Episode 35 - Curiosity

🔹 Introduction
Welcome to Episode 35! If you're new here, I hope you enjoy the podcast. If you're a returning listener, thanks for coming back! Feel free to share your musical journey with me at david@pianofinally.show.

🔹 This Week’s Highlights

• A busy start to the school year and reflections on getting back into teaching.
• MRI scans took some time away from piano practice, but all is well!
• Watched an amazing two-piano concert featuring Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson on Stage+: 🎵 Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Cage, Pärt, and Adams
  🎥 Watch it here: Stage+ Concert
• Observations on page-turning methods: Yuja uses an iPad with a foot pedal, while Víkingur relies on printed scores and a page-turner. Have you tried either method? Let me know!

🔹 🎥 YouTube Spotlight: Aspen Music Festival and School
YouTube's algorithm finally got something right! This week, I discovered the Aspen Music Festival and School, an annual program for pre-professional musicians. Their YouTube channel offers:

• 🎻 Performances across a wide range of instruments
• 🎹 Masterclasses with world-class musicians
• 🎶 Insightful interviews about music and performance

📺 Check out their channel: Aspen Music Festival on YouTube

A recommended video features Daniil Trifonov and Sergei Babayan rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 and discussing their musical approach. Watch it here: Trifonov & Babayan – Aspen Festival

🔹 Essay – Curiosity in Music
This week’s thoughts on curiosity—not just for scientists, but for musicians too!

• How curiosity helps us understand the meaning behind compositions
• Exploring music theory: Why do major and minor triads evoke such different emotions?
• Learning orchestration and tackling new concepts to deepen musical understanding

📺 Another interesting video on curiosity in music: Musical Exploration

🔹 Review – Musicnotes 🎼
A look at Musicnotes, a leading online source for digital sheet music.

• 🎵 Massive collection of sheet music for piano, guitar, voice, and more
• 📖 Offers interactive sheet music and self-publishing options
• 🎶 Free manuscript paper downloads!

🔗 Explore Musicnotes: Musicnotes Website
🔗 Free Sheet Music & Manuscript Paper: Musicnotes Free Section

🎶 Until next time—keep your piano in tune and enjoy the music! 🎵

You can contact me:

• via email at david@pianofinally.show; this is probably the best option
• the show website, www.pianofinally.show
• Instagram and Threads @pianofinally
• and on YouTube
• all the podcast directories - list
• here's the RSS feed

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All reviews of products, websites and services are unpaid, and no sponsorship has been received for any content on this podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome
• 0:14 Opening
• 2:42 YouTube - Aspen Music Festival and School
• 5:34 Essay - Curiosity
• 8:46 Review - Music Notes
• 11:39 Closing
• 12:35 Progress

