Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of the Musical World with pianoTV

I’m always on the lookout for interesting resources that can help my students learn challenging musical concepts in a fun and engaging way. One resource that’s flown under my radar until now is PianoTV, a project of Saskatchewan-based pianist and teacher Allysia van Betuw. I first chanced upon Allysia’s channel when looking for fun and interesting biographical information about the major composers the could inspire young pianists who haven’t yet had any exposure to their music.

Here’s a brief history of Bach:

You can also find brief histories of Beethoven, Grieg, and Mozart. That’s not all - there are also dozens of videos on musical styles, practice tips, as well as easy explanations of musical concepts.

These are exactly the kind of videos that young pianists need in order to find an addictive way into a daily practice routine.

Keeping it Simple in Presentations

This week I’ve been crafting my presentation on the Collaborative Piano Blog for the Dream Big Conference in Winnipeg next week. And while it’s always fun to construct a series of slides that will be of value to the audience, it’s also important to know that it’s the underlying story told during the presentation that creates the real value.

At next Thursday’s session I’ll be talking about the history of the Collaborative Piano Blog and its engagement with social media, but framed within the need to start a collaborative piano society. Most of all I’ll be talking about why this is critical for the future of Collaborative Piano as a profession.

Nicholas Bate’s long-running blog is always a continual source of inspiration on anything related to business. His articles on presenting are keeping me in line, and including a reminder about the best presentations:

(1) Less is more (2) PPT is rare (3) Apologies are none (4) Q&A is managed (5) Trees are saved (6) Actions are demanded (7) Time is respected.

And yes, I will only be presenting a number of slides that is fit for human consumption.

(Photo by Marcos Luiz on Unsplash)

Some Thoughts: Atlassian's 2020 Retrospective on the History of Work

A retrospective infographic by Atlassian shows how technology developed by decade from the 1950s to the present, as well as how perceptions of what the future might be developed alongside it. Some futurists have been remarkably prescient:

In a 1964 interview with the BBC, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke nailed almost all of his predictions for the year 2014. He predicted the use of wireless communications, making us “in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be,” as well as robotic surgery, only missing his prediction that workers would no longer commute to their offices and travel “only for pleasure”.

This Stephane Kasriel quote from the final section might be a bit onerous for those hoping for the security of traditional employment:

The majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance by 2027.

Perhaps those of us in the arts are a bit more robust for already having had this experience?

(Image courtesy of Alex Knight on Unsplash)

Saturday Links

Here are some assorted links to get your weekend off to a good start.

10 Motivational Practice Tips: Melanie Spanswick nails it with a list of various things you can do to improve the quality of your practicing, including ideas on process, community, and alignment.

The Uncertainty of What You Should Be Working on Right Now: Leo Babauta’s ideas on how to keep yourself organized are grounded in the Zen tradition, and understand the reality of what it’s like to work in a landscape where everything is always changing. His four ideas:

1. Keep the whole board in mind.

2. Play one stone at a time.

3. Dance with the uncertainty.

4. Leave no trace.

On Making Decisions: Our quality of life depends on making important decisions at certain points in time. Kurt Harden’s advice nails it:

Make the decision.  State it out loud and then let it sit overnight. In the morning confirm that decision.  

Don’t personalize. Write like a person: I intend to get back to my newsletter really soon and the strong personal tone advocated by CJ Chilvers is what I’ll be aspiring to.

Some thoughts: Timely advice from Rebecca Toh, whose blog has really started to find its stride in the last few months. This idea resonated with me:

Every day adds up to make up a life. Hence the small things we do every day matter.

Finally, a rare but magnificent collaboration between Sviatoslav Richter and Benjamin Britten playing Robert Schumann’s Bilder aus Osten in Aldeburgh (via Anton Nel):

Dream Big Interview

In just under two weeks I’ll be attending and presenting at the Dream Big conference at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Over on the Collaborative Piano Blog I had a chance to ask Laura Loewen and Judy Kehler Siebert a few questions about the festival and its aspirations. This quote in particular is getting me very excited for what will be going on in Winnipeg this February 20-22:

This is the first Canadian collaborative piano conference that we know of, and we feel a responsibility to really honour the art form and set a template for future events. Collaborative pianists so often meet on the sidelines of other conferences or events, and it’s important for us to meet to talk about art and its place in society from our point of view. We believe that we will discover commonalities through our discussions, but we hope we also discover differences that will challenge and expand our ideas of what we can become. 

At Home in Space - Fila Brazillia

Some 1995 chillout/downtempo from Fila Brazillia, via the playlists of Aimee Clifford. See if you can figure out the classical sample that’s cleverly woven into the texture:

Fragment

Looking south on Richmond St. in London, Ontario

This unfinished post was written a few weeks ago when I was on the road. The road back to blogging was challenging at times, and I got back into the routine of writing in stages. Not everything I write for the blog makes it here.

This morning marks the midpoint of my January exam trip in Ontario. The storm hit yesterday morning, so the drive to the exam centre was not great, made worse by tailgating Saturday morning drivers. But I still got to the centre early, and my Saturday lineup of exam candidates (and their collaborative pianists) all arrived on time. The weather worsened through the day, so I headed straight to the hotel afterwards.

This morning was a good time to catch up with finishing up exam reports, reading, having a slow breakfast around the corner, and taking my time making the trip west to Sarnia for the next round of examining. Leaving early allowed some space for a pit stop at Starbucks, chai tea latte, and quality writing time on the iPad.

