At
some point as mu-
sicians, students,
players, performers,
and/or composers,
when we’re encouraged to default
to conventional wisdom, we start
to get our backs up.
While becoming good and
familiar with the “tried and true” is
key to furthering our understand-
ing of music and our grasp of the
instrument we’ve chosen, some-
times that encouragement only
deepens the urge to follow our
own paths.
In many cases, our efforts to
carve a different way forward find
us in opposition to others, and
could seem like a battle – with our
teachers, collaborators, or even
ourselves. It’s a battle summed
up neatly by E.E. Cummings, an
American poet who was famously
willing to break with tradition and
described the difficulty of doing
so as follows: “To be nobody but
yourself in a world which is doing
its best, night and day, to make
you everybody else – means to
fight the hardest battle which any
human being can fight; and never
stop fighting.”
For this year’s Keyboard Spe-
cial, Canadian Musician sent that
quote out to a variety of pianists
and keyboardists and asked them
to provide some insight, in their
own words, about how, when, and
why they felt they had to break
with convention to establish their
own voice.
Sarah
Slean
www.sarahslean.com
Stage Essentials: Yamaha grand pia-
nos, and when I’m not playing with or-
chestras, I use a Nord stage piano.
It’s important to remember that an instru-
ment is a conduit – it can speak/sing in
many different contexts. You don’t have to
50 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
Gowan
www.gowan.org
Stage Essentials: Roland RD-800 Stage
Piano
I studied classical mainly because, in the
early ‘70s, with the level of musicianship in
rock – Rick Wakeman and Elton John and
Keith Emerson – I realized, “If I’m going to
be a piano player, I’ve really got to go at this
hard.”
It seemed like, more and more, classi-
cal music was having an effect on rock.
Looking at two songs in particular, “Elea-
nor Rigby” by The Beatles and “MacArthur
Park,” I could tell these were strongly
classically-influenced pieces, which contin-
ued into the ‘70s with those more progres-
sive rock bands.
I knew I wanted to go to the Royal Con-
servatory, seeing that Elton John and Rick
Wakeman had studied at the Royal Acade-
my in the U.K.
Going in tandem with that was a
straight-up love of rock music and the
improvisation it encourages. It became,
right from the start, a balancing act. I loved
learning rock songs by ear, and then I’d
be studying the Bach and Beethoven and
Liszt pieces note-for-note, basically being
brought into line with a more regimented
way of performing. I always loved the
balancing act between the two, and when
I started getting more serious about it at 17,
I left high school to go to the Conservatory
full-time for a couple of years.
I was always having a bit of a de-
bate with my main teacher at the Conser-
vatory on the importance of rock music. It
become a professional pianist if that’s not
your path.
In my first year of the piano master
class at university, I became restless
halfway through. I loved playing Bach and
getting better at Rachmaninov, but so
many people could already do that better
than I ever could. Why devote years of my
one and only life to fine-tuning my ability
to play very difficult music by other people
when I had music of my own that I was
ready to write?
Classical pianists are high-perfor-
was always considered to be disposable,
because the pop chart was what dictated
what you were supposed to listen to, and
last year’s songs were last year’s songs,
so there was an idea of them being very
temporary. I remember telling my teacher,
“Lennon and McCartney, they’re the Bee-
thoven of their time.” Their songs had been
around nearly 10 years then and he com-
pletely dismissed that. I always struggled
with that. They were affecting millions of
people, and that’s what music is supposed
to do. It’s communication. That’s what all
these master composers were doing – try-
ing to find wide audiences given the tools
they had in their period.
It was right around then that I thought,
“No, you have to be really careful when any-
one is thinking they can hold music in a box
– that it’s something they can contain.” And
that exists just as much in rock, jazz, and
blues as in the classical world. You can fool
yourself with this elitism or exclusivity of
music, but I think the wider you can express
that music, the greater the value to it.
I think that’s when I realized I wanted all
the discipline and all the love and depth of
the classical world, but I wanted my music
to be relevant now, to today. When I was
about 19, just coming out of the Conserva-
tory, I realized I had to write my own songs
and come up with my own version of every-
thing I’d learned.
In the next few years, playing clubs ev-
ery night of the week and trying new original
pieces, I could look at the audience and see
how they responded, and took note of the
songs they’d ask about after the show. Any
indication I had that things were connecting
with the audience, that would be the direc-
tion I would start going.
mance athletes. It’s amazing what they
can do, but I knew that I couldn’t offer the
world anything new and vital and unique
as such; I was too eager to use the instru-
ment to write.
Regarding the way my playing has de-
veloped, I’ve found the best way to break
out of one’s habits is to listen to other
musicians with radically different instincts
than your own. Keith Jarrett, Tori Amos,
Thelonius Monk, Joni Mitchell… They all
play so differently and uniquely. Listening
is the best education by far.