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

G'Day everyone. I'm David Reidy. Welcome to Piano. Finally, a podcast by an old bloke who's getting around to learning the piano. Finally, welcome to show 35. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen. If this is your first time hearing the podcast, I hope you enjoy what's here. If you're a returning listener, and thanks again for coming back. If you're learning the piano or another musical instrument, let me know how you're going with it. You can contact me at David at piano finally show. It's been a busy week. The new students started arriving at school on Tuesday and the others returned on Wednesday, so there's been a lot of meeting new students in my classes and welcoming back some that I taught last year. I said last week that six weeks holiday is about long enough and although there was a lot going on, getting back to teaching was quite enjoyable.
(01:00)
I didn't get quite as much practice done this week as I would've liked. My every two year MRI scans meant a fair bit of time lying still in strong magnetic fields. They went smoothly, and there's nothing wrong. They just were monitoring. It's frustrating, though, the way life sometimes gets in the way of practising. I caught up with some more piano on stage plus this week I watched a concert by Yuja, Wang and Vikingur Olafsson recorded last year in Berlin. It's a concert of pieces for two pianos with works by Schubert Rachmaninov and more modern composers including John Cage Avo Pärt and John Adams. It's an interesting collection of music. Quite different to the Chopin and other piano works I've been listening to, but I can certainly recommend it. I noticed that Yuja and Vikingor approach the mechanics that they're playing differently. Both pianists have scores at the piano rather than playing from memory Viking or has printed scores and a woman page. Turner Future has an iPad with a wide foot pedal. I wonder which is better. I've heard stories about iPads going wrong, so I suppose a printed score is more reliable, but I assume it's much less expensive than employing a page turner. Have any of you had experiences with either option? Let me know. Like all the content on stage plus the concert is excellent and both pianists appear to be enjoying themselves greatly. It's nice to hear some music outside the pieces I would normally choose. Here's a link in the show notes.
(02:42)
Generally, I don't think much of the algorithms that suggest content, but YouTube has been doing a good job recently. Maybe that's because I have YouTube premium, which is ad free, and so the algorithm is less interested in pushing ad supported content, but the music related videos it has been suggesting have been mostly really interesting. This morning, as I was sitting down to write the notes for the podcast, it suggested a video from the Aspen Music Festival and School Channel. The Aspen Music Festival and School is an annual eight-week music school that takes place over the northern summer. The school is open to pre-professional musicians and seems to include just about every instrument there is and voice. The YouTube channel is a mix of performance videos from their students and there is a wide variety of music in these performances and in other videos looking at the school and the people's experiences in music, like some of the other channels I've been watching.
(03:41)
These are a really great insight into the lives of up-and-coming musicians. In most of the performance videos is also time spent talking with the performer about the music and their approach. Although there is a fair bit of piano, that's certainly not all. If you've wondered about mariachi music, there's a video looking at the school's mariachi festival. It really looks like a fun place to be. There are also many recordings of masterclasses conducted by leading musicians on a wide variety of instruments. The video that was suggested to me was one in which Daniel Trifonov and Sergei Babayan were talking and rehearsing. They're working through some two piano pieces for a concert at the school and they have pieces by Rachmaninov Schumann, a Mozart and others. The video opens with them rehearsing Rachmaninov suite number two and talking about their performance. Sergei is Daniel's teacher and it is clear from their interactions that they've worked together over a long time.
(04:42)
It's fascinating to see a world cast pianist still interacting with his teacher, especially how they talk about their performance ideas. It's not just Daniel and Sergey though. Sergei talks about his teacher Vera Guava and what she taught him as a teacher. I particularly enjoyed seeing these two where the student has grown into such a successful career. I've seen this happen with some of my students too, and it's great to see Sergei's obvious pride in Daniel's success. It's so much more to music than just the notes and the videos on the Aspen Music Festival and School Channel are great at showing us this and they're really entertaining. If you want something light, watch their video on a day in the life of a practise room. Links are in the show notes.
(05:34)
Curiosity. I was introducing my new Year seven class to the science course this week and I told them that the most important attribute of a scientist is curiosity. So much of science has come from someone observing a phenomenon and wanting to understand it. Why do apples from trees across the laneway fall downwards? What are those fuzzy objects? The sky I can see with the telescope, curiosity isn't limited to scientists. I think musicians need a good dose of it too, especially those of us who are learning. All of us encountered music well before having the ability to understand it. Babies get sung to all the time, so knowing that music is just a part of growing aware of the world around us. Because I was brought up in Australia, all the music I was exposed to early on was Western in origin. It was pop and rock on the radio and European classical from the musicians.
(06:31)