Part of the challenge of my work these days is managing teaching, admin work, scheduling, invoicing, practicing, and trying to fit in writing in as well. With a studio operating at capacity, writing is no longer something that I can simply do in the spaces between gigs, as it was when I first started blogging. The challenge of social media’s dominance of the online space is that it can make writing on the web (which was so prevalent even 10 years ago) much harder to accomplish.

Managing the Disconnect Between Having Ideas and Executing Them

Daniel Gross has written some interesting thoughts on improvisational productivity:

The longer you think about a task without doing it, the less novel it becomes to do. Writing things in your to-do list and coming back to them later helps you focus, but it comes at the cost: you’ve now converted an interesting idea into work. Since you’ve thought about it a little bit, it’s less interesting to work on.

It's like chewing on a fresh piece of gum, immediately sticking it somewhere, then trying to convince yourself to rehydrate the dry, bland, task of chewed-up gum. Oh. That thing. Do you really want to go back to that? “We’ve already gone through all the interesting aspects of that problem, and established that there’s only work left”, the mind says.

In knowledge work, this is the transition between having ideas, planning them, and moving into the execution stage. The timeline becomes longer with each of these three steps, at the same time that that the initial clarity of the idea becomes ever more concrete (and paradoxically farther away) the farther you move into the project.

Daniel’s solution:

…my solution is to (somewhat counter-intuitively) not think about the task until I am ready to fully execute it. I do not unwrap the piece of gum until I’m ready to enjoy it in its entirety. I need to save the fun of thinking to pull myself into flow.

This is where a system comes into play, as well as the world of productivity tools that can help you to get there. I must admit that I fell down the rabbit-hole of the productivity world long ago, and it has without a doubt helped me to get where I am at present. There are one-size-fits-all solutions such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (check out this quick run-through of the system) and I used this system for many years. And although using GTD always helped me to understand my current responsibilities, it never got me into a flow state with any consistency. At present, I use the Simple Scanning method of Mark Forster, which I find helps me keep track of my complete responsibilities as much as other systems, with a much more intuitive moment-to-moment sense of what i need to do and how it’s progressing over time.

But as someone who works in the portfolio-based world of the arts (which only partly explains the kind of work I currently do), managing even one project becomes far more challenging if you combine it with a bunch of other projects in multiple areas of focus. Here are some elements that add complexity to the mix:

• the degree of agency on a project: is this something that I have the final say on, or is it for someone else?

• separating strategy from next actions

• projects that have defined end-points or ongoing responsibilities

• managing the nature of different work contexts: home office, the work office, on the road

• discretionary time vs. pre-scheduled events (ie. teaching lessons, performing, examining)

• a constant stream of new information arriving in my inbox

Learning to say no has also helped me clarify my priorities considerably. So my method of working is constantly evolving, and I love talking about it. Leave your comments below!

The Toronto Star is Cutting Arts Reporting: How You Can Fill the Gap

Ludwig van Toronto is reporting that the Toronto Star will be significantly cutting arts reporting through buyouts and reassignments. Although this is certainly sad news, it comes as no surprise in a climate where media outlets have been cutting arts support for years and newspapers must change their business models to survive in a world of declining readership.

Rather than bewailing this development on social media, get those blogs going. if you think it is important that arts journalism survives, you need to start your own blog and stake out a permanent presence on the internet. The gatekeepers are largely gone. Never have the barriers to entry in the arts writing world been as low as they are now; with a bit of work setting up a website and some finessing of your social media circle to develop followers, you too can be part of the meaningful commentary going on in the arts.

(Image via Bank Phrom on Unsplash)

Monday Links

From my examining trip earlier this month, the Covent Garden public market in London, Ontario

Several major projects have come to completion in the last week and I’m absolutely thrilled to be back on the blogging circuit. Expect regular updates here and on the Collaborative Piano Blog.

Some assorted links to start off your week:

On Music - Derren Brown: Derren’s thoughts on the progress of Western music and what was lost through the 19th century are ideas that I hadn’t considered before (via Sovereign Professional):

Bach’s music needs to be unlocked; its emotional content, when discovered, is somehow in and of itself, and uniquely musical. Much of it is deeply confessional. By contrast, Romantic music now seemed to create a broader emotional landscape: that of falling in love, spending a night on a bare mountain, suffering in turmoil or throwing oneself off a parapet. Instead of experiencing those things for ourselves, we are given music that stirs and excites the corresponding emotions within us. Thus the refrains of the Romantics are often more accessible, yielding their power more or less immediately. Those of us who prefer the earlier mode might even say this emotional mode became a mere substitute for experience, and that the unique, private experience of music was diminished.

Useful Laws of the Land: This Collaborative Fund post looks at 8 laws that are applicable to many fields. As a blogger, I learned #4 the hard way, but am still in the process of internalizing #6.

The Pianist’s ABC: Jenna Ristillä’s compendium of 26 items of interest to pianists runs the gamut of things we encounter on a regular basis:

Question, is "pianist" really your profession? Love it. Yes, yes it is. I live in this elitist cultural bubble where my biggest problems are whether Brahms intended the crescendo to begin from the middle or the end of the bar, and am I going to die of poverty and malnutrition this year or the next.

Comments: Rebecca Toh writes about the thrill of getting blog comments, once the mainstay of online discussion, relegated to the margins with the rush to social media, and making a comeback with the return of many of us to blogging.

From the playlists of Detroit/Windsor-based soprano Aimee Clifford, some exceptionally well-aging electronica with Wax’s No. 30003 (B):