#10 DILARA AYDIN-CORBETT, STUDENT & PIANIST

"Initially I was working on an electric keyboard, but by the time I got to Grade V, I realised that I needed to work on an acoustic piano. Because we only had a few pianos in my secondary school, I remember the rush at lunchtime or after school to get to the music department first! And then when I got to college I began by working on a boxed piano, and soon after I began to work on a grand piano, which was great.  It was much more sensitive, and because of the room it was in, and the acoustics and the piano being really good, all of the things I had been practicing for years finally really came out, I didn’t have to worry about getting the sound out now I was on a good piano. I use the piano now for performing, coming up with ideas for composition and for having fun and messing about on as well. I think what partly draws me is the versatility in producing rich, dense, chordal textures, but also legato, singing melodies and you can use it more percussively (as you find in some more contemporary pieces). And of course it can act as a solo or ensemble based instrument too. I get classical piano lessons; I’m doing performance at Goldsmiths University. I started preparing for my end of year recital in October; I’m playing Beethoven and a Chopin Nocturne.  My teacher suggested some Ginastera, as I wanted something more contemporary and rhythmically challenging. Technically each one has its own difficulties.  For example in the Ginastera, getting the triplets in time to be correct by not mechanical, and with the right accentuation is my main focus and the left hand part is quite hard as well. I’m also doing one of his American Preludes, which has octaves in both hands the whole way through, so I’m trying to build my stamina up for that as well. The Beethoven is challenging because it’s quite a well known piece.  I’m trying to stay true to Beethoven’s instructions and also be passionate with it, it’s called the Pathetique!  Barenboim’s interpretation definitely inspires me the most as he seems to capture the essence of it so well. I hadn’t got my hands on Chopin until now, but as soon as you start learning it you realise how pianistic it is, perfect for piano players. Such a contrast with Beethoven, some of his markings are not pianistic.  Probably, Beethoven had his own way of playing.  My teacher guides me with interpretation but never dictates how I should play something and encourages me to be show individuality through playing. If I’m ever frustrated or feeling like the practice isn’t working, then I just stop because you’re not going to get anywhere.  The right mode of practice is when you’re feeling focused and content.  You’re kind of in the zone. I try to play for a few hours every day. I think after completing my studies I would like to do some performance but not become a Concert Pianist. I also compose; that’s one of my real passions.  I’d really like to teach piano too. " (Dilara Aydin-Corbett)

#9 CRAIG STALLWOOD, KEYBOARD PLAYER

"I was playing on a cruise ship in Alaska and we were getting towards the end of the set.  The ocean was completely beautiful and very, very calm; the water was like marshmallow.  We were playing some nice quiet jazz ballads and all of the sudden, without any sort of warning the whole cruise ship tilted over by 10 to 15 degrees.   I was playing a pink baby grand piano and the whole stage, including the piano, started rolling down towards the end of the window and I thought I was going to fall out of it!  Basically the whole cruise ship was a complete wreck because everything started falling over.  It was quite bizarre.  There were no waves at all, completely tranquil ocean, you couldn’t imagine a flatter sea and then all of the sudden the piano started sliding over while I was playing it.  I thought, shock horror!  What’s going on?  We’re all going to die!  We’d all had a few cocktails by then as well, it was really late.  Most of the audience had already gone to bed, but there were a couple of people left and they started screaming.  It was tilting like this for fifteen minutes.  We didn’t find out til the next day what had happened.  As it turned out an engineer had had too much to drink and had pressed the wrong button.  He’d turned the stabilisers off. They’re meant to keep the ship horizontal, it was so ironic because it’s one of those moments you just couldn’t believe, we’d actually been commenting on how calm the sea was and then that happened!" (Craig Stallwood)

#8 KARL FERRE, MUSICIAN

"My grandmother was born in 1898 and I remember her bottle green piano.  When she was sixty-two  years old she moved to the 26^th floor of a tower block. The building was new; it was one of those towers put up in the 1960’s.  It was in Edmonton, I was a young boy at the time. The piano stayed there 'til 1980 when she moved to Norwich to live with us.  The piano came with her then as well.  When I used to visit my nan in the tower block I’d wonder how the piano had got all the way up there!  I’d tinkle away on it and she’d tell me  “learn your scales, learn your scales!” That was her phrase. She was worried about the noise so she didn’t play it that much.  She played more at the Salvation Army meetings, she’d play the hymns.  I don’t know much about how she learnt piano.  When she took the piano to Norwich she gave it to my brother who lived nearby.  It was on casters and he started wheeling it to his home but the piano never made it because it gradually started falling to bits in the street until there was nothing left!  I didn't really learn my scales but it’s never too late." (Karl Ferre)

