Today's guest post is written by Geraldine Boyer-Cussac, a music director, pianist, vocal coach and piano teacher. She holds a M.M. from Western Michigan University, and a D.M.A in collaborative piano from Boston University. She is currently writing a book on music directing, and her excellent blog Geraldine in a Bottle looks at what it takes to become a professional musician.


You've been thinking of becoming a full time collaborative pianist, but is it the right decision? Answer the questions below to find out.

1. You're given one week to learn a brand new piece.
a) How about two weeks instead?
b) Kill me now!
c) I better get payed more.

2. The choir director stops in the middle of the piece.
a) You try to figure out what spot

Please turn up the volume on your computer.

 

A friend suggested this topic.  He wonders how in the world keyboard players get their left hand to do anything.  And then there are the organ pedals.  All that independence!  Mind-boggling!

I agree.  Don’t you wish you were an octopus?  I do sometimes.

Learning a fugue takes patience!  Each voice must be learned separately before we can perform them together with confidence and clarity.

As I do not play the harpsichord, I am not able to offer suggestions.  Portions of this post may, however, be relevant…

A few suggestions

Finding good fingerings is the single most helpful

Occasionally an audition can be so stunning, it profoundly affects everyone in the room. 

One audition was so impressive, I can still hear it years later.

Background

The Oratorio Society of New York holds soloist auditions every year.  The preliminary round is scheduled over the period of a week, every evening.  I was hired as house accompanist.  Chorus members acted  as judges, inviting me to sit in when a singer arrived with his or her own accompanist.  Although I had no vote, it was fascinating to be there and I was grateful for the invitation.

Things proceeded as usual, with some good performances throughout the week.  Since most of you who are reading this have

I think I may have calmed down a bit from this particular composer FAIL that now I may write about it. (Or, maybe I finally have the time to constructively write about it and share it with my tens of readers.)

To recap, the main reason why this grant was rejected was because the committee didn't believe I had hard evidence of how I would complete my "double-helix" concept in my future opera. (Did I have hard evidence of this? No, but that's because I would like to have funding discovering this double-helix concept. Spending time to work on this would be a little more beneficial than...working McMicken Ave.)

There are other reasons.

One musicologist committee member was a little concerned about the genre of opera I was going to write. This

Joe Morello, the adventuresome drummer in Dave Brubeck’s most famous quartet, has died at 82. Tucked away at the bottom of his obituary in the New York Times is this gem:

Joseph A. Morello was born in Springfield, Mass., on July 17, 1928. Sight-impaired from an early age, he took up the violin at 6 and performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra three years later. According to a biography on his Web site, Mr. Morello gave up the violin for drums at 15, after meeting his idol, the violinist Jascha Heifetz.

Reminds me of an art history professor friend of mine who started out as a painter. One day, his teacher, Charles Burchfield, stopped at his easel, stared at the painting for

#1 What We're Up Against

Long gone are the days of the 18th century when salon concerts were the buzz of the town and people waited anxiously for Mozart's newest release. It's even a distant memory to think of Classical music's Golden Era when opera singers and prima ballerinas reached rock star status in the mainstream. Modern times put today's concert artists up against never-ending access to technology and endless possibilities for entertainment. To compete, the new breed of performer has to reinvent the concert experience making it an adventure that balances mystique and discovery with information and entertainment. The Art of the Modern-Day Concert presents the tools today's modern-day concert artists can use to engage and

In high school, a classmate who was introducing me on stage said, “Eileen Huang is a pianist,” pronouncing “pianist” with an accent on the first syllable: pee-a-nist. Unfortunately he didn’t enunciate the “t,” and everyone in the audience had a good laugh.

Let that be a lesson to everyone on the importance of diction, and a vote in favor of pee-an-ist. On to semantics…

Pianist vs. Collaborative Pianist

I consider “collaborative pianist” to be a more specific description of what I do. It’s like telling someone you’re a novelist or a journalist vs. telling them you’re a writer. Granted, not everyone knows what a collaborative pianist is. The Collaborative

I was practicing yesterday and encountered, for the first time in a long while, the temptation to stop after the first 20 minutes. I've set about going through the Popper études and plowing roughshod through the repertoire to prime myself for re-entry into a more performance intensive lifestyle.

When I have more time like I did over the holidays, I have a serve-and volley relationship with my practice. You know, I get something back each time I sit down because I'm able to daisy chain a long series of consecutive practices together. These days it's more of a search and rescue mission: go back and see if I can mine some competence out of the rusty appendages that claim to be my hands. Sure, I'm hard on myself. I'm 98% the cellist I

Today's guest post is written by Martha Hill Duncan, an award-winning composer and piano teacher living in Kingston, Ontario. She is also an examiner for the Royal Conservatory of Music, conductor of the women’s choir She Sings!, and a founding member of Red Leaf Pianoworks, a self-publishing composer’s collective. For more information, sound clips and score availability, please visit Martha's website.



Driven by the deep and intimate workings of a tortured and convoluted mind, I once believed that I would always compose alone. Recently, however, and especially with my vocal writing, I’ve had a change of heart. By drawing poets, singers, teachers, artists, and recording engineers into my creative machinations