February 7, 2025 • 52 mins
In this episode, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Brianna Matzke, a pianist, musical director and music educator, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
During the interview, Brianna Matzke mentions a certain number of resources that are listed on ArtsAbly’s website, in the Blog section. Access Brianna Matzke’s resources
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(00:01):
♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episodeof ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics,and project leaders who dedicate their
(00:25):
time and energy to a better accessibilityfor people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversationson our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
(00:54):
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversationwith Brianna Matzke,
a pianist, musical director, and music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
You can find the resources mentionedby Brianna Matzke during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
["Tremor" by Brianna Matzke]
(01:16):
I'm fine.
My hands just shakea little bit sometimes.
It's nothing.
These are my hands.
There's nothing wrong.
[She closes a drawer.]
(01:38):
It's genetic.
There's nothing wrong.
[She is pouring coffee.]
No, I didn't have toomuch to drink last night.
My hands just shake a little bit.
No, I'm not nervous.
I have essential tremor.
♪ Piano music - "Rêverie" by Claude Debussy ♪
(02:17):
I don't notice it at allwhen I'm playing on the keys.
(03:10):
When I play the piano is when I'm my most authentic self.
My shaking hands
are at the heart of that.
(03:35):
I'm not broken.
Welcome to this new episodeof ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Brianna Matzke, who isa pianist, a musical director,
and a music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hi, Brianna.
Hi.Thank you for having me.
(03:56):
Well, thank you for dedicating a bitof your time in your busy schedule
that I know is very busyto have this conversation.
I always start these episodes by asking
about you, about our guest today.
So would you mind providinga bit of background?
(04:21):
Where did your journeystart as a musician?
Thank you.
Sure.
Your introduction to me wasa great introduction to what I do.
I wear many hats, but I startedmy musical life as a pianist.
I grew up in Small Town, Minnesota.
(04:45):
As I was growing up, I was always...
This happens in a small town.
I was always the piano girl in town.
When it came time to choose what to do forgoing to the university,
I decided to get a music degree,went to the University of Kansas,
(05:05):
which is still in the Midwest,but a very different part of the Midwest
from Minnesota,for my undergraduate,
and got a degree in Piano Performance,and then moved to Cincinnati,
where I started grad school,master's and doctorate here.
I didn't think I would...
When I moved here, I didn'tthink I would stay in Cincinnati.
But once I got here, gotto know the city, I loved it here.
(05:28):
And so once I finished my graduate work,I did everything I could to stay
and was very lucky to find a position at a smallliberal arts school nearby to Cincinnati.
That's where I teach now.
But you don't only teach, right?
You do so many different things.
(05:49):
That's right.
My specializationas a performer is what has led me
to all the other work that I do now.
All through grad school, oneof the things that I did a lot
was collaborate with the composerswho are also going to school with me.
(06:13):
They'd have a new piecethat they'd written for piano,
and they needed someone to perform it,to record it, whatever it might be.
And I didn't think that...
As I was doing that in grad school,I didn't think that that would
ever be professionally viable for me.
But then as it came time to finish grad school,
(06:36):
some of my mentors encouraged meto develop some projects that
involved me commissioning new music from composers
and performing that and developing those projects
in a way that was conscious of not only being innovative in an art sense,
(07:00):
but also innovative inhow it involved the community.
That work of commissioning composersgradually expanded to commissioning
other artists as well and workingwith other community organizations.
Just by necessity of being ableto make those projects happen,
(07:22):
I learned how to fundraiseand how to be an arts administrator.
Over time, I've been askedto step in to leadership roles
in some various arts organizations.
Now, I'm lucky enough to serve as
the executive director for something
called concertnova, which isa chamber music concert series
(07:47):
and collective here in Cincinnati.
I also am the President and CEOof the International Foundation
for Contemporary Music.
Our flagship program is something calledthe Cortona Sessions for New Music,
which is a two-week summer musiceducational program for emerging
professional performers and composersworking on contemporary classical music.
(08:11):
That happens in the Netherlands every year.
I also - this project of commissioning artists and composers
is called the Response Project.
I'm the Artistic Director of that project.
So yes, I do stay very busy.
concertnova, it has been around for many years, right? If I read correctly on the website.
(08:34):
Yeah, that's right.That's right.
This is our 18th season,which is amazing.
Founded 18 years ago.
The thing that's so interesting to meabout concertnova is it was started
(08:55):
with the idea to take classical musicout of the concert hall and to put it
in unexpected contexts andto do interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the time when that happened,18 years ago, they were one of
(09:15):
the only organizations that I know ofanywhere doing that work.
Now, that's becomea much more common thing.
But when concertnova started,they were on the forefront of that idea.
So where are you going?
What's the typical example of a concertby concertnova outside the concert hall?