#7 EDUARDO RECK MIRANDA, COMPOSER

                                                                Mozart Reloaded by Eduardo Miranda

"I was intrigued by Mozart Sonatas and remixed them using the language of electro-acoustic music combined with piano.  I’m a keen pianist, instead of playing the music myself I had the idea of using recordings of other people playing, and manipulate their recordings.  So I took twelve piano sonatas and chopped the scores into bars and sections, I put them in a bag so to speak and took bits out and started to sequence them. I then began to change the pitches, process the sound, do the same sort of things that DJs do with scratching and the spinning turntable and different speeds.  I used computer software, some of which was written in my laboratory at Plymouth University.  In performance the pianist plays the score and I sit next to the pianist with my laptop and trigger the sounds that I composed from the recordings at different points indicated in the score, so the performer knows exactly how and when the recordings will come with music he or she is playing.  Pianists will have performed Mozart sonatas before, and what I wanted to achieve is that the performer would be surprised by the sequences that I have in my score that combines, let’s say, sonatas K310 with K280 and so on, so you have new combinations of bars from different sonatas.   And also in the recording that I processed, you can hear themes that are transposed, or are at different speeds, or even played backwards and so on.  The whole piece is around 15 minutes long.  The first movement is “Appassionata”, a reference to Beethoven – in working on this piece I discovered some themes, bits and pieces here and there, small segments by Mozart that appear in Beethoven and Haydn; these composers were recycling other music that they’d heard elsewhere more than other composers do and it’s so interesting to see how much they were doing this.  So I called it “Appassionata” because there are some Beethoven-like themes in there. The second movement is called "Dance of Shadows".  Here I used stuff from Gluck's "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" which again I think is very similar to bits one can hear in Mozart's sonatas. The third one is "Hip-Hopped" because it uses hip hop rhythms, the pianist has to synchronise the beats I wrote with the hip hop drumming that is going on in the recording. The process of making this piece reminds me something Mozart did with his musical dice games where you throw dice and depending on what number you get you sequence the bars, and maybe the procedures used by other composers like John Cage." (Eduardo Reck Miranda)

Mozart Reloaded is available on CD with accompanying book detailing the compositional process, the full score and all samples required for performance:

http://www.sargasso.com/khxc/index.php?app=ccp0&ns=catshow&ref=Eduardo+Reck+Miranda

Eduardo Reck Miranda is a composer and computer music expert, working at the crossroads of music and science. He is also director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research with Plymouth University and currently Composer in Residence at London's Science Museum, developing a work with Lottolab Studio in which live music performance is relayed to soundwall of 77 speakers and electronically manipulated.

Connect with Eudardo at http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/

#6 KATE KERRIGAN, AUTHOR

"My brother Tom was a pianist living in London and we’d become estranged. He had problems and was drinking heavily.  I live in Ireland and found this wonderful old 1920’s house by the sea; the woman who sold it lived next door.  My whole family were due to get together again at my sister’s wedding and Tom was coming over to see us after a gap of a few years, he was going to be staying with me.  We were really happy and optimistic that he was coming over and spent months planning everything. He had a history of disappointing us.   As a child, he’d been a kind of prodigy at the piano.  I’d always been close to Tom, when we were growing up I was his audience while he practised and played, it had been a feature of my childhood and of my life.  When I knew he was going to be staying with me I bought the piano from our neighbour; it was the same piano that had originally been in the house.  It was sitting here in our drawing room waiting for Tom. And of course Tom didn’t come to our sister’s wedding in the end, he was held back for his own reasons.   The piano has just been sitting here ever since.  One of the nice stories I have about it is that my son Leo then took up the piano. My friend Helen is a wonderful pianist and she’s teaching him. She put him in for his first grade and I was making him practice but it sounded really bad.  Helen kept telling me to get the piano tuned but I’d been sort of ignoring her.  When it came to Leo’s exam I was outside the room and I could hear someone playing, and it sounded like they were playing perfectly and it was Leo!  He’d been playing it properly all along; it’s just that the piano was so out of tune it sounded really terrible at home.  He passed with a Distinction so I got the piano tuned for him as a gift.  He continues to play so I’m really happy about that.” (Kate Kerrigan)

