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amoveablejake · 4 years ago

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Well, Here We Are

It is time for the obligatory year in review piece, I know, try and contain your excitement.

Well, here we are. The end of another calendar year. 2020 is drawing to a close and so like many, if not all, journalistic outlets I too will be doing my year in review. Do I count as a journalistic outlet I hear you ask? Yes. I’ve decided that I do. This is my column and I’m going to to pretend that I am a columnist here. And I can’t hear your eye rolls because I’m busy hiding behind my clicking keyboard.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I wanted to structure my year in review, for instance did I want to go through each category in a classic way and also would I also only speak about things that came out this year. The answer to both, is a no. Instead I am going to present to you my alternative awards for the year. There will still be runners up but the categories may be a little bit all over the place so if you were planning on counting on a sure thing award winner that might be out the window now. That being said, shall we dive into perhaps the most chaotic awards show you’re going to experience this year.

The album that I listened to literally on repeat for a week whilst I was working and as result now know ridiculously well. Perhaps too well - Winner: Pink Floyd ‘Dark Side of the Moon’

Right. So. Back in April one rainy Monday afternoon I put on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ to listen to it through in its entirety for the first time. I had heard songs from it before and I was familiar with Pink Floyd’s music before this but this was what sent me down a spiral of their discography, so much so that Spotify have dubbed them my artist of the year based on playtime. Whilst I would not consider them to be my artist of the year, I can’t deny how deep I’ve gone into their library and in particular ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. I quite literally had it playing on repeat for the entirety of that week and now, now I simply don’t know if I ever truly existed before that album. Am I the album? Is the album me? I’m in too deep.

The best representation of Seattle in a post apocalyptic video game - Winner: ‘The Last of Us Part Two’

Honestly, I know that this category makes it pretty clear that Last of Us was always going to win but that is because if it wasn’t on this list somewhere I think it might have indeed been a federal crime. This year I played both editions of Joel and Ellie’s story pretty much back to back and boy oh boy was that quite the ride. Part Two is a gruesome, grueling, revenge fueled ride that in all honesty is some of the best storytelling I have ever experienced. In any medium. It’s narrative is phenomenal, its game design is unparalleled, the voice acting and soundtrack are both out of this world and the way it looks is breathtaking. It is a game that continuously left me speechless and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I put it down. The fact that Joel looks like my Dad did and wears the same clothes only partly adds to the emotions it makes me feel. Although I won’t pretend the bit where Joel is talking to Ellie didn’t hit me quite hard. But hey, thats the game’s point. Its a story designed to make you feel and oh boy does it achieve that.

The football player who came out of nowhere to bring life back to my club - Winner: Bruno Fernandes

It has been a lot ol’ time since I’ve seen a player that I instantly fell for. Bruno Fernandes arrived in Manchester with an already strong reputation but he has completely transformed a team and shows no sign of slowing down. His first twelve months have been unparalleled and the comparisons drawn with a certain other Portuguese player who was worn that red shirt are not only warranted but deserved.

The band who I’ve been missing all my life: Winner - Niteflyte

Quite frankly, this is a very hard award to give. There were quite a few front runners however, it has to be Niteflyte. I got introduced to Niteflyte via a podcast about the CIA’s involvement with the soundtrack of the Berlin wall coming down (’Wind Of Change’, listen to it now. Well after you’ve finished reading this piece that is). The podcast only played Niteflyte because one of the figures it was investigating used to manage the band. It was a thirty second sound bite if that and it stopped me in my tracks. I was walking in my old city at the time and I had to stop on the street and find the album the song was from and put it on straight away. I have previously written about Niteflyte and their self titled album on the blog so go back and read that for a more in depth look however, if you take one thing from this it might be that if I was going to give an artist of the year award, lets just say I think I know who it would go to.

