Video clip number 1: Thanks to Terry Teachout's blog, I came across this video clip of a 1954 Art Tatum performance on TV. Simply staggering. Talk about your lack of extraneous body motion while playing! Learning some of the written-out transcriptions of Tatum's recorded performances (I often play "Cherokee")  was a big challenge, but not in the ways I expected. The biggest technical difficulty for me was not the speedy runs in the right hand (which usually lie well in the fingers) but the "walking 10ths" in the left hand (not such a feature of this particular clip, though). On close inspection you can see the size of the mitts Tatum had, so those were child's play for him. (For non-pianists, pick any white note on the piano, then count up nine notes to the right to get a sense of the hand span).

Also worth noting for piano students: how little his right hand fingers seem to "work," i.e., rise above the level of the knuckles joining them to the hand. Yet his runs have tremendous clarity. He doesn't use the fingers to generate tone or volume, all that comes from his (admittedly huge) body and arms. His body is still but his arms are fluid, unlocked at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Speaking of a still body, another lesson: his time is impeccable, virtually metronomic, yet there's no bobbing of the head, knee-bouncing, or anything of the sort (maybe he's tapping his toes; we can't see on the video). His time is so ingrained, so internalized, that no wasted energy needs to be spent reinforcing it to himself. His body is centered; all movement goes into the production of the music; and as a result, he can hear clearly what he is playing.

Video number 2: a friend recently turned me onto this clip of juggler Chris Bliss' beautiful routine set to music of the Beatles. These are the kinds of things I've always liked to show students (and probably has led more than one colleague to consider me a little, well, unorthodox). But to me the connection between things like juggling and playing piano seems obvious. My teacher, Leon Fleisher, constantly sought to illustrate technical or artistic points by drawing on analogies with phenomena from the natural world, or laws of the physical world. Gravity invariably figured in these analogies. After all, it's fundamental to piano playing, more so I believe than in string or wind playing. When it comes to producing sound, on the piano you're either lifting off against gravity, yielding to it, or seeking to prolong, Jordan-like, that magical moment in-between. If you watch this video of Chris Bliss, you will come away with a greater understanding of the interface between the laws of gravity and the laws of rhythm.

Then, when you shift axis again to the dimension of pitch, you start to realize that the laws of gravity and motion, resistance and release, apply there as well. Then you hear harmonic implications; you feel phrasing as a physical imperative. When you get to that point, you're really cooking.

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The other option is to send your comment as an email to lkompass@sc.rr.com. Then I, as Blogstream member, will paste your comment into the comment section with any moniker you wish. This email account is used for nothing other than receiving comments on this blog. You have my solemn word that email addresses will not be printed, redistributed, saved, pilfired, disseminated, or abused in any way.

Thursday night's Southern Exposure concert at USC was a ton of fun. I think the Bartok went pretty well, Lynn and I had a great time and we are grateful to our colleagues Scott Herring and Greg Apple for their percussionistic contribution to the whole. Marina Lomazov and Joe Rackers gave a hair-raising version of Rite of Spring for two pianos...all of us now are plotting a performance of "Les Noces" sometime down the road.

Lots on the music blogosphere these days about the problems facing classical music and proposed solutions for same...but anybody reading this from New York should know that "mini-music-scenes" are alive and kicking in many places overlooked by the "MSMM"...the "Mainstream Music Media."

John Fitz Rogers has done an extraordinary job with the SE series here in Columbia...it is now routine for the hall to be packed to its very capacity, with quite a number of people having to be turned away at the door. If Columbia had an acceptable 400-500-seat hall, I'm sure that the series could come close to filling such a space. And that's for new music, too. (Granted, this last concert focused more on 20th-century classics, but performances of those are quite rare around here too. Moreover, John Adams and Mary Ellen Childs had works on the program, and I heard from person after person backstage that the Childs work--"Kilter" for two pianos, from 1992--was their favorite work on the program.)

Now I'm off tomorrow morning for Milwaukee, where Kevin Stalheim and his group Present Music have been drawing audiences of 300-700, almost every time out, for years now. Next season is their 25th. And I do hear "good news" stories coming from many unlikely places. It's all about grass-roots, people. Building from the ground floor up. On his blog this weekend, Alex Ross quotes Esa-Pekka Salonen as saying, "The most important function of a conductor is that of developing local musical life." I couldn't agree more...how few really do that, though? Moreover, I'd also add university music faculty member to that list. Too often musicians, having attained a secure position in academia, allow their world (and their students') to be circumscribed by the walls of their particular School of Music building, not seeking to be a musical citizen of their community, not seeking to connect their art to the community, not seeking to do the badly needed work to build audiences in the community at large. There are exceptions, and Rogers in our city is a shining example. Well, this is a topic I could "pontificate" (my wife's word for what I'm prone to do) on ad nauseum, but we'll leave it here for now. Happy Easter and more from Milwaukee later this week.

This Thursday night April 13, at 7:30 PM, the final concert of the Southern Exposure series will take place at the USC School of Music's Recital Hall. It's a concert centered around duo-piano works with two of the most significant works of the last century on the program: Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the latter in the version for piano duo. My wife Lynn Kompass and yours truly will be playing the Bartok, in collaboration with USC percussion prof Scott Herring and Greg Apple; the Stravinsky will be performed by USC piano faculty members Marina Lomazov and Joseph Rackers.

Jeffrey Day wrote a nice piece about the upcoming concert in last Sunday's State newspaper if you'd like to know more; he also added a sidebar with good info about the music itself here.

There are also two other short and intriguing works on the concert by composers who are very much alive: Mary Ellen Childs, a composer who has been based for some time now in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, wrote a lovely post-minimalist work for two pianos entitled "Kilter," which Lynn and I are playing; and I'm opening the program with "American Berserk," a piece that John Adams wrote in 2001 for Garrick Ohlsson. The title is apt; it's six minutes of Nancarrow-esque "bonkers"-ness, and fun as hell to play.

The concert is free admission; composer John Fitz Rogers has curated another remarkable season of the series, and one of the hallmarks of the series is that the recital hall fills up early and to capacity...so if you want to go, my suggestion is to get there at least 30-40 minutes early for a good seat. Hope to see you there, should be a fun evening.

Maybe it's the desperate search for some sign of humanity among our leaders, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's devotion to music is getting a lot of attention these days. (My previous post about her WNYC radio interview, with links, can be found here). The latest comes from Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, who hung out a bit with Dr. Rice and her chamber music pals as they worked through the Schumann, Shostakovich, and Brahms quintets. No frilly trifles, those.