinway was to the Yamaha. I certainly was not in the market for Yoko Ono’s piano; I wanted a mahogany piano. But just knowing that Lennon’s piano was a Steinway M was good enough for me. When I told Hoy that I wanted a mahogany piano, he took me to the basement and showed me my dream instrument. It was a gorgeous 1 year old mahogany "M" which had been at U of M for the past year. $60,000 new, it was on sale that weekend with still a full ten year warranty intact for $30,000. However, Tim Hoy told me that if I took it right now, I could have it for 20.
My plan had always been to save my money until I completed my first 2,000 hours of practice and then buy the slightly used Yamaha grand piano I had seen at Oakland University for $9,000. Tim suggested a much better plan would be to continue the lessons past the 2,000 hours, continue saving until I completed the high school courses and then buy the Steinway instead. Since I was already of the opinion that my Ritmuller was quite comparable to the Yamaha (at half the price) and was already convinced that Yamaha at half the price was not half as good as a Steinway, this suggestion made a lot of sense. So this Steinway M became my new dream, (as an interim of course until I could afford the Fazioli.) Knowing it was John Lennon’s piano was only the frosting on the cake. I told Hoy that I would keep haunting the Steinway Gallery and, when I was ready, I’d come to him and tell him to get me that same piano at that same price. He told me he was ready when I was ready.
I said not all pianists would agree with me on this approach. Pam is one of them. She is a big Yamaha fan, considers them to be the best pianos made for the price, considering that they are one-half the price of a Steinway and she thinks they’re even better than Steinways. Guess who else thinks Yamaha is better than Steinway? None other than the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John, for both of whom Yamaha is their personal piano. Again, I’m not saying they’re wrong. My skill level is not yet sufficient to get the maximum sound out of the Yamaha so when I say the Steinway is better, I only mean to say it seems better to my amateur ears. Pam is actually quite disdainful of Steinway, as she is also of Bosendorfer and most of the European makes that are also so much higher priced. "It’s just a piano!" she says. "The Yamaha is fine! It’s obscene to pay as much for a piano as you would for a house!" She’s never even heard of Fazioli, but then most of the professional pianists I’ve talked to haven’t.
Which brings me to another point. I have found that most professional pianists do not know very much about the different piano brands. That makes a certain amount of sense. The supreme irony about piano is that the best brands are owned mostly by rich people who can’t play and they end up just becoming very expensive pieces of furniture, while most skilled players can’t even begin to afford the finer makes. So pianists tend to know and prefer the pianos they were trained on, and all but the most elite schools train their students on Yamahas, which are widely considered to be the best machine-built pianos in the world. (The elite schools are all contracted with Steinway.) The Yamaha factory produces a piano in 20 minutes and puts out hundreds of thousands of pianos every year. Steinway, by contrast, spends a full year making a single piano and produces about one thousand every year. Bosendorfer also takes a year to build a piano and makes about 1,500 per year. This is because these are all meticulously crafted hand-built instruments. Faziolo takes the cake. They spend three full years making each piano and produce only about 300 each year. One thing my tuner Cal has taught me is that most professional pianists do not understand or are even aware of the differences in the different makes. Since no two makes sound the same, most pianists find that brands they are not accustomed to playing sound "strange" to them.
So once again I am unique because I have taken an avid interest in the different makes. My first dream has been supplanted by a new dream of a Steinway M until I can afford the Faziolo. But first I have to play a Fazioli to see if I like it as much as I think I do, and I can’t do that without coming East.
Because of my infatuation with Steinway (though I do not entirely agree with Steinway’s business practices, which I have already written about extensively), I’ve been visiting Steinway Gallery on a regular basis to continue trying their pianos and take special interest in the big sales they hold 2 or 3 times a year looking to see if they still have that dream "M" that Tim Hoy showed me three years ago.
They had their semi-annual sale a few weeks and when I showed up, I was very upfront with the receptionist, as I always am, about my intentions. I was there to see the "M," I planned to buy an M at some point but not for a few more years. I’d been coming to these sales for years to look at the M and I was here now to look at the M again. Then she tells me that it is against policy to let someone in just to look around. She didn’t ask me to leave but I was so shocked by her comment that I just said, "Well, if it’s a problem, I can leave," and when she did not offer me an argument to that proposal, I turned and walked out, even more shocked that she let me. I could have asked to see Tim Hoy but was already upset and saw no point in making a scene. Besides, I did not know whether Tim would side with me or her.
Instead I went home and sent Tim an email telling him all about it. I did not expect to hear from him and when I did not hear from him that day, I was even more put off. That evening, I had dinner with a very talented piano student at Oakland University named Ivan, as I had been coming to his performances for quite some time. If you’ll remember last year’s posting, "Oakland Univeristy Gone Wild ... or the one thing Hitler did right!", Ivan was the student who got into a debate with another student about the validity of atonal music, which Hitler had banned. Several months ago, Ivan played for the Musicale and I talked to him a bit there, enough to find out he had a desire to pursue an MBA. So we got together for dinner that night after my expulsion from Steinway, to talk about piano and the MBA.
Ivan was working at this piano store in Troy called you might guess, "The Piano Store." He said the owner was quite accomplished as both a pianist and a business owner and that they had quite a collection of very fine European pianos on sale that weekend. He invited me to come by the next day to check it out.
So three Saturdays ago, I’m at The Piano Store and am just blown away by these European makes. Ivan had said that he considered them every bit as good as Steinway but at half the price. I had to agree he was right. His boss spent quite a lot of time with me. They had a beautiful Petrof there but the real surprise for me was this German piano that had been around since 1824 called The Perzina. It was gorgeous both to look at and to listen to; it was love at first sight. Just as Ivan had said, his boss was an extraordinary pianist. Your typical piano salesman can play well enough to fool an untrained ear into thinking they’re good. But Tim Hoy can’t play very well and I’ve always noticed he only demonstrates pianos for the amateurs. If he knows he has a skilled player, he just leaves them be. But this guy was good, very good. And he had perfect pitch. I was playing some Bach from memory and he knew every note I missed and was able to tell me what the correct note was.