The best motion picture handling of a father that has passed away that I have seen. Ever - Winner: ‘Onward’

When I first heard what ‘Onward’ was about I was, hesitant. Any film where a parent particularly a father comes back to life always makes me filled with trepdiation and this was the case when I went to go and watch ‘Onward’ back in March (the last film I saw in the cinema before all of this). Instead, what I found was an incredibly moving and sensitive film about losing a parent that had at its end the best handling of a reunion between father and son that I have ever seen on the big screen. I have watched it a second time since and I still found it to be incredibly well done. ‘Onward’ might well be my film of the year because of it, I’m that impressed. It is also a great film in its own right but hey, I can’t deny why it sticks out in my head.

The show that keeps on getting better and better: Winner - ‘The Mandalorian’

Sigh. Everytime I think that that ‘The Mandalorian’ couldn’t possibly get any better it goes and proves me wrong. This year started off with the finale of series one and it has ended with the conclusion of the second series. It is a masterpiece and for that I don’t want to ruin its ending here. Instead I will say that it does get better and better each week and for this life long die hard Star Wars fan, hell, it might be my favourite Star Wars property. And I know that won’t mean anything to you, but to me, that is saying something.

Okay, so, I could keep going on and on with these awards however, its the festive period and I don’t want to keep you hanging around too much so instead I am going to include below some honourable mentions with a little sentence about each.

‘Anxious People’ - If I was to give a book of the year award winner this would be it. In fact its one of my top ten books ever. Its perfection. Read it. Now.

‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ - Released at the perfect time and all these months later it still captures my heart everytime I go on it.

‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ soundtrack - Look. I don’t need to make my feelings about this album any clearer. We know I love it and I hope that you’ve listened to it by now and you do too.

Diego Maradona - The greatest of all time. There’s nothing more to say.

‘The Prestige’ - Oh boy. I had heard about this film a lot from the IGN UK podcast over the years and it did not disappoint at all. Especially who plays a certain Mr Tesla. That reveal blew me away.

Joe Exotic - Watching ‘Tiger King’ really felt like event viewing and came along at the perfect time like Animal Crossing. Joe Exotic, I don’t know what to say but he has earned his place on this list thats for sure.

‘I’ve Got My Second Wind’ - I heard this on one of the early days in January, maybe the second or third and I’ve been listening to it ever since. My song of the year.

Philippe Auclair - Football journalist and singer. Auclair who features on the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast regularly is an incredibly articulate speaker and is never afraid to hold the more questionable footballing authorities accountable. One of the writers and figures in football that I look up to the most. Oh and hes an excellent singer. What a man.

Napoli FC - This was the year that I fell in love with Napoli. Theres no looking back now, I finally found my own team.

‘Uncharted Four: A Thief’s End’ - The game that showed me, truly, how good games can be. I felt like it was a crime that this game is so perfect. It feels like the inside of my head and I never wanted it to end.

My brother, James - Look. I know you’re reading this and you more than deserve your place on this list. I was going to give you a proper award but I couldn’t quite get the wording right. Anyway, the point is you’re on the list as you always will be. (And yes, you’re in the same section as Joe Exotic, quite the compliment I know)

So there we have it. 2020. Hopefully the above gives you something to think about and some things to consume over this festive period before we go again for the new year. This won’t be the final piece for the year but all the same, I hope its a bright 2021 for you, see you in the future.

- Jake, a man who is immediately re assessing the awards, 27/12/2020

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lindsay36ho · 4 years ago

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Tonebase – Catching the Moment

Interview With tonebase’s Piano Executive Ben Laude

In late 2019, tonebase Piano was launched, with the aim of giving amateur pianists access to high level music education through premium online content featuring great artists. Since then, education has been trending even more in a digital direction because of the pandemic. Piano Street’s Patrick Jovell has talked to Ben Laude about the challenges he faced building tonebase’s piano platform, but also about how to forge a unified music education, reconciling our physical and virtual realities.

Piano Street: Dear Ben, thank you for letting us interview you! From what I know you are responsible for the Piano at Tonebase. But you are not alone. I could count fifteen people working in your team. Among the founders I find Chris Garwood who is a guitarist. Can you tell me how it all started and how it has developed?

Ben Laude: First of all, thank you Patrick and to everyone at Piano Street for the resources you’ve been providing us pianists for decades now! I used to frequent the forums back in my conservatory days, mostly looking to pick fights with people about whose Rach 3 recording was the greatest (it was Horowitz and Reiner from 1951, I was convinced).

I joined tonebase in medias res about two years ago with a simple mandate: build the piano platform. The model I had at the time was tonebase’s original pilot classical guitar platform, which had been launched in 2017. Our three founders met at Yale, where two of them (Chris Garwood and Igor Lichtmann) were pursuing their master’s in guitar. They took their ‘Music and Business’ course more seriously than most, it seems, and ended up with a germ of a business plan. They connected with a comp-sci/econ double major whiz kid (Abhi Nayar), and the three of them officially founded tonebase in the summer of 2017. Their savvy and initial success led to getting involved with some Silicon Valley investors, with whom they secured funding to expand to another instrument. Piano was the obvious choice. At the time I was hired, I was busy teaching and performing, and continued to assist David Dubal in curating his NYC piano performance series (a gig I had going back to my early grad work at Juilliard). I figured it was time to put the doctorate I earned in piano to proper use, and had started applying to tenure-track jobs in higher ed when the call for a tonebase ‘Head of Piano’ fell into my lap. It seemed a bit too good to be true, as I’ve had a second passion for media production dating back to high school, especially video editing. I’ve always enjoyed Bruno Mosaingeon’s interviews at the piano with Glenn Gould and wished more films like this existed with more pianists.

Ben Laude performing in concert

My first six months at tonebase were a mad scramble to recruit as many high calibre pianists and professors as I could and coordinate productions on various repertoire and pianistic topics. Garrick Ohlsson was one of the first major artists to say ‘yes’ – he and I met for coffee in New York the summer of 2019 and got lost in conversation about piano. He was clearly a great fit for our longform style of in-depth tutorial videos, and I owe a lot to him for being willing to contribute lessons to our launch. The next big challenge was organizing our post-production workflow with my teammates – editing the video and adding corresponding scores and workbooks to the platform. (I watched Ohlsson teach Chopin’s First Ballade and Third Scherzo over and over again for so many hours while editing those lessons, that I must have learned both pieces by osmosis – they’re now in my active repertoire and I can’t account for that based on practice-time alone.) We launched in late 2019 with about 30 videos and to-date we’re approaching 300 released, plus dozens more in our backlog waiting to be processed and released.

2020 was a bittersweet. It started off in January and February with some unforgettable productions, including two extended sessions with Leon Fleisher, just months before he passed. While Covid led to a higher demand for streaming services, it also became quite difficult to continue productions as before. I also began to direct my energies towards developing foundational musicianship content, beginner courses, and live programming, while continuing to pursue new collaborations with great concert artists and professors where possible. 2021 couldn’t have arrived soon enough. Our subscriber count has by now risen to over 5000; among our active users, about 40% are ‘serious amateurs’, 40% teachers/professionals, and another 20% or so younger students. We’re aiming to keep pace with our expanding base as we grow, and continue to provide a really exceptional and unique product to pianists of very different backgrounds. There’s also some major concert artists who will be added to our roster soon, including a few based in the UK/EU, and I look forward to producing with them later this year (hopefully in person, fingers crossed). We’re still a young platform, and I’m excited to see where we can go from here.

PS:You are a Juilliard trained pianist and you also function as a tutor, also on Tonebase. Which key questions on piano playing and interpretation have you nourished through the years and which come out in your function as a Masterclass moderator?

BL: While at Juilliard I grew fascinated by one of the core questions, or mysteries, of piano playing: that is, what is the relation between physical technique and musical expression. The more I investigated the problem, the more I discovered that musicianship training – i.e., deeply internalizing musical relationships in one’s mind, ear, and voice – can foster better interpretive ideas while also contributing directly to overcoming physical obstacles. In my tonebase lessons, I’ve tried to emphasize the importance of integrating music theory and aural skills into our practice at the keyboard, and we’ve been releasing more and more practical musicianship content for our users’ benefit.

