I digress. Back to the concept of leaving music alone. Simone Barere (the other great student of Felix Blumenfeld besides Vladimir Horowitz) was a master at this. His recitals always bore the emblem of freshness…

By leaving music alone, we classical pianists mean more than just not over-practicing or merely leaving everything to chance. We mean an entire lifestyle and philosophy dedicated to the practicing of nil. When one goes about one’s day in the spirit of nonchalance, yet still takes loving care of all the details that obscure one’s path, the pianist can acquire the most permanent state of awe-inspiring awareness. It is a moral and ethical duty to perform music in such a state of curiosity and repose.

Let’s take the case of Simone Barere. Mr. Barere rarely practiced the piano except before recitals in Carnegie Hall in which, on the contrary he would practice like a madman. During his recitals, he could easily fall into a trance and magnetize his audiences, displaying an array of musical colors and timbres, like a scientist designing new color dyes for the latest clothing fashions.

If you can always manage to practice in such a state of integrity and unconditional passion, then hoorah, you are a pianist with a special gift to nurture; an introverted type, who takes 70% of his inspiration from within. Other pianists are more extroverted, taking 70% of their muse from the outside world, continuously requiring an audience and other such hooplah in their presence to perform at their peak.

Both types of pianists can still benefit from the above-mentioned ideology no matter whether they like to practice alone or not. How else, can they wait just that extra microsecond longer on stage before a critical note to enter the metaphysical realm?

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Poland is a country that has had its fair share of warfare. With a rich country (Germany) on the left and a huge country (Russia) on the right, it’s placement has caused a lot of suffering for the people especially in the last 100 years with the advent of WWI and II.
Poland has very delicious home-made food. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. God bless all those wives who cook using Polish tradition. Every Christmas Eve, simply walking into a Polish home can make anyone’s mouth water with the smell of delicious borscht (red beet soup), pierogies, and a poppy seed and raisin roll for dessert. Mmm!

By Daniel Wnukowski

The internet has revolutionized the speed in which people can communicate their thoughts, beliefs and artistic values. Are online classical musicians ready to jump on the bandwagon and explore its myriad possibilities, or should they withdraw from its rampant growth and continue to perform in a way that worked for our ancestors hundreds of years ago? This essay will attempt to examine the advantages and disadvantages of using the internet as a means of distributing online classical music to a wide, global audience and offers suggestions to young artists as to how they can utilize its full potential.

There is no longer a need to travel for hours by horse-carriage in order to hear a concert artist live in performance as would have been commonplace in the late 19th century. The internet has enabled millions of viewers from anywhere in the world to tune in simultaneously to any given performance at any time from the convenience of their own home. An audience can now instantly access an artist’s biography, photos, and sound clips at any time of day without having to wait for days or even weeks at a time.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is one example of such an orchestra which has been using online classical music videos to directly reach local members and fans, as well as the growing global audience interested in staying connected to BSO content and activities. Visitors can also access archived recordings such as award-winning performances by renowned composers, behind-the-scenes footage, conductor lessons and other web only content. (“Boston Symphony Orchestra”) Even music competitions such as the Piano E-Competition in Minnesota, USA now have live streaming performances of each competitor. (“Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition”)

The internet has also revolutionized the ways in which young artists can promote their careers. A young artist can now sell their recordings over the internet at a cheap price and still generate a profit margin nearly twice as high than they would by selling a CD version of their music through traditional retail shops. (Mewton 122) Although the marketing of an artist’s name and brand can still be an expensive and arduous process involving the use of specialist magazines and radio coverage, the low maintenance costs of producing and distributing an electronic press kit consisting of downloadable audio clips are still a considerable advantage for any budding young artist operating on a limited budget. (Mewton 123)

Modern classical musicians can now easily create a basic website with relative ease and simplicity. With the evolution of custom-made templates, knowledge of HTML, or the language used to create websites is no longer an essential requirement. Web hosting and domain name fees have become significantly reduced due to more competition from third party providers. Ambitious internet entrepreneurs can even set-up their own virtual ‘store’ in minutes allowing them to accept credit card orders through their website eliminating the need for large bank deposits which were once required for setting up merchant accounts. (Evoy 25)

