Here was an interesting piano teacher there named Cecil Lytle, a black guy who was sort of a self-styled Jazz pianist, but was also a Liszt freak, played all of the great Liszt pieces. He had some Jazz records, everything from the original Light as a Feather and the Chick Corea/Gary Burton Crystal Silence to some Coltrane and some Miles. I heard all the heavies of the early ’60s in their prime.Īt Grinell College in Iowa (where Herbie Hancock went briefly, as an engineering student), I made friends with this guy named Eric Lewis. It wasn’t just Horowitz my parents and I went to symphony concerts weekly – the Cincinnati Symphony, Byron Janis, Oistrach, Gina Bachauer. I got the Horowitz return to Carnegie Hall, and that was kind of… I mean, I heard that, and I was like, “Well fuck…” – I mean, really, why bother? That whole record is great, but especially the way he plays the F major Chopin etude. I don’t know, I just knew somehow that it was not my path, and it was kind of depressing to listen to a Horowitz record. I had played Beethoven sonatas, but I never got the guts to memorize a big Chopin Ballade or Scherzo. And then I went away to Grinell College, having chickened out of all my auditions for all the big music schools. I started playing little cocktail gigs to make some money. And then, senior year in high school, we got a new director of our Jazz band (which previously had only played rudimentary high school things), and the first thing he brought in was an arrangement of “Old Folks.” It was like, “Oh, standards!” It had really lush harmonies, and I was like, “H’mm!” I would pick up pop tunes and play them my own way, or look at books of the great tunes of the 60s, you know, and I would just kind of monkey around with them. Throughout high school, I did a lot of improvising. I couldn’t get it, you know it just was not there in that Baldwin. I could never get that sound that I heard on the Glenn Gould records, that I heard on a Rubenstein record. So it was like, “Who’s right?” So I can actually track my lessening of interest in practicing seriously from the day that my piano arrived. But my grandmother had a Steinway, and Mark Hornstein down the street had a Steinway, and even at ten I knew money wasn’t that much of an issue, and I never liked that Baldwin piano, and it was made more confusing by my mom saying, “Well your teacher picked it out, and it’s a really good piano!” She was a Baldwin artist, and she and my mom picked this Baldwin baby grand and brought it home when we moved to a bigger house when I was ten. Jeanne Kirstein had won the Naumburg competition and was the local piano God. She was the wife of Jack Kirstein, who was the cellist in the LaSalle Quartet that did those great early recordings of the Second Viennese School. My teacher was a woman named Jeanne Kirstein. So they spotted that I had the talent it was something that was in the family. My maternal grandfather, for whom I’m named, played violin semi-professionally, and my paternal grandmother was a pianist. I grew up with a Lester baby grand that I just sort of went to as a four year old, and picked out cartoon show themes, and my parents said I was talented. And I would hear my mom yell from the kitchen, “You’re not practicing!” She wasn’t a musically illiterate person, and she knew when I was faking things… but faking it was much more fun. I would constantly be noodling or improvising, but it would sound like Mozart or something, because that was mostly what I was listening to. I had done four-part writing, I had done counterpoint, writing in various styles, figured bass, checking out scores. So, by the time I was in 7th or 8th grade, I had been through what every freshman goes through in a conservatory. Perhaps the best thing that my parents ever did for me was getting my private music theory/composition/analysis from 3rd to 7th grade. Thanks to Martin Porter for transcribing the interview.įred Hersch: I was an atypical piano prodigy. Before turning on the tape, I said to Fred, “Let’s go from the beginning,” and he dove right in. Logically he should have been one of the first DTM interviews I’m surprised it’s taken this long to sit down together. I still occasionally consult with him about piano problems. Beginning in 1993, I studied consistently with Fred Hersch for several years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |