Replaced by a string quartet

It’s 8 am in London. My next door neighbor starts practising promptly. I have only met his wife who explained yesterday that he had a concert that evening. They moved into this neighborhood, what, 4 ? 5 years ago. Yet I never bothered to get to know them because one of them smokes, perhaps even both, albeit outside. The cigarette smoke drifts into my garden. And for that, I did not bother to get to meet, much less, know this virtuoso Russian concert pianist.

As the “Flight of the Bumble Bee” wears on, I find myself as the beneficiary of live background music. Ten years ago, I housed a young pianist who practised this exact piece every day while I made my move to the Netherlands. I could only imagine what my neighbors experienced through the brick walls.

Just last week, I unpacked my suitcase to the live background music of the classical guitar — Robert practising for his 3 gigs.

The third guitar concert culminated in Mauro Giuliani’s Theme & Variations. It was a piece I knew like the back of my hand. We went through it many times, the guitar struggling to be heard, the piano unresponsive and unsympathetic. After many years of tug and war, I finally relented.

The guitar cannot sound well if the guitarist has to force it to sound louder than the grand piano. Although it is absolutely possible, as Amsterdam-based composer Allan Segall proved in his first piece for piano and guitar, in most other cases the guitar has to struggle and the piano has to give in. The traditional way in which the duo is written assumes the piano is a fortepiano or some other subservient predecessor of today’s modern piano.

So Robert upgraded to a “concert guitar” — built to match the concert grand piano.

But I still had work to do. I had to constantly adjust to the volume and quality of the guitar sound.

There in Williams Hall at the New England Conservatory, on Tuesday 8th May, at approximately 9 pm, Robert performed Giuliani’s work with a string quartet. The four string players, by sheer nature of their instruments, brought out infinitely more color and texture than I could produce with 88 keys. Each of their four strings was a different instrument. They had the bows to help produce sound at different parts of the strings. They could pull, pluck, strum, hit, and more.

I sat back, resigned to my fate.

I had been replaced by a string quartet.

In the simplest case, my right hand was replaced by two violins and the left hand by the viola and cello. Thinking like this, every piano guitar duo piece can result in guitar and a string quartet or wind quartet or other combinations.

My eyes moistened as I thought of the years of preparation that led to this day. The guitarist can go on — playing solo with other instruments.

The pianist?

I’ve sold my Gerhard Adam grand piano in this Victorian cottage where I experimented with chamber music, house concerts, and eventually decided to pursue a degree in music. My Steinway Grand is sitting in a piano shop in Zeist, the Netherlands, waiting to be noticed, tried, and bought.

And I?

I have returned to where it all began. No piano. No audience. No house concert, but neighbor to a concert pianist who practises all day long.

C’est la vie.

Aranjuez Concerto in the garden of the Victorian Cottage in London, July 2002

Piano playing in Taipei, Taiwan

What a joy it was to meet up with my old friend Tina, whom I’ve known since my teenage years. The way we met was in class in the Hakka town of Miao Li Gong Guan. She was accompanying choir – and I noticed she played a wrong note on the piano.

To discover after a lifetime of wedded bliss, motherhood, career, …. she still plays the piano — that’s the joy!

I grew up in a neighborhood where our fathers were colleagues, our mothers volunteered for community activities, and we kids went to school together. We were competitive, and we all learned to play the piano. Every other year, we’d “return” to our native lands (Taiwan, Korea, etc) on “home leave.” Some industrious parents (like mine) would put us through school so we’d progress in our own languages. That’s how I met Tina.

How many of us still play the piano? Few.

My entire family learned to play the piano. First my father — in college — he learned to play the black keys. He bought a new Yamaha upright (a console) in Okinawa. My mother, my 6-year old sister, and I started piano lessons from a Japanese neighbor, the wife of one of my father’s colleagues. Eventually when my brother became of age, he started lessons, too.