So what with the unpleasantness at Steinway, I had found a new favorite go-to place in Troy. And a new dream piano - The Perzina, which was a $50,000 piano on sale that weekend for $25,000 but he told me that, when I was ready, he could give it to me for 15. I played it and had to agree with Ivan. It sounded just as good as a Steinway. On Sunday, Tim Hoy answered my email with profuse apologies and assurances that I absolutely should not have been allowed to leave. And he offered me a free ticket to my next Steinway concert. So Tim Hoy and Steinway are back on my good side. But I am so terribly happy to have found a new friend at Oakland University and a new store in Troy.
IVAN & PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
AND – believe it or not, he confesses to me that, with still over five weeks left until his senior recital, he’s already sweating it, he’s already very nervous. Here’s this superb pianist who’s been playing for seventeen years and he’s suffering from even worse performance anxiety than am I. There was a great article on AOL some time ago about all the top musical celebrities who still get an almost pathological stage fright even though they’ve been performing for decades. Some have to take sedatives to calm their nerves before they can go on stage. Adele reports that she routinely vomits before a performance. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys says he still gets ill before every performance. Carly Simon becomes so paralyzed with fear that she actually has to ask her band members to smack her as the only remedy that will clear her head and allow her to perform. But Barbra Streisand took the cake. So intense was her stage fright that she actually quit touring altogether for over 30 years as she had become so rich and so famous that she decided she didn’t have to put up with getting violently ill anymore. She continued her movies and recording but, until recently, she had not gone on stage to perform in front of an audience in many years.
THE AUDITION
So as I approached Evola Recital Hall, I decided it was okay to have anxiety. I decided it was just something to accept and would probably never go completely away. The important thing was not to let it overwhelm, not to let it keep me from performing. A little bit is good. A little bit keeps you sharp and focused in a way that nothing else can. I did not feel like I was ready and was now more convinced than ever that until I get Hanon down, I probably will never feel ready. But that’s okay. I was emotionally prepared, for the first time, for it not to go well. But I was as ready as I was going to be. I had made the decision in the last few days to minimize my practice and just try to relax. I got a good night’s sleep and made it a point to have a banana an hour before performance. (They recommend eating a banana just before a performance; it’s a natural relaxer, the potassium helps calm the nerves.)
This year I drew another poker-faced judge. I was playing twice as long and twice as hard as last year so I was hoping for some positive feedback but she just had one word commentaries after each piece. Either "nice" or "lovely," but said in such a way as to indicate she probably said that to everybody. After all, what’s she going to say, "It sucks!"
I was shaking like leaf through the Bach piece but then something very unusual swept over me. I’m about a quarter the way through my very long Clemente sonatina when something inside me snapped and I found myself thinking, somewhat like Streisand, "To hell with it! I’m tired of being nervous all the time. I don’t care how crappy I play, I’m just going to play for myself now, I’m just going to play for the pure pleasure of it, I’m just going to have fun." Except the opposite of Streisand. Instead of saying "To hell with it, I’m not performing anymore," I said, "To hell with it, I’m performing just for me now." And from that moment forward, I lost all my fear and had the time of my life for the next fifteen minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed playing for this judge and, at the end, she even commented that it was very obvious that I enjoyed playing.
This was my fifth Guild audition and in each of the other four, we got our grades the next day. Once I even got my grades the same day. So the suspense was very short-lived. One of the reasons I’m rushing to get this on paper is because this is the first year that we’ve had to wait a whole week to get our grades. I’ll find out at my lesson tomorrow how I did. I’ll find out if throwing caution to the wind and playing purely for pleasure turned out to be a good approach or not. I’ll find out if whatever snapped inside me to cure my stage fright and make me not care will prove to be a bane or a blessing.
I will write a postscript after my lesson tomorrow before I publish this.
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Postscript: Thursday
The verdict is in and it was better than I could imagine. The judge graded me on 60 different areas of proficiency and I received 59 A’s and 1 A-. (On second thought, there weren’t 59 A’s because I had several A+ marks too. This is from memory since we don’t get to keep our report cards until after recital next Friday.) And so it was by far my best report yet.
The judge was a Dr. Joy Outland from the piano faculty at Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In addition to her teaching duties at Purdue, she also runs the Fort Wayne Arts Academy and has performed regularly with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic.
It seems that whatever triggered this impulse in me last Friday that ended my stage fright and prompted the decision to stop caring about doing well and just play for pleasure paid off. I perform my annual concert at Lourdes tomorrow afternoon and then the big spring recital on Friday the 31st at Community Prebyterian in Waterford 7 p.m.
I told Pam about my "epiphany" and she laughed, "The banana must have kicked in right at that moment." We’ve already mapped out the plan for the coming year which will include, just for starters, another Clemente sonatina, a Beethoven sonatina, a very pretty French ballad, and the most challenging piece yet, the infamous "Avalanche" by Stephen Heller. We will also be focusing a good deal more on Hanon. She doesn’t think I’m ready for Czerny yet, maybe after another year with Hanon. My main rival in the class is this young lady named Ashley who is heading off to college in the fall to study business and has just now completed the second high school Guild course. Ashley’s Pam’s star student, I’m #2. She started lessons at age 10 four years before I did and was just one level ahead of me three years ago. Then she started studying Czerny and this past year jumped two levels at once. I do believe that may be the key, and Pam does not disagree.
Let’s be sure to have that banana before the recital next Friday.
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