Pedagogy
Crucial to me is the notion of transmission.
A substantial proportion of my time is devoted to giving lectures, lecture-concerts, master classes, workshops, seminars, coaching sessions. Whether it be for elementary school children, conservatory students, senior citizens, or general public, it is a form of mission to share the accumulated treasures that will make a difference in people’s lives.
Subjects include:
1.
1 – Piano Music of the 20th-21st Centuries
Any format from 1 hour to full doctoral seminar of 1 or 2 semesters.
Tech List: 1 piano; 1 mike
The monument that is the music of our time is neither unyielding nor impenetrable. My goal is to demonstrate that it did not just appear from out of nowhere. In plotting a time-curve, from late Liszt (1886) up until current works by the young Bruno Mantovani, it is possible to note tendencies and influences and elements that, when elucidated, enable us to feel as comfortable and familiar with music of our time as with that of the standard repertory. Just as with all of life, it is a question of a “meeting”: with composers, with works. What I am proposing here is the pleasure of meeting.
2.
Piano Music of any of the composers included in “Programs”, i.e. Piano Music of Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, or Piano Music of Luciano Berio and Franco Donatoni, etc.
3.
Evolution of 20th-Century Piano Techniques.
4.
4 – History of American Music
Tech List: 1 piano; 1 mike; 1 CD player
This presentation is a panorama of American music, with evocation of the debt towards Europe from the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the 19th century, as well as the immense influence, starting in the 19th century, of Afro-Cuban sources. Verbal and musical illustrations at the piano of forms such as church hymns, dances, marches, patriotic music, ragtime, theater music, symphonies, and fusion, covering inevitable composers such as Stephen Foster, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, John Philip Sousa, Scott Joplin, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, George Antheil, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Roy Harris, John Cage, Morton Feldman, George Crumb, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams.
Duration: 1 to 1-1/2 hours
5.
American Piano Music of the 20th-21st Centuries.
6.
French Piano Music from 1945 to Today.
7.
Fusion Through the Ages: Popular Elements in Classical Music from 15th-21st Century.
8.
8 – Six Centuries of Sixth Sense: Surprise in Music from 16th-21st Century (OR WHY GREAT COMPOSERS ARE GREAT)
Tech List: 1 piano; 1 mike
If we take for a given the famous Paul Klee adage, “Genius is the error in the system”, this lecture-demonstration gets to the heart of the question of genius; at least that of the towering, colossal composers of music. Approaching the subject as a lawyer would expose the facts as proof in a case, seated at a piano and with a swivel microphone, my tools are specific examples taken from works by exceptional composers.
The excerpts I have chosen, by composers such as Gesualdo, Byrd, Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Fauré, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Cage, Ligeti, Berio and Crumb, span from the 16th to the 21st century, hence the title of the presentation.
Alternating between playing the excerpts at the piano and my verbal commentaries, even non-musicians will be able to perceive in concrete form how these masters went beyond the reliable, expected formulas (“the system”), outside of the box to create surprise. The goal is to show clearly the components of magic.
Duration: 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
9.
9 – The Magic of Nadia Boulanger’s Teaching.
Tech List: 1 piano; 1 mike
Having worked closely and intensively for many years with Nadia Boulanger, both privately and in class, in composition, analysis, harmony, score-reading, conducting, and piano, and believing firmly in the power of articulating the specific components of magic, this presentation zeroes in on precisely what characterized Mademoiselle’s extraordinary approach to music history, style analysis and harmonic refining, with numerous musical illustrations at the piano.
The lecture-demonstration format will show how Nadia Boulanger provided bridges between sounds and concepts, bringing to the fore for her students the most internal, sometimes arcane, musical processes and, in turn, leading us towards internalizing them for ourselves: “rule” become “inner necessities”. Her methods, both Socratic and probative, produced the same result: illumination.
Duration: 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
10.
Workshop in Improvisation