As I listened to Tina sightread the Chinese equivalent of “fake book,” that is, jian pu (simplified Chinese music notation) as right hand melody and accompaniment in Western chords, I thought of all the years that had gone by. Suddenly I felt a shake. The ground beneath me trembled on the morning of Wednesday 27th March.

I stopped her. “What is it?” I asked.

Tina stopped playing abruptly.

The IKEA loft bed above the covered upright piano was shaking from side to side.

“It’s an earthquake,” she replied and went back to playing the same piece.

Barely a week has gone by since she came to pick me up at the airport. Today she waited for me at the same airport with presents.

I wish there was more time to play music — we have not even managed a duet together — ever.

“Come visit me,” I said. “You’ve missed out on all those great places I’ve lived.”

A future blog: jian pu — simplified Chinese music notation

A day in the life of the blogmaiden

It was one of those long and winding days, waking up and on the phone while having a make-shift breakfast.

8 am – I thought there was enough time for my 9 am phone appointment with the policy expert in San Francisco.

Multi-tasking on the computer. iPhone.

Then an alert from my google-calendar — a conference call on sustainability. I had completely forgotten about it.

Headset – landline. Desktop. Brewing Hawaiian coffee. Multi-island conference-call and google doc. I was typing away. I wanted to leave by 10:45 am – but as usual, it got too late to be on time for yoga.

So I made a detour – and then made lunch at my mom’s. She wasn’t there but she left her freshly washed and picked greens on the counter for me. The pot that I thought was soup for the noodles I was making turned out to be freshly cooked sweet red bean dessert. I packed them for later.

I had to cancel my 1:30 pm appointment so I could be ready for the 2 pm. Several colleagues descended upon me at once. It was time for the electric vehicle exchange outside the new science building.

I had to empty my flash drive (or memory stick as they call it elsewhere) for the digital photography class. We had gone on a photo shoot last Saturday on the West Side — in quest of EV in paradise, or at least what it should be.

A voicemail from Kentucky. Who do I know there? I had completely overlooked his e-mail of 1st Feb!

Then I opened an e-mail from the State — an urgent request for me to read some extremely technical and legal document overnight and provide feedback.

By 4:30 pm I was spent.

I stayed another 30 minutes to get things printed for review tonight. Did I really want to do more work?

As I left campus, I reminded myself to always leave before it got dark — otherwise I’d feel resentful of giving my day away.

After dumping my mom’s plastics and newspaper at the recycling corner, I drove through the park and thought how best to spend the remaining sunset hours.

Did I want to read outside? Pick rucola from my little garden? Unpack the package from Boston?

In the end, I succumbed to my bed — completely exhausted from working around the clock these last 4 days.

But there was one more day left of this week.

Can I make it?

I had already prepared the test for my 14 piano students. I’m sure they will do well tomorrow afternoon. And then I’ll go through the Circle of Fifths and tell them about Catalyst String Quartet that will be visiting Maui on 27th February.

Before lunch, I will meet with the half-Dutch, half-Chinese host of the dinner party where I will play and talk about music for Chinese New Year of the Snake. A year ago I had researched the Year of the Dragon and the lyrics from the Song and Tang dynasties and presented a lecture/recital with a Chinese soprano. It was something I wanted to do again but simply too time-challenged this year to do one properly.

Will I have time to practise?

No. I have a 9 am meeting with my procurement officer on invoices, budgets, and travel requests.

At least I managed to swim laps in the outdoor pool and got some vitamin D in the tropical sun. That was my treat.

A Thousand Years for easy piano

How do you teach complete beginners how to play the piano?

Start with a tune they want to play.

So I searched Pandora and Youtube for the most popular movie themes. Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” is one of those sticky melodies that haunts me like the movie Twilight. Although I’ve yet to see Breaking Dawn, I can see why young people like it so much.

The short cut is to search for the sheet music online. However, it’s in a key too challenging for most beginners. Plus there are too many notes. Too much variety.

So I reduced it from 6/8 time to 3/4 time and transposed into the white key of C.

The result is something quite do-able, particularly with added fingerings. Of course, it’s always possible to simplify this further still. I will assign my students to figure how how it ends.

