RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL

INTERVIEW

Interview: Owain Park, Composer/Conductor

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Owain Park

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Practice is key – I’ll forever be grateful to my mum for sitting me down on the piano stool and getting me to do those scales, because now I can look at a piece of music and interpret it at the piano, and these millions of connections lead to compositional ideas when the fingers find the right spot on the keys.

It’s also important to remember that failure or rejection can allow even better opportunities to present themselves. Having worked with the choristers at Wells Cathedral, I felt I was really suited to the organ scholarship at St John’s College Cambridge, but I ended up at Trinity. At the time I saw this as some kind of failure – I wasn’t quite good enough to get my first choice – but now I couldn’t be more grateful for the time I had and the people I met at Trinity: years which have been instrumental in my career.

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Interview: Anne Vanschothorst, Composer and Harpist

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Anne Vanschothorst

How do you work?

Composing is such an intuitive process. Sometimes I hear a melody and then play it on my harp and most of the times it immediately becomes a basis for a free improvisation. Sometimes a composition arises through improvisation, some brain work and choices. I listen and re-listen until the composition sounds right, either I need to delete some notes or maybe I need to make a stronger melody … or the pulse – heartbeat of the music is not there yet … again I trust my gut feeling in this refining and creative process.

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Interview: Julian Rowlands, Bandoneon Player

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Julian Rowlands

 

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I think the biggest challenge has been finding techniques and strategies to deal with the mental pressure of performing in a professional schedule. There are certainly other challenges, such as the physical problems – strains and injuries – that most musicians have from time to time, and the challenge of approaching the preparation of passages that initially seem impossible to play. But behind all this is the necessity to develop a higher level of concentration, which means an ability to negotiate distraction, and ways to cope with non-optimal outcomes – the sort of mortifying failures that can sometimes trip us up because we are human and fallible. My experience is that mindfulness meditation has been very beneficial in mitigating stress and improving brain function in performance situations, and there is some research that backs it up, which I think is very important. Nowadays I would always choose to go with evidence based practices because that guarantees a better probability that I am devoting time and energy to something that will work. I also think that the more we can learn about the psychology of performance, the better able we are to manage ourselves. Noa Kageyama’s Bulletproof Musician blog is a great resource for information on the latest research. But there’s always a certain mystery about the whole business, no matter how scientific we are.

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Interview: Alex Karpeyev, Pianist

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Alex Karpeyev

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

I think a performer has to be faithful to the ‘tradition’. It is important to know the achievements of the artists of the past, be aware of the performance traditions existing at time of the composer, but also aware of the time in which we live today. An artist must strive to summon something new to the ‘tradition’ to keep it alive. For this a strong personality is a must. A keen interest in the visual arts, literature and even psychology have helped me personally.

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Interview: Marcus Paus, Composer

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Marcus Paus

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles and orchestras?

What’s great about working closely with an ensemble or a performer, is that you get to know each other, and can play to each other’s strengths. Just as individual instruments will suggest how and what to write for them, so, too, can a particular performer inform the material. Many of my works are in fact portraits of the musicians they were written for. The better you know someone, the better you can write for them.

But sometimes you get so specialized, so idiomatic, that you might end up writing a piece that can only ever really be performed by one person. I suspect that much of the music I have written for Norwegian saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm will suffer this fate.

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Interview: Rowan Hudson, Jazz Pianist

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Rowan Hudson

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

I think probably the best advice I could give is very boring – practice the fundamentals. A lot of people (myself included) neglect simple things like having good time, feeling comfortable in difficult keys (and minor keys), ear training, etc. too early in their development and move on to really complex concepts before the fundamentals are really in place. I definitely made that mistake and I now practice mostly quite basic things along those lines. Also, to me there seems to be a bit too much focus on harmony and not enough focus on phrasing and rhythm in Jazz education, maybe that’s just a personal thing. It’s difficult sometimes early on to see the timeline of your playing. The balance between getting the fundamentals together and also trying to find your own sound can be hard. I think most Jazz players now need to have very solid foundations to built on, maybe that wasn’t the case in the past for people like Ornette Coleman, who made his own rules. But nowadays it seems to be pretty hard to get anywhere without good reading, ability to play in different time signatures, ability to play modal tunes, etc. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but I think it is the way things are now.

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