Canadian Musician September / October 2019 | Page 26

PHOTO: CLAUDIA ZADORY
KEYBOARDS
Aside from touring internationally as a concert pianist, Daniel Wnukowski is also the founder and artistic director of
Piano Six, a pan-Canadian outreach program to bring music to remote, rural communities (www.pianosix.com),
the Collingwood Summer Music Festival (www.collingwoodfestival.com), and runs a blog that follows his trials and
tribulations as a musician (www.bagatellen.com/blog).
By Daniel Wnukowski
10 Commandments
for Professional Pianists
I
Part 1
f you were to ask me about my strongest childhood memories, two things
immediately come to mind: the piano and my school lunchbox with a
blue penguin painted on its cover.
All I can remember about the lunchbox was that it accompanied
me everywhere I went and was made of tough tin metal, as were most
lunchboxes back in the day. I distinctly remember it making quite the clangy
sound when dropped inadvertently.
The piano, however, has continued to dominate the core of my identity
to this day. It is a unique instrument with a dynamic range like no other,
capable of producing vulgar sounds of rage to heavenly whispers from
an outer-worldly dimension. It is my ally and partner in crime for a couple
hours each day and then again during a quick trist at an evening concert.
Bring in a piano and in an instant, I’m possessed! I want to learn more
about what makes it tick, its everyday emotional needs, and understand
why I’m so drawn to its magnetic charms, like bass fish to grub bait.
Yes, I could survive in the Antarctic with only a piano in sight and a
few penguins roaming about. After all, pianists and penguins are both an
endangered species: penguins are dealing with the threat of global warm-
ing and melting sea ice, whereas we are battling with an unscrupulous,
mass entertainment industry and the greatest foe of humanity: equal
temperament tuning (at least according to Timothy Leary).
Here are the 10 commandments for surviving a career in music. They’ve
been crafted with the professional pianist in mind, but can be of benefit
to just about anyone studying the instrument.
1. Always Remain Faithful to the Score
Think of the score as a complex design, similar to the visual splendour of a
butterfly’s wings. Every masterwork is filled with a vibrant panoply of patterns,
designs, and colours. New patterns emerge out of familiar ones, creating a
fragile interplay of wondrous beauty. Oftentimes, the underside patterns are
entirely different – a feature of natural selection that has allowed the species
to survive the attacks of predators over millennia.
Powerful microscopes have now revealed a butterfly’s wings to be noth-
ing more than millions of colourless, translucent scales that work in sync to
create the illusion of colour. We pianists are faced with a similar phenomenon,
having to read between the hundreds of thousands of two-dimensional black
dots, lines, shapes, and symbols that underlie our music scores. Musicologists
continue to disprove each other’s theories, bringing us closer and closer to
the true intentions of a composer’s musical thoughts; however, it is still the
responsibility of the concert pianist to ultimately bring the music to life.
“But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides,” Arthur
Schnabel once remarked.
Approach: Take a score with you during a walk in the park and gaze at it
for a couple of minutes each day. You never know what mysteries you may
unravel there.
2. When All Else Fails, Read the Manual
Chamber music rehearsals are especially notorious for bouts of endless bicker-
ing and badgering, but sometimes it’s useful to simply ask what the composer
had intended in the first place. “What would Beethoven have said in this situ-
ation?” Sometimes the answer to the question is blatantly obvious, especially
26 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
if you are using a quality, urtext edition with a well-researched commentary.
Other times, the message is less readily decrypted and it can help to demon-
strate what you are after by singing out the text. Wagner’s book On Conducting
goes into this in much more detail, providing specific examples of how entire
orchestras can benefit from singing and its corresponding effect on melody
and rhythm.
For example, the “Moonlight” sonata continues to be one of the most
misinterpreted works of all piano literature, yet Beethoven provided specific
instructions right from the start: to be performed delicately, pianissimo, and
without changing the pedal (Ex. 1).
From: Ludwig van Beethovens Werke, Serie 16: Sonaten für das Pianoforte, Nr.137 (pp.15-26) Leipzig: Breitkopf
und Härtel, 1862. Plate B.137. Copyright: Public Domain
Approach: When all else fails, read the manual; when the manual is not clear, sing it!
3. Don’t Covet Another Pianist’s Interpretation
The bane of a music teacher’s existence: “But Horowitz pedals here... But Zim-
merman did this... But Gould...” In a fast-paced world such as ours, it’s easy to
forget the very essence of what brought us to music in the first place: a child-
like curiosity that was naturally instilled onto us during our youth. With the
advent of YouTube, it’s become far too easy to snatch a few ideas from another
pianist’s recording and claim them as our own. Many young pianists today have
become expert imitators, which has essentially corrupted the cultural fabric
and glutted the recording industry with cookie-cutter recordings.
Let’s not confuse being inspired by a recording with blatantly copying
another musician’s interpretation. For example, Glenn Gould once remarked
just how inspired he was by Arthur Schnabel’s 1933 recording of Beethoven’s
“Fourth Piano Concerto,” listening to it again and again in his youth; yet, his
own album of the work with Leonard Bernstein in 1962 reveals a vastly dif-
ferent interpretation, honed by years of maturity and guarded by a distinctly
“Gouldian” approach.
Approach: Work on constructing your own unique musical language and
vocabulary in lieu of short-term gains.
4. Avoid Excessive Mannerisms
Economical movements that employ a wide range of muscle groups are fine,
so long as they serve the music; however, exaggerated physical expressions are
not only counterproductive to your interpretation, but are actually warnings of
a greater underlying problem. It’s actually easy to understand: we compensate
whatever is missing in our interpretation with excessive movements of the
body. Wailing back and forth? Check your rhythm. Kissing the keyboard? Learn
to exhale. Flailing arms? Let’s talk about tone production.
Approach: Spare the facial expressions of orgasmic yearning, unless you are
performing Scriabin.
More in part two next issue!