A Thousand Years for easy piano

Materialism and the art of letting go

In this age of post-911, post-2008 financial meltdown, nobody likes to be described as “materialistic.”

When I was trying to decide whether to stay in London or move to the Netherlands, my friend Jackie observed,”You’re not materialistic, Anne. What are you going to do with all the money you earn?” With that, I decided to stop earning money and earn time. I moved to the Netherlands to study music.

Sightreading thesis and piano duet sheet music, San Francisco, May 2011

Today I reassured a friend who made shopping a ritual: “You’re not materialistic. You are sentimental. You are attached to what the things represent. You want quality things. So you take your time.”

Equally, I have asked myself why I should find it so difficult to let go of things when I have been described as being NOT materialistic.

In 2003, I threw an open house one weekend to sell my things so I could leave London with less luggage. The only things I moved to the Netherlands were my sheet music, Laura Ashley dresses, and house plants.

Now I need to do the same with all that I have accumulated in the Netherlands. But every time I see something I recognise, like the photograph of a hand-made white vase for a single rose, I’m reminded of where it came from and how it came to be. It’s a present for such and such occasion. It was given under such circumstances. Because it’s a gift, I should not sell it or give it away. But why should I keep it?

A physical object may remind us of an occasion, a relationship, a conversation, a place, or a moment in time. When we attach ourselves to an object, we are relating to all that it represents.

When we walk into a stranger’s home, nothing has history or represents anything meaningful to us. In contrast, our own homes are full of objects that bear meaning.

Buddhism talks about detachment and emptying oneself. I never understood it until now. Why be owned by what we own? Should we be slaves to objects? I would rather spend my time with people and talk about ideas. How can we detach ourselves from objects that consume our time?

Clean up your house. Adorn the walls with unfamiliar art work. Play music you’ve never heard of before. Distance yourself from what is familiar, or make what is familiar unfamiliar by all these measures. Detach yourself. These are the ways to help you let go of what was once dear to you.

Is it regret that you fear? That if you let go, you will regret doing so?

I have a dozen boxes of sheet music that took 20 to 30 years to collect — an activity I rewarded myself in the basement of a bookstore in London. The music is worth nothing to anyone else but everything to me. How can I possibly let it go?

Post-concert recordings

A CD arrived in the post about 4 weeks after the concert. Listening to it brought back memories of that action-packed, full-house evening. The guests started arriving more than an hour before the concert. Half-an hour before it began, the hall was full. Minutes before the concert, I saw the “reserved for pianists only” seats taken by two ladies who read the cards but ignored the request.

It was every concert producer’s dream: standing room only.

Perhaps it was the rigor of concert promotion effort or the success of previous year’s piano concert or both, the outcome was impressive. Nearly a month later, my hairdresser mentioned that she heard about this concert though she was not able to attend herself. One of her customers raved about it.

I was warned that seats would be taken early for the 7:30 pm concert at Maui Music Conservatory, on the second floor of the Queen Ka’ahumanu Mall in Kahului, the capital of Maui County. “Piano Synergy” was the name of this concert, which, for us 6 pianists, actually began 4 months earlier with Sunday afternoon group rehearsals.

On Saturday 14th July at 7:30 pm, Ebb & Flow Arts, the non-profit arts organization on Maui, presented that one-hour concert (without intermission) of original works for many pianos, including the premiere of a new piece it commissioned for this occasion.

The composer Thomas Osborne was not only present for this premiere but also played one of the parts: Piano 1. Aptly titled “Canyons,” it began with Piano 4, nearly always in forte or fortissimo and definitely always the loudest of all 4 pianos. Piano 3 echoed Piano 4 but slightly softer. I played Piano 2, even softer. Piano 1 was nearly always pianissimo. This method of imitation in terraced dynamics continues until an augmentation, a spacing out of the repeated passages. Listen below.