However, the immediately apparent benefits of such a rapid, global system of communication can sometimes leave the ingenuous amateur startled and disappointed. Many young artists create a homemade website with the hope that their debut online classical music recordings will start magically selling like hot pancakes on a Sunday morning in Camden market. When this does not become a reality, they give up on the system only to believe that their time building the website could have been better spent on developing artistic pursuits. I was also a victim of this when I had my first website several years ago with the intention of promoting my newest album. For many months, it seemed like only my friends and family made up the bulk of the visitors to my site and usually with no intention of purchasing anything from my site.

However, the website owner can learn how to develop a direct relationship with his online visitors in a relatively short time with a little effort. He must discover new ways of standing out of the overwhelming crowd of online classical musicians who unanimously send out the same message. How many times have we stumbled upon a classical pianist’s or violinist’s website and found a deluge of superlative compliments about the artist’s accomplishments? Due to the internet’s overload of information, buyers of online classical music on the internet have become more and more scrupulous and sceptical of a website’s claims. Website owners must now learn to avoid the overuse of superlative language and instead learn to instil trust and security into the minds of their potential customers.

Aside from the general look & feel of a website in terms of its professional appearance, style of language and authoritative tone, there are a few other ways to boost a website’s integrity. One way is to try and find an official, legal or properly regulated authority such as a university, government agency or library to endorse the site. Another way is to find a reputable national or international agency or institution that could provide outgoing links to the artist’s site from their own sites. (Herbert 51-52)
Another method of standing out of the crowd in the profuse online classical music world is to provide genuinely interesting and unique content about one’s experiences as a performer. It has been more and more customary to begin a live concert with a short lecture or presentation on the pieces one will be performing before in an attempt to ‘warm-up’ an audience as to what they are about to hear. Why can’t the same hold true for online performances?

Since the majority of our targeted visitors browse the internet solely for the purpose of finding information, why not give them precisely the information they are looking for so that they become our virtual friends and fans? This could provide a win-win situation for both the artist and the performer as the visitor becomes pre-sold about what the artist is offering rather than just visiting a website that blatantly attempts to sell them a product. For example, I noticed a large surge of traffic stemming from the major search engines to my website when I installed a diary section which outlined my experiences as a classical concert pianist. This was far more effective than merely offering a web page with superlative quotes about why they should buy my recording.

One disadvantage of the internet is in how our society can become too dependent on it as its sole provider of music thereby causing hours of lost time spent with researching and sifting rather than attending live concerts. A quick search using Google’s ‘Keyword Suggestion Tool’ reveals that the keyword online ‘classical music’ is very much in demand with over 1,000,000 queries a month. (“Keyword Tool”) This signifies that young people are genuinely curious about online classical music but are too afraid to step outside the door and attend a live concert. Perhaps they find the live concert environment too austere and unforgiving; the online classical music concert environment is far more convenient and attractive for them.

A major challenge remains with such an approach as many performers don’t feel comfortable playing solely in front of a machine and believe that music is far more effective and spiritual when it is performed directly in contact with the human ear. Naturally, we don’t have to return to the use of horse carriages to bring back the intense anticipation of hearing a live performer on stage, but we can find a better equilibrium between downloading online classical music as an introduction to certain repertoire while still attending live concerts for the full emotional experience.

To make matters worse, the most common method of distributing files on the internet is the ‘mp3’ which is a compressed file format roughly one twelfth the size of a normal audio CD file. Although the average listener suffers only a relatively small loss of audio-quality, a well-trained ear or bona fide concert-goer will certainly feel a substantial difference meaning that online audiophiles never really hear the highest quality of sound available to them. (Mewton 25) However, this problem may be ameliorated in the future as ISPs (internet service providers) discover new ways of economically bringing faster internet speeds into the homes of their subscribers allowing them to download high quality, uncompressed sound files.

All disadvantages aside, the internet is and will remain to be a powerful medium for reaching people of all far corners of the earth. Before the advent of the internet, Leonard Bernstein was able to reach ten million people a week through his television broadcasts on topics related to online classical music which were loved by children and adults alike. (Lebrecht 180) Let’s just imagine how many more people we could reach with the internet if we could tap into a similar system with online classical music?

It may be extremely difficult and not even worth the effort to try and convert the average listener who is simply not interested in understanding the inherent complexities of online classical music into a fervent connoisseur. A far more efficient strategy would be to gently sensitize them with an appreciation for the delicate nuances a classical piece of music can offer so that they may become entranced upon hearing a musical excerpt the second time around. The internet can easily provide anyone with the ability to listen to an excerpt again and again; however, it is still up to the experienced musicians to try and sensitize the listener whether it be through the use of persuasive words or through the musical notes themselves.

Bibliography

Boston Symphony Orchestra. Home page. 15 November 2008 Link.

Evoy, K., Make Your Site Sell (Hudson Heights, Quebec: Sitesell Inc., 2001). 15 November 2008 Link.

Herbert, T., Music in Words (London: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 2001).

Keyword Tool. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. 15 November 2008 Link.

Lebrecht, N., The Maestro Myth (London: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

Mewton, C., Music and the Internet Revolution (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2001).

Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition. Home page. 15 November 2008 Link.

I don’t know if you can remember that last day of school right before the summer holidays, when you came home and could breathe a hugh sigh of relief and then you started to make plans for the summer. You would call your friends, and tell them about your plans for vacations – maybe you would do something extra wild this summer like going skiing in the Alps, or visit and exotic island like Fiji and go snorkeling in the Pacific Ocean viewing the brilliant flourescent colours of the fish.

Many years ago, I promised myself that after I finish college I would re-live that moment for the rest of my life and promised myself I would do whatever it takes to live a fun-filled adventurous life without the monotonous grind. According to NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), if you find successful people and model what they do, their success would brush off on you, and you would be successful too!

Using the internet, I have been fortunate to find some incredible quality people, including colleagues and other musicians which will probably last a lifetime. Every weekend, I take some time off of my busy schedule, and spend some time alone usually by taking a scenic drive somewhere far away from home.

This page is especially designed for the upcoming Chopin year of 2010.

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I am often asked to repeat his name…
Cziffra – Gyorgy Cziffra.

(OK, so it’s not as easy to remember as Bond – James Bond.)

But I am very pleased to see the revival of Cziffra amongst today’s listening audience. Gyorgy Cziffra was a Hungarian composer/pianist who lived at the heart of the 20th century’s greatest virtuosi. Although he was born in 1921 to a poor family of gypsy musicians, it wasn’t until 1947 that he was able to grow his career due to military services and even being a POW. In spite of wide acclaim, he (like Horowitz at one point) abandoned his career until the early 1990s when he gave a concert in Paris.

The Cziffra foundation in Paris which provides rare information on this unique composer seems to be doing well, selling manuscripts to an international market.

Cziffra’s own recordings have the unique ability of stimulating tremendous excitement onto the listener. He was a master of adding fire and passion to any piece he touched, and had an unrivaled facility which allowed him to execute extremely difficult passages. Who else but Cziffra could take an already difficult theme such as Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and turn it into alternating octaves between the hands AND play it in a flowing manner- without making it sound like chopping liver?
I think he is not performed often enough today because of the improvisatory nature of his music. We live in such a digital age where each day, beautiful music is being turned into a monotonous ring tone for the latest cell phone. Today’s ‘artists’ are, in fact, the sound engineers more than the performers themselves, as they continuously produce music that sounds cleaner and more digital.

I, myself, was fiercely criticized after a performance I did in Warsaw, Poland back in 1997. I composed a piece during my first month in Warsaw called “City Traffic” which reflected the culture shock I experienced upon moving into the big European metropolis. Although I had written every note down, and even used the classic sonata-allegro form, I was criticized for writing “out-dated music which sounded too improvisatory”. In other words, anything that even sounds improvisatory is now considered old-fashioned. It took me months to recover and it took me years until I could write another note of music again.

I believe that our new generation of musicians will begin to realize the benefits of supporting improvisation more and more strongly. After all, all of the greatest pianists of the last century were essentially improvising on stage.

Recently I purchased a new concert grand piano. I was extremely picky about finding an instrument that would match all my needs. I am one of those notorious customers that will spend hours trying a product only to say “I’ll think about it” at the end.
One of my chief requirements was for the piano to play as if the makers had put their heart into it. This is difficult to explain. Basically, many new pianos – even brand names – are mass-produced which means cheaper parts, cheaper labour and higher marketing costs. What I look for is the rare hand-crafted instruments made of only the highest-quality material which took long hard hours to create. Often, one has to go back pianos made in the ’20s to find such a delicious treat.

I was fortunate to find such an instrument in Orange County which was being sold through another wonderful concert pianist – Bob Estrin. The moment I tried it, I was astonished by its even, responsive touch, and its warm, rich powerful tone. It was a Mason and Hamlin – relatively unknown in the music world but considered by many to be even better than Steinway.

Mason and Hamlins produced some truly wonderful instruments. When this ‘little’ 1100+ pound toy had arrived into my living room, I couldn’t keep my hands off it for weeks!

I’ll start with an old Jewish joke:
A man was walking in the mountains just enjoying the scenery when he stepped too close to the edge of the mountain and started to fall. In desperation he reached out and grabbed a limb of a gnarly old tree hanging onto the side of the cliff. Full of fear he assessed his situation.

He was about 100 feet down a shear cliff and about 900 feet from the floor of the canyon below. If he should slip again he’d plummet to his death. Full of fear, he cries out, “Is there anyone up there who can help me?” But there was no answer. Again and again he cried out but to no avail. Then suddenly a deep voice replied, “Yes, I can help you.”
“Who is it?”
“This is the Lord.”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes I can help you.”
“Help me!”
“Just let go and trust.”
Looking around the man became full of panic. “What?!?!”
“Let go. I will catch you.”
“Uh…Is there anyone else up there that can help me?”

Let me give you an example of something I discovered many years ago regarding the power of letting go and taking risks. Normally, I would always practice a piece of music with a certain conception of how it should sound, and then I would run it through a thousand times until it felt solid and ready to perform on stage. Then of course, there was always the ‘stereotypical warm-up’ which had to precede each session of ‘so-called music-making’. Well, I can’t say the system is terribly flawed; It will definitely work but the results have always turned out to be mediocre, nothing like the level of the great pianists of our time.

Now instead of this procedure, I decided to take on an entirely different approach. I decided to not practice at all for six months before a concert tour I was scheduled to have. Previously, if I ever took a break and returned to the piano I would jump into hysteria, and panache over how unprepared I am. Very soon the mind would erupt into an avalanche of negative thoughts which lead to extreme tension, fatigue and even injury. Instead, I decided to relax and embrace this unpreparedness of my piano technique. I got myself to enjoy just how distorted each piece sounded from its very first notes, compared to how it sounded before my huge break.

After a couple of hours of doing this I noticed that the notes began to fall into their proper place. It almost felt like magic. According to Leon Fleisher, one of the great pianists of our time, each beat in a piece of music has a ‘sweet-spot’, which makes the rhythm feel natural to the listener. A metronome cannot provide this ideal pulse, it must come from within ourselves. It was truly a magnificent experience to create such beautiful music and to realize that everything was in fact a distortion!

I must make an important point here. During those six months of not practicing I was not lying at the beach all day long – although I’m not completely ruling out this possibility for a future experiment – instead I was reading many great works of literature and philosophy, and listening to many older recordings of great pianists.

To sum up this six month experience, I would say that I was intensively augmenting my ‘curiosity’ by continuously asking myself why some performances become great while others do not reach our soul. I was not looking for answers, and obliterated any expectations that I would find them. Still today, I really don’t want any answers – only more risks!