Lili Kraus

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Kraus-Lili.htm

http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2000/roberson.htm

Great Contemporary Pianists Speak for Themselves (Elyse Mach)

Without those experiences, I would never have achieved the depths of compassion and, on the other hand, the appreciation of the richness of life that fills my sould and spirit ever since liberation, to this day. Depth may not be the right word either; perhaps immediate or irresistable come closer to my meaning. The gratitude for having a clean cup like the one I'm holding; and the countless wonders, considered trivial, could never, never have grown to the degree of gratitude and enthusiasm with which hey now occur.

Indeed, gratitude and enthusiasm rule my life as they do my performances; they appear in my teaching; and they trigger my understanding of composers - I give them all I have and thank them with all I am for the privilege of being their interpreter.

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When I walk out and see the friendly grin of those 88 keys assuring me, inviting me, I love them and then everything falls into place.

I never eat anything before a performance because I believe that every fiber of your body has to serve the performance and you cannot burden your stomach by making your digestive juices work. If you do, you function too much in the stomach and not enough in the spirit and the brain.

During the performance, this person you see before you, this Lili Kraus, ceases to exist as an individual. I exist only in the music I project to the audience.

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The piano really is a marvelous instrument. In a way it is not only the most sphisticated, but also the most transcendental of all instruments, because it forces you to rely not on technique only, as many would have it today, but on your creative imagination almost to the point of sorcery. The paradox lies in the fact that the voice of the piano dies in the moment of birth. Once you have struck the key, the sound can only diminish; there is no way of actually prolonging it. It is up to your imagination and vision to pretend and make believe that there is a continuity of sound equivalent to the sound of a flute, a voice, a cello, a horn, in fact, a whole orchestra. So the piano has all the richness imaginable besides the polyphony it can produce.

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Mozart has given this gift of sweetness, which is so extraordinary because it is born out of tragedy. I feel an affinity to Mozart because he, like myself, had an almost unbearable sensitivity for all suffering around him, if I dare to speak myself in the same breath with his name. ......

In his diary, Leonardo da Vinci said that the true experience of the artist at times is so terrifying that, if the artistic vision were presented in full truth to the layman, he would be so shocked that he would flee in terror. Therefore, according to Leonardo, it is the duty and sacred privilege of the creative artist to cloak his experience in the garb of love and perfection. Now this is precisely what Mozart has done, and his music has become so much a part of me that I agonize when the music turns minor, and I'm redeemed when it reverts to the major.

Glenn Gould Hall of Fame

Glenn Gould- Phone fetish
http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0896August/Sparky/gould.html

Glenn Gould: The Man by Jessie G. Greig
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mwatts/glenn/jessie.html

Writings and Works, etc by and about Glenn Gould
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mwatts/glenn/articles.html

The Cliburn: "Encore! with James Conlon"

Being it or playing it

Being: existing, incarnating, acting

Playing: pretending, simulating, recreating

Is it to be? Or to play?
Do I play the music? Or am I the music?
Do I become the music? Or do I just play the music?

As an interpreter, there is a constant dynamism between just identifying with the music, becoming spiritually at one with the music and at the same time just playing it, just doing it.
We need to feel identification, we do identify with the composition. We make it our own, we speak of it, making it our own. First of all you practice to a point where you have it "in your hands" and the time that it takes to do that you develop an emotional relationship, as if you had been conversing with that piece, as if that piece had been talking to you, and you're talking back to it.

So you have the illusion that that piece belongs to you, these are words, you hear these things said, "that's my piece", or "that's his piece" or "that's her piece".
I prefer to think of it as the interpreter, having surrenderred his or her ego to the piece, so that the piece can flow into your own person as fully as possible. So naturally, at that moment, you feel that you are a part of that piece, you are that piece and you feel yourself disappear into that piece.

Now, does that make a good performance, or does that make you a good performer?
The answer is no, it's not enough. Because at the same time, you have to have enough distance from your experience of the piece in order to actually execute it. You still have to play the notes, you may miss some, that's ok, but you still have to play them.

This is an illusion that we have, however, when we perform a piece of music to which we identify, because we have, at that moment, the impression that we are at one with the composition, at one with the composer, and in a way maybe that's necessary.

Just the way and actor could imagine to believe he's Hamlet. Certainly he makes us believe he's Hamlet .....

Professor Benjamin Zander, Founder and Conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra:

"You are all going to get an "A"! Part of you getting that "A" will be that in the next 2 weeks you write me a comprehensive letter. You will imagine yourself having just graduated with a first-class degree in Creative Musicianship and you will write in that letter why it was you were given an "A"; how many hours practice you put in; what your goals were and how you achieved them.; what mistakes you made and how you corrected them; what advice you took and how you applied it; what major lessons-for-life you learnt along the way; and how you are further going to advance your studies and career now that you have your first-class degree."

http://www.benjaminzander.com/teacher/

Theory References

http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/instname.htm

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/musicnotes/terms.html

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/