Canyons as performed by Beatrice Scorby, Robert Pollock, Anne Ku, and Thomas Osborne (mp3)

The last work to be performed that evening of the celebration of French independence on Bastille Day was none other than Darius Milhaud’s 4-piano work “Paris.” Wearing my dry-cleaned black silk dress purchased in Paris in summer of 2009, I stood up to introduce this 6-movement work. It was, without doubt, one that required the most study of all works selected for this concert.

“And now, for the piece d’ resistance, Paris, which is the raison d’etre for tonight!” There were French-speakers in the audience who were glad to help my pronunciation. Before each movement, I introduced that part of Paris and what to listen for. After Montmartre came L’isle St Louis. On a foggy day, you can hear the church bells of Notre Dame and nearby churches. Sometimes you can hear they are out of tune!

L’isle St Louis from Paris by Darius Milhaud (mp3)

Longchamp refers to the race courses. The composer chose a fugue to represent that. A fugue literally means a chase. You can hear it getting faster and more intense.

Longchamp from Paris by Darius Milhaud (mp3)

The recordings were made by John Messersmith for Ebb & Flow Arts.

Concert promotion by other media: Ebb & Flow Arts in Maui, Hawaii

Once upon a time, the concert was the talk of town. It’s the end result of all things. But nowadays there is too much competition for your attention — to0 many other things you can be doing, including staying at home and watching TV. To get people to come to a concert, you’d have to promote it.

Identify a concert’s unique selling points. Below is a photo of something quite rare: 4 pianists sitting at four grand pianos. It would catch anybody’s eye. This appeared in a free weekly paper that gets published on Thursdays — and just in time, too — the Thursday before the Saturday concert.

Pianists at rehearsal. Photo credit: Klazine Pollock

How to attract people to come to a concert? Mention the composers and repertoire, particularly if they are interesting and connects. In this case, there’s the premiere of a new piece written by a composer based in Honolulu, Thomas Osborne, who also teaches at University of Hawaii at Manoa. The date of the concert, 14th July 2012, also coincides with Bastille Day, celebrating French independence, hence a concert of music by French composers, including Darius Milhaud’s Paris.

Appeal to different audiences, including those who have access to television. The following 10 minute video clip was aired twice a day, every single day in the week of the concert on Channel 55, the 24/7 cable TV of University of Hawaii Maui College (UHMC).

Reach audiences via different avenues and media. On the Wednesday before the Piano Synergy concert, the following 25 minute clip was aired on local radio.

Kaio Radio: Ebb & Flow Arts (audio clip)

Besides local paper, TV, and radio promotions, there were also color posters, postcards, and local newspaper listings mentioning the forthcoming concerts.

What can we learn from this? While the musicians are busy practising, the concert organizer (producer) is busy letting as many people know about the concert as possible. These “previews” are important to help potential audience decide and anticipate. Here is a blog post anticipating the event.

It’s simply not enough to tell someone to come to a concert. It needs to reach all audiences in more than one way. Before doing so, one needs to think through what appeals, what attracts, what is relevant.

Canyons by Thomas Osborne

We six pianists first met on Sunday 4th March 2012 in Ruth Murata’s Maui Music Conservatory. Ebb & Flow Arts had commissioned a new piece for 4 pianos. As time marched on, we got anxious if we’d get the score in time to study individually and then rehearse as a group.

As with all new music, the approach is to first scan it, assess the difficulty and amount of time required to study it. We’d identify the challenging areas and spend more time studying them than the rest. We’d use a metronome to ensure we keep to a steady beat.

When we got together to rehearse on subsequent Sunday afternoons, we’d notice that the music for 4 pianos was quite different from the single score we were given to study. After studying Milhaud’s Paris, Busby’s Four!, Depue’s 16 Pawns, and two piano works, we learned towards the end of May, that Honolulu-based composer Thomas Osborne’s new work was ready.

When I first looked at “Canyons” I didn’t know what to make of it. The mp3 recording sounded extremely exciting though. I was willing to give it a chance. I became one of the pianists committed to studying it for premiere on 14th July. Robert Pollock, the founder and director of Ebb & Flow Arts, planned for us three pianists to rehearse and the last 3 rehearsals with the composer as the 4th pianist.