I knew that was the music that sounded right. I accepted most of it at face value and when I first learned the guitar, it was learning mostly by rot without understanding why things were the way they were. That was fine when I was 10, but now I want to understand why. From what I can gather, there are two main ways to be curious about music. There's curiosity surrounding what the composer of a piece is trying to convey, which will then inform how to perform the music. Watching musicians talk about their approach to the performances, whether in the recent Chopin competition or in interviews around other recordings is a step to satisfying that curiosity, or at least it would be if anyone was certain. I found out a bit about Chopin's music from all the material from the National Chopin competition, but one of the key items was that Chopin said that he didn't compose programme music.
(07:27)
His music was absolute and didn't represent anything concrete. This hasn't stopped pianists putting their own interpretations on the work to satisfy their curiosity about Chopin's ideas. I have nowhere near enough knowledge about the lives of composers who even attempt to give reasons for their choices, so I've been limiting my curiosity to why some things seem to work in music and other things don't. I'm curious as to why a major triad and a minor triad are so musically distinct when the difference is just one semitone. I can work out the different resulting wave forms with physics, but that doesn't explain the different feelings they evoke. Physics doesn't explain why the 18th variation in Rachmaninov's rap on a theme of Paganini is so sublime. There must be some reason I'm curious to find out why and understand the rest of the theory that goes into music. Curiosity keeps me learning. I recently brought a textbook about orchestration. It comes with a workbook. I looked at the first quiz and can't answer any of the questions, so there are lots of new things to learn in addition to how to transfer them to the keyboard. I can't wait to get started.
(08:46)
Music Notes is an online source of sheep music for piano, guitar, voice, and other instruments started in 1998. They claim to be the world's leading digital sheet music retailer and from the amount of material that there is on their site that's believable. I've listened to the music notes. People talk about their service on their podcast behind the notes where they explain their business model and how they work with composers and arrangers to produce the music on their site. Given that they have deals with almost all the major publishers, you can be sure they have the correct rights to be selling the music. That's becoming increasingly important with the rise of AI generated content and the number of dodgy operators on the internet. Making sure that the correct people are getting properly paid is something that all of us have to be aware of. I'm not going to list the music available because it's all there.
(09:40)
There aren't complete orchestral scores, but I couldn't think of a solo piano piece that wasn't listed and it's not just piano. There are scores for woodwinds, brass strings, voice and guitar. It's almost a one-stop shop. Music note also has complete books, many of which are interactive. I'm still going to suggest supporting your local brick and mortar music store if they have stock, but this is a pretty good way to source music if that's not an option. All their electronic material is usable on Mac and PCs by the web and apps and on iOS and Android devices. You can pay for each item you download, but there's also a membership that gives you access to one piece of music a month at no additional charge and discounts on the regular price of other scores. Membership is us $15 a year without the free music and us $50 a year with the free music.
(10:33)
Both plans give you the discounts though. You can browse the entire site and see samples of every piece if you want to work out if it's for you. Music notes also has a self-publishing section, which I won't cover now. I want to go through the material for that. There's a lot to it, including them helping getting clearances. If you are arranging copyright material, I'll do a proper review of their marketplace in an upcoming episode. One other thing that music notes has on site and it's free are files for manuscript paper. If you want some standard staff paper that's there, just download the PDF and print as much as you want. It's not just ordinary staff paper though. If you want grand stays for piano music, it's there. Piano and voice that's there too as a sheet for piano duets and if you're a Dima player, there's manuscript paper for you too. You'll find it all on their websites. More section under the free sheet music item. There's a link in the show notes.
(11:39)
Well, that's it for this week. If you'd like to contact me, email is the best way You'll find me at David at piano. Finally show and the website at www dot piano finally show. In both cases, piano finally is all one word. The show is also on Facebook and Instagram and available as audio only on YouTube. You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. I also post an excerpt and a link to each episode as an Instagram reel if you're learning an instrument. Let me know where you are in your journey, what's going well and what challenges are you finding, and so until the next episode, I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time. At the Keys, I am including the same two pieces and exercise again in this week's progress.
(12:40)
The first piece is the Bagatelle by Daniel Gotlob Turk. It's a list B piece in the Anker book. The second piece is Afternoon Snooze by Andrew Crags from the ANZCA preparatory list C. I worked through this piece in my lesson last week and Devi showed me how I should be moving between chords in the left hand. The correct technique is to briefly hold one of the notes that will be released when playing the new chord. It's taking a lot of coordination and I'm still very much working on it. It certainly makes the music sound more connected than the way I had been doing it, so I've been spending a fair bit of time on just the chords. I'm still on Exercise one of Czerny Opus 5 99. It's going smoother now that I've explicitly written all the fingerings on the score. All the recordings were made using the choir NV 10 as the keyboard and piano tech eight running on the M four Pro Mac Mini piano Tech is set to a Steinway model B in player mode. I had to look up the difference between the Model B and the Model D pianos from the last couple of weeks. The Model B is a bit over half a metre shorter than the D and is obviously more suited to smaller spaces. Can you hear the difference? I can't.