These musicianship subjects are often taught in isolation, especially in the American conservatory systems I’m familiar with, so that your typical piano major will sleep through music theory class on Monday, mumble through solfege exercises on Tuesday, and show up on Wednesday for a private lesson. This results in an unfortunate separation between the intellectual comprehension of harmony and form, the aural recognition of musical relationships, and the physical realization of these principles in performance. (I should also mention a vital fourth element, the study of music history and culture, which takes place on Thursday and is forgotten about by the weekend!) It is no wonder why so many one-sided musicians have emerged from this state of affairs. How often have we encountered a pianist with “great technique, but nothing to say” or with “great ideas, but no chops,” or those who have great ears or analytical minds but never applied them at the piano?

Producer and tutor. Ben Laude is also featured in instruction videos at Tonebase.

The remedy, I have found, is a kind of well-rounded musicianship training where playing the piano is treated as a means for developing your musical personality, rather than as an end in itself. I don’t claim to know the best way to get there! But, I have familiarized myself with some traditions that I believe can help a great deal – for one, I’ve always found Nadia Boulanger’s method of keyboard skills training, with solfege and harmonic analysis mixed in, to be very useful. (The first time I ever performed Bach without a memory slip came after painstakingly working through the Fugue phrase-by-phrase, singing one voice while playing the others, then switching.) Committing to such training transforms our connection to the instrument, and over time a kind of holistic awareness starts to develop, which is just awesome. It becomes nearly impossible to play a given figuration or progression on the piano without hearing its component elements and knowing something about how they relate. Scores can be processed faster and memorization becomes much more rapid and reliable. Furthermore, these new sensitivities instantly inform how passages might be played, conjuring all sorts of possibilities about voicing, texture, phrasing, rubato, etc. Physically, the instrument begins feeling more like an extension of your arm, hand, and fingers, relieving tension and promoting facility.

There’s much more to this, but these are the basic contours of a kind of “musical fluency” at the keyboard that I believe all pianists should develop more thoroughly (including myself!), and which I hope to spread through tonebase.

PS: The line-up of artists and pedagogues on Tonebase is impressive as are the productions in question. The technology used is a proof of your ambition to give the viewer the best possible chance to get into the contents of the Masterclasses. One easily thinks about carefully directed momenta in order to secure the core message. As a “stage director”, how do you manage the different artists and personalities which all have their own fields of expertise and own articulated artistic/pedagogical universes?

Leon Fleisher teaching pianist Rachel Naomi Kudo Brahms’ B-flat major Piano Concerto.

BL: Pianists can be temperamental, particular people, and each of the artists on tonebase has a singular vision at the instrument that has been honed over decades. I’m lucky to work with one pianist at a time, since their perspectives often rub against each other. In some cases, they appear to be in direct opposition. For example, Leon Fleisher preached a rhythmically-strict, architectural approach to building phrases; Jerome Lowenthal insisted on a rhythmically flexible, narrative approach to interpretation. Who is right? Both, and neither, I suppose. What matters to me is that both have the floor, and are given a platform to demonstrate and defend their perspectives at the instrument. Then, it’s up to viewers to watch, absorb, and find what resonates with them. Pianistic wisdom comes in many varieties, sometimes contradictory!

Ben Laude in interview and Chopin session with Emanuel Ax.

In terms of stage direction, I do my best to steer and structure lessons without leaving my fingerprints all over them. Some artists, like Boris Berman, preferred to work more carefully with me in advance to develop a carefully articulated lesson plan. In other cases, artists were more comfortable speaking extemporaneously about their piece or topic. Garrick Ohlsson, for example, had a marvelous ability to spontaneously manifest highly structured lessons on the spot with very few retakes. One of the trickiest parts of the job has to do with building an ideal viewer in the mind of the artist. Professors are used to the give and take of engaging directly with a student in person, so speaking to an anonymous future student inside a camera can be alienating. If I can manage to make artists comfortable and be themselves, they forget about the artificial environment they’re in and their personalities shine through.

PS: This last year’s Pandemic situation has shown a necessary increase in consulting digital resources in music education. Institutions are now much more open to include such alternatives in their regular curricula. How do you predict the future for Tonebase and similar resources on the Internet?

One of the Scarlatti takes with Claire Huangci.