Kate Kerrigan is an Irish historical fiction author whose books are translated into several languages and sold all over the world.  Her novels follow Kate’s theme of drawing parallels between the emotional landscapes of women’s lives in the past with the way women live now. 

Connect with Kate at www.katekerrigan.ie

#5 TARA CLIFFORD, CONCERT PIANIST

“I perform some difficult  Nineteenth Century music.  When I’m learning it I find you have to have a lot of perseverance, you have to really tackle the notes,  get to know the notes, get the music really inside of you, get it completely memorised, and then I find, especially with more difficult works, it’s best to learn the notes and then put it aside if time allows you and let the music settle within you. If the music is really difficult it can take so many hours of practice that you don’t ever want it to get stale, or you don’t ever want to find you are getting sick of the impossible bits that you are practising over and over again, so putting it aside for a while is a good idea.  Then I do the obvious things, I listen to lots of recordings and decide what I want to do with the piece.  There’s a lot that the composer gives you in the score,  but there’s so much that they don’t at all.  Say, for instance, in the Schumann Fantasie, especially in the first movement, there is a lot of rubato, but it’s also very episodic, so the tempo does change throughout the movement and you really have to get a sense of unity but also have that freedom.  You have to interpret the music, and feel the different moods and characters and make your own decisions. Once you have memorised it I think it’s important to keep coming back to the score so you’re really aware of what the composer has given you to work with so you don’t just go off into your own world with the piece.  It’s a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions, you initially adore the piece and then you might go through down phases when you’re going a bit crazy, maybe there are bits just aren’t working how you want them to.  Especially with difficult music you hit these breakthrough points when suddenly it feels like you are finding your way and it’s really coming together as a piece.  I love performing concerts, and I’ve also recently realised that my dream is evolving because  I also love all the outreach work that’s going on, where you bring music to audiences  or venues that don’t normally get to have Classical music.  I particularly like to bring the music to children, and I sometimes find that kind of situation more rewarding than giving a traditional concert.” (Tara Clifford)

Connect with Tara at http://www.taraclifford.com/

#4 MARIA LARRAIN, OSTEOPATH

"It was the 1970’s, I was seven and my sister was five and we had to flee from Chile; we lived in Santiago.  My granny used to play the Tango on the piano when my Dad was very young, Tango was very modern then and that’s what everyone was doing.  She would play the piano and sing.  My father had four brothers, they were all very musical and went to music school quite a long way from home.  They formed a band that played Latin music called Los Cubanitos when they were all still children, it was 1950’s.  My father was the youngest, he was on piano.  They got on the radio and performed quite a lot, they’d dress up in frilly clothing.  When we fled Chile in 1974 we arrived in Denmark with just a suitcase and no piano.  Whenever we were near a piano my father would play it, no matter where he was, he was obviously missing it.  Once he got a job he wanted a piano but couldn’t afford it, so he got one of those new organs with two keyboards, a cheap brown thing.  My Dad was listening to Jimmy Smith, he was playing that style at the time.   I started playing as well but went over to the guitar after a while.  Years later my father moved back to Chile and ended up inheriting my granny’s piano. When I visit him I wake up to the sound of him playing and then, last thing at night as well he’s on the piano, he’s always the last to go to bed.  He spends most of his day playing, he’s an amateur who really loves it, mainly jazz and also bossa, he plays a lot of Bill Evans.  He’s got a good ear, he’s pretty good. Music has always been very important in his life, when we first arrived in Denmark one of the first things he did was take us all to the big jazz club in Copenhagen.  It was the Jazzhus Montmartre and we saw Tania Maria.  They weren’t used to letting children in and didn’t know how much to charge." (Maria Larrain)

Connect with Maria at http://www.butterfieldosteopathy.co.uk/