“Canyons” plays on the term canons. It uses imitation and terraced dynamics to produce the kind of echo effect you can hear in a canyon. The first pianist to play is Piano 4 — loud. The next pianist — Piano 3 — is slightly less loud. These dynamic levels are to be kept throughout the piece.

Canyons by Thomas Osborne, page 1

Robert Pollock and I discussed this and other works on Kaoi Radio recently.

Here’s the 25 minute audio clip.

Tonight’s concert is FREE — and expected to draw a standing-room only audience. My only regret is that we get to perform each piece just once — tonight.

Piano Synergy! Concert, 14th July 2012 at 7:30 pm at the Maui Music Conservatory, 2nd floor of the very centrally located Queen Ka’ahumanu Shopping Mall in Kahului, on Maui, Hawaii. We begin with a work of John Cage and end with Darius Milhaud’s Paris.

The highlight of the evening will surely be Thomas Osborne’s “Canyons.”

Canyons by Thomas Osborne bars 84 to 87

Paris by Darius Milhaud

The Paris of French composer Darius Milhaud in 1948 is captured in his 4 piano music for 4 pianists. I asked my friend Joe Goldiamond, who has lived in Paris, to write about each of the areas which title the movements of this work. He has always spoken fondly of Paris, a romantic city I was fortunate enough to visit as a 21-year-old backpacker through Europe, on holiday as a graduate student, day trip for a job interview, blind date, conferences & meetings, winter rendezvous with friend from Houston, and the last occasion in Summer 2009. I can’t wait to share his descriptions with the audience on Maui on Saturday 14th July 2012. [The bracketed comments are mine, after our 8th July rehearsal.]

Montmartre

Montmartre sits on a hillside in the northernmost part of the city and has a 2,000 year-old history as an independent village known for its windmills and vineyards.  Annexed by Paris in the late 19^th century, it quickly became home for artists, poets and revolutionaries who were attracted by its tolerant atmosphere, its buoyant nightlife, and by the beauty of its winding, narrow cobblestone streets, often with steep inclines, that may lead suddenly to small squares and fountains and gardens. [You can hear the scales, which I think depict the steps and paths.]

L’ Isle St. Louis      

The Isle St. Louis is a natural island in the River Seine right in the heart of Paris.  Yet, it feels far away and on Sunday mornings, when the island is shrouded in mist that rolls in from the river and the only sound you hear is that of a church bell, you might easily imagine yourself in rural France, 400 years ago.  It was the home of the Polish composer and pianist, Frederic Chopin.  The quays, which embrace the entire island, are legendary as lovers’ promenades. [You can hear the tenuto notes representing the bells of the Notre Dame.]

Montparnasse

Montparnasse became the heart of Paris’s artistic and intellectual life after the first decade of the 20^th century.  Located deep on the Left Bank, the area is a broad plain gathered around the boulevard Montparnasse, which today, as much as yesterday, blends bookstores and nightlife, cafés and crepe restaurants.  The stroller will still find legendary cafés, such as Le Dome and La Rotonde, where painters, sculptors, writers and philosophers from across the globe gathered to mold thoughts and debate ideas. [This piece is full of conversations, ideas, and thoughts criss-crossing each other. The biggest movement by far.]

Les Bateaux-Mouches

The Bateaux-Mouches are long, slender boats that have carried visitors on tours through the heart of Paris since the end of the 19^th century.  The visitor experiences a leisurely adventure and gentle breeze as his boat glides past Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre Museum and the Tuileries Gardens and under historic bridges.  He may also sense what the waters of the Seine have always meant to Paris, as its main artery, and some would say, its soul. [In 12/8 time, you feel the sway of the boat on the water, nice and relaxed!]

Longchamp

The Longchamp Racecourse is located along the banks of the Seine in a wooded area in western Paris.  From the time of Napoleon III and across La Belle Epoque into the early 20^th century, it was the kind of place that you went to in a top hat, if you were a man, and carrying a parasol, if you were not.  Even the thoroughbred horses had an understated elegance, along with power, in the masterly paintings of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. [This is a fugue, which means chase. You can literally hear the parts can't wait to imitate each other, more like chasing each other!]

La Tour Eiffel

The Eiffel Tower is the tallest structure in France, the most visited monument in the world, and the universal symbol of Paris.  If the islands in the River Seine are the city’s heart, and the river its soul, then the Eiffel Tower is the city’s intelligence.  Constructed of iron lattice, like Parisian balconies, it was considered an impossible feat until it was done.  It was completed in 1889, in time for the World’s Fair, which was held to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution, an event we commemorate this evening. [As the last movement, this is grand and triumphant, rising high like the tower itself! Lots of octaves!]

Wanted: home for a Steinway

My relocation to the Netherlands in 2003/2004 coincided with a refund of monies from Singapore. It was a milestone for change.

Frustrated by the daily challenge of finding a good piano to practise at the conservatory in Utrecht and the inadequate upright piano at home in Bussum, I decided to find a grand piano of my own.

First I visited the local piano shop whose owner led me to a room full of Yamahas. I could not find a piano that was special enough to be different. I abandoned the idea of a Yamaha and went for a Steinway instead. The story of how I found that piano and the piano technician who helped me negotiate the price is an interesting one, perhaps for another blog post. He did request that I visit his atelier after I got back from Taiwan. A month later, the French polished, restrung Steinway grand arrived in Bussum.

It was a glorious moment — to finally have a Steinway Grand Piano in my home. The Steinway was not from Hamburg but from New York. Made in 1909. All 188 CM of it. Model A. Ivory keys. One celebrated concert pianist, Dutch winner of the Liszt Piano Competition who commuted between Vienna and Utrecht, remarked that it was a Rachmaninoff piano for it had that romantic sound.

Here’s how the Steinway sounds: Intermezzo by Allan Segall, performed by Anne Ku, recorded by Robert Bekkers.

I held a Steinway Warming party for my piano friends. With the upright piano, four pianists could play on both pianos. We tried all sorts of duets.

Once I got accustomed to being the proud owner of a Steinway, it was time to let go of my Gerhard Adam, a German mahogany grand piano from the 1920′s which I left behind in London. I wrote a decision making guide to buying a second-hand piano to help sell that piano online. Once again I walked down my memory lane of buying a piano. I wrote an Adieu which used all 88 keys on the piano, a way for me to say goodbye thru the new owner I did not meet.

Here is a recording of my playing on my Steinway. Adieu to a Piano by Anne Ku

Steinway Grand Model A 188cm, 1909 New York, before recording session

In summer 2006, the Steinway moved with me to Utrecht. We launched the Monument House Concert Series with a violin and guitar concert by Duo 46. That December we chose the theme Piano as Orchestra, featuring several concertos (harp, euphonium, guitar). The following year we combined food with music in Chamber Music Tapas Style. Every year we committed to organizing two house concerts. Often we had several mini concerts, including a kitchen concert, garden concert, impromptu concert. Each time we became more adventurous and more professional. We outsourced food and wine to professional chefs and wine sommeliers. We included art exhibitions.

On my last trip back to the Netherlands, I felt compelled to host two concerts back to back. Despite being time-challenged with only 2.5 months to sort out my things, I felt it was important to organize these concerts for two American pianists on their way to the Italian alps. Why? Maybe instinctively I knew it was the last time my grand piano would be heard in a concert setting. Sure enough, 2nd July 2011 became the last house concert.

And the last recordings were that of piano duets I had collected from a Call for Scores from Hawaii to Holland. Here’s Brendan Kinsella and I playing my late composition teacher Henk Alkema’s piece.

APPEAL:

This Steinway Grand, made in New York in 1909, model A – 188 cm – needs a home. SALE. RENT. or LOAN.

Steinway for Sale with new photos and sound clips.

Interested parties please use the LEAVE A REPLY field below.

Steinway Grand at the Monument House, Utrecht