BL: I should say that I’m familiar enough with dystopian literature and film to be suspicious of the rallying cry to thoroughly digitize education. It has seemed inevitable since the advent of the internet and streaming services, but brick and mortar educational institutions were too thoroughly entrenched in social life to be uprooted like Blockbuster Video. Nevertheless, education had been trending in a digital direction when 2020 arrived. It seems like the pandemic just sped things up by a decade.

Discussing the piano concerto repertoire with John Kimura Parker.

The original mission of tonebase was about connecting amateur pianists to the otherwise insulated worlds of conservatory and concert hall. Therefore it relied on the coexistence, and separation, between offline institutions and online individuals. The amateur’s relative isolation from centers of high level music making and education was the problem we were solving by making the wisdom of great artists accessible and affordable. But what we found even before the pandemic was a widespread general interest in such premium online video content, from more amateurs on the periphery to professionals at the center of these institutions, plus many students and teachers in between. Now that the pandemic has created a situation in which everyone is isolated, including from their own institutions, there has been a need for virtual experiences of all kinds. Some are surrogates that will disappear once social restrictions are lifted, but it seems like others are here to stay. I see lots of potential for tonebase and other online resources to become staples of music education in the post-Covid future, both in institutional settings and private teaching.

You might think a subjective, sensuous discipline like music requires the flexibility of “offline” learning and would find less use in incorporating digital resources into the classroom or studio. Yet what I’ve found in observing tonebase’s appeal is that it’s precisely the elusiveness of music education that increases the value of any given artist’s video lessons. Whereas it might be interesting to hear the same calculus concept explained by five different math instructors, ultimately they’re each trying to communicate the same bit of knowledge. This is never quite the case with piano instructors, as there’s a wonderful lack of consensus about even fundamental principles of technique and interpretation. There are no axiomatic proofs to musical understanding or scientific laws to piano technique, there are only more-or-less-successful approaches developed and passed down through lineages of mentorship. Under the right circumstances, piano teachers should embrace this healthy relativism and utilize our video archive as discussion material during lessons. Having students weigh different approaches will help them think critically about piano playing, find solutions faster, and ultimately foster original artistry to a degree not possible if you only had access to the perspectives of one or two professors.

Screen capture from a digital workshop with Simone Dinnerstein.

On the other hand, often the point of a lesson is not to encourage an exploration of different viewpoints, but to focus on solving a student’s specific problems without the distractions of a second opinion. Even here, a digital resource like tonebase offers a lot of promise down the road. Private teachers often wonder what goes on during the 167 hours between lessons with a student, and having trusted, high quality video lessons and training videos available for the student to watch and practice along with could be a game changer. Teachers could be spending valuable lesson time working on the particular problems a student is facing while they entrust tonebase’s virtual instructors to do the job of introducing or reinforcing concepts and skills in the interim. Along these lines, I believe piano departments and music school libraries will find great value in making tonebase available to both students and faculty as a versatile teaching and training resource.

Garrick Ohlsson preparing for filming momentum.

Of course, in-person learning environments bring benefits that can’t or shouldn’t be reproduced by digital technologies, such as direct feedback from instructors and social interaction with peers. Music, as Boris Berman exclaims in a tonebase lesson, is “the art of sound,” and there’s something irreplaceable about experiencing sonic vibrations in person – making, sharing, and commenting on music together in the same space. Feedback can be digitally mediated to a degree, and tonebase has been increasing its live workshops and developing community feedback channels. But ultimately, the power of digital resources utilized in combination with in-person instruction remains unrealized, especially in music. The goal is to make tonebase a constructive force in reconciling our physical and virtual realities and forging a unified music education that draws from the best of both worlds. (And if all hell breaks loose and the machines do try to take over, I would expect the humanizing forces of music education to tame the robots and for tonebase to help keep our priorities straight!)

After filming session series with Boris Berman.

Emanuel Ax on Learning Chopin in Lockdown

tonebase recently visited the 7-time GRAMMY Award-winning pianist at his breathtaking home in the Berkshires for an extended interview and recording session.

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from Piano Street’s Classical Piano News https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/articles/catching-the-moment-11172/

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