(09:38):
When people ask me that question,I don't have an answer for you because
every concertnova event looks different.
If you've been to one concertnovaevent, then you've been
to one concertnova event.
There's nothing typical about it at all.
We perform in the forest.
We perform at the beer brewery.
We perform in the art museum,on the street corner.
(10:00):
Whatever the idea is behind the music,however we want to bring it
to the community,that's where where we bring it.
Everything's different all the time.
That sounds very nice.
It's really fun.
I just had a meeting this morningabout our next season, Season 19.
(10:21):
One of the ideas for a concertis to do a roller-skating rink concert.
(Laughs.)
We'll see if we can make that happen.
What about the Response Project?
What led you to create that project?
I mentioned that a little bit earlier.
(10:43):
I was finishing grad school,and I had done a lot of work
with composers through grad school.
I didn't think it was viableas a professional avenue.
But I knew that alsowhat I had been studying for
(11:03):
my doctoral degree recitals and thingslike wasn't that interesting to me.
When you get a degree in piano performance, you study Bach and Brahms
and Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt.
Great music.
I love to play that music, but I didn'tfeel artistically authentic
in performing that myself.
(11:24):
I didn't feel fully myself.
So this was 2014.
In 2013, as I was approaching the endof my studies, I went to a music festival
here in Cincinnati put on by a person
named Bryce Dessner, who's the guitarist
(11:47):
for a rock band called The National,and also a classical composer.
He, for this festival called MusicNOW, brought together
artists and musicians from all genres.
It was sort of... genre went out the window for this.
He just brought together all thesemusicians he thought were interesting
(12:08):
and put them on the stage together tomake music together, performing their own
projects, but also making new projectsspecifically for that festival.
Maybe it sounds silly to say now,but I really didn't realize
up until I saw that festival thatthat kind of creativity was possible,
(12:30):
something that was alive,was very relevant, very contemporary, and
irrespective of genre,just existed as a creative product.
I was really inspired by that.
That was where I began to come up withthe idea for The Response Project.
(12:50):
It grew from there.
I knew I wanted to work withother creative people
to make something new together.
The model for that generated out of
that initial spark of an idea.
Over time, it started out -The first response project I ever did,
(13:11):
I just e-mailed five of my friendswho were composers that I had
worked with before and asked themwhat they would like to respond to.
They ended up selecting a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called Mikrophonie One.
Not to get too in the weeds about it, but
it's experimental electroacoustic musicmaking.
(13:36):
They wrote a response to that for meto perform five new pieces on solo piano.
At the end of that project,after I had premiered it,
somebody said to me, Brianna,this could be The Response Project.
This is great. This is a great model.This could be the thing that you're known for.
(14:00):
I hadn't realized that that was what I hadmade, but somebody else said that to me.
I decided to do another one.
I chose a different response point,a different set of composers, and then
brought in some visual artistsfor the next one.
Again, it went really well,was able to get some grant funding.
Then I did another one.
(14:22):
And another one and another one.
More people came to me and said, I wantto be part of this next Response Project.
That's how it's grown over the years.
It has been 10 years.
It has been 10.
I can't believe it.
So every set of Response Project hasits own name or its own setting?
(14:44):
Yeah. Every response project is centered arounda pre-existing artwork or pre-existing
idea that I choose as the response point,and all the artists involved
in the projectare free to create new artwork in response
to that in whatever way they wish.
Is there one of these pieces?
(15:04):
It's very hard becauseall of these pieces, you
interpreted them and you gave somethingfrom yourself in these interpretations.
But if there is one of these or twoof these that really marked you,
what would be these pieces?
Out of all the response projects...
(15:24):
Well, you reached out to me for thisbecause of one of the Response Projects,
my most recent one, the Tremor Project.
That's certainly what comes to mindwhen you ask this question, because
the Tremor Project is my most personal Response Project by far.
(15:46):
All the other Response Projectswere responses to...
We did a response to a Bob Dylan album.
We did a response to the compositionsof Pauline Oliveros.
But for this one, Tremor, I asked
all the artists to respond to something about me.
(16:11):
Should I tell the story of Tremor?
Oh, yes, please.
In 2020, I was diagnosedwith a neurological condition
called essential tremor.
This is a condition that causes
parts of the body to shake, and
(16:35):
it affects - Everyone who has essentialtremor, it affects them differently.
For me, it causes my handsto shake most often.
When I was diagnosed in 2020,I'd been visibly shaking
for quite a while before that.
But once I was officiallydiagnosed and I knew what it was,
(16:57):
it really freaked me out.
I wasn't sure how to process it,I didn't know how to move forward,
if I should start telling peopleor if I should keep it a secret.
I was very afraid for my career.
I was afraid of the stigma associated with
(17:21):
having shaking hands as a professional
performing classical musician,and also just the stigma of having
shaking hands in general and what peopleassume when your hands shake.
I decided that the best wayfor me to move forward
and process what was happening to me wasto do the same thing that I always do,
(17:43):
which is use creativity and collaborationto figure out the world.
I decided to do a ResponseProject about tremor.
The first person that I called
to develop the idea for Tremor,
once I knew I wanted to doa Response Project, was Molly Joyce,
(18:04):
who had already been a collaboratorwith me on two other Response Projects.
Molly is a wonderful composer and creativeperforming artist herself who
uses disability as a creative source
in her work and uses her creativity
(18:24):
to illustrate and illuminate and dispel
misconceptions about disability.
I called her because I knew Iwanted to use this project to explore
ideas of ability and disabilityas it relates to artistic expression.
(18:45):
But I didn't know if my condition
qualified to enter that space.
And I talked with her about it.I said, Can I do this?
Is it okay if I make a projectabout ability and disability?
(19:06):
She said, Yes, please!Please do this.
She helped me shape it a little bit.
Then I selected, with her consultation,I selected some more composers
to write music for me in additionto her contribution.
I sought out a community organization towork with for visual art for the project.
(19:28):
I'm so lucky they said, yes,the organization who worked with this
is called Visionaries & Voices.
It's an art studio for adults withdisabilities here in Cincinnati, where
they can go and be mentored and supportedin their career as a visual artist.
It's a wonderful place, and they helped mefind five artists to work with there.
(19:50):
I also got to work with a sound artistnamed Britni Bicknaver,
who lives with a stutter.
She interviewed all of the artistsfrom Visionaries and Voices and developed
these lovely audio interview portraitsthat have become a part
of the project as well.
Tremor turned into as the final product
(20:15):
a multimedia concert where
I play the piano, we look at the visualart, we listen to the interviews
with the artists, and I talk aboutthe project a bit as a whole.
I've taken that concerton tour around the US.
It was very scary to present this at first, very vulnerable
(20:37):
to admit what I was going through.
I have been just blown away by how peoplehave been reacting to it and
their curiosity and their gratitude.
It's been really wonderful.
Were you able to exchange with,
(21:00):
I guess, the surroundingsof these visual artists, for example?
Because being part of a projectwith multiple artistic practices
is something that they might notsee every day or live every day.
Were you able to exchangewith the teams who work with them,
(21:22):
with the other artists, and maybethe families, something like that?
Yeah.
The process of developing the visual artcomponent of this was really fun.
I visited visited the space,the studio, for Visionaries & Voices
multiple times, and started out just having personal
(21:44):
one-on-one conversations with the artists,talking about their experience
with art and their disability
and how they related to my tremor
and how they felt that it would manifest in their art making to respond to the fact
that I have a tremor as a musician.
(22:06):
Those conversations were great.
Then from there, the artistslistened to some of the music
that I've made in the past
and used that as a creative generation
for their own visual art making.
(22:27):
Then we put all of the art pieces
up in an exhibition here in Cincinnati,
and we invited all the artists tothe opening reception for the exhibition.
They got to come and bringtheir loved ones with them.
We performed some music at the exhibition and shared the
(22:51):
audio interviews from the artists with the audience.
It was really lovely.
Yeah, a lot of interaction.
The composers were there?
The composers were...
No, I don't think any of the composers were at that reception.
(23:13):
The composers for this project,unlike the visual artists, the composers
for this project are located all over the country, and
it was difficult to get them all there for that particular event.
They've been at different performancesof this project.
I've met all the composerssomewhere along the line,
but they weren't there for that.
(23:33):
So where did you tour with this project?
I've done all overdifferent parts of Ohio.
I got to go to Boston and Vermont.
I've done Chicago,Minnesota, and Kansas City.
I'm so lucky that I was granteda sabbatical for my teaching
(23:56):
at the college this last fall,and that was my project to go on tour.
Those were all the performances that Imanaged to squeeze in one semester.
I'll be performing it one more timein a few weeks here at the end of...
We're talking on January 20th,and I'll be performing at the end
of January here in Cincinnati again.
(24:20):
I don't have any other datesbooked for this project, but
I'd love to continue performing it.
It's certainly worth taking toother parts of the country and world.
We'll see what happens.
Very nice.
Well, you're also traveling outside the States
for the International Foundation for Contemporary Music, as you were mentioning.
(24:43):
This is in Hollandfor the Cortona Sessions.
That's right.
How did you manage to do that in your academic year every year?
Well, I'm really lucky with that position
that I have a team of people
(25:05):
working alongside me to make that happen.
Everyone really generouslygives of their time and energy to support
the administration of that project.
I'd certainly would notbe able to do it alone.
No, it'd be impossible.
(25:27):
Can you tell us a bit moreabout that, the Cortona Sessions,
and also the foundