RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL

PIANIST

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: Andrew James Johnson, Composer and Pianist

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Andrew James

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

That’s a tough question to answer! I would say success means an ability to play the kind of music you like most of all as often as possible! If you can get paid on top of that you’re getting even closer. In my experience, it’s not always the best players or composers that achieve the most success. There’s so much more involved, so many other qualities. It’s so much more than just being able to play all of the right notes in the right order! Success is as subjective just as life itself. I’ve been on both sides of the fence in my career as a musician and it’s one of the most demanding, exhausting and sometimes frustrating industries to work in. Passion and patience are the two big qualities you need, plus a very thick skin. But truthfully I could never do anything other than compose and play the piano. Either one is amazing but both at the same time? Now that’s what I call success!

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Interview: Alexander Soares, Pianist

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Alexander Soares

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

I think it is the things that affects most musicians – having to learn a great deal of repertoire at short notice, keeping your artistic integrity at the forefront, and finding time to deal with the business side of the career. On a side note, learning statistics for my doctorate (examining musical memorisation) was perhaps the most unusual challenge!

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Interview: Conor Hanick, Pianist

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Conor Hanick

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Spending time doing things that are truthful and honest.

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

Short answer is: see above. Longer answer is: use your brain with as much or more rigor than you use your fingers (or arms or throat, as it were). I find this to be true in my own playing, that the digital execution part always suffers without a proportional amount of attention paid to its musical purpose. What is the idea and why does it have to be this way? What are viable alternatives? Does the idea service a larger goal? Just like reading critically, one has to maintain a constant internal dialogue about meaning. This, for me, is the correct direction of workflow – letting the brain inform the fingers. Another thing I find myself discussing a lot in my own teaching is being in touch with the character of abstract elements. What I mean is that basic syntactical, or perhaps atotomical, elements in music contain huge amount of potential expressive energy. The difference between a rising third and a falling fifth, for example, or the way hyperrhthmic structures can compress or expand to create excitement or spaciousness. It’s been important for my own sense of what it means to express something in music to explore these basic ingredients and figure out why they behave the way they do.

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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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Interview: Mihail Doman, Composer & Pianist

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Mihail Doman

How do you work? (as a composer)

I first create the theme on the piano. For Arhythmology it was a very basic motif in Em, which you can hear all-through-out the album. And then I build the songs around the theme and around some variations. After that, I create a rough draft of the song in my music program, so I have something to prepare the strings to. Then comes the sound design part – probably the best part. I use a lot of virtual synths. I usually like to do my own sounds, so a lot of times I start with an empty sound, like just a basic Sine or Saw wave.

Next is the string orchestra. Hopefuly on the next albums I’ll be able to use a live orchestra, but for now it was Native Instruments’ Session Strings, along with a really old East West Quantum Leap Library that I had lying around, to give it a bigger size ?Programming the strings is a super tedious work, because you basically have to write every note manually for every individual voice. And afterwards you have to tweak the velocity and the sample sounds until you have something that sounds natural.

As you can see, my process involves a lot of computer work, my music being very electronic as well. Using good old pen and paper certainly has its charm, but for my music I must go to the digital realm.

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

There is no such thing as talent. There is only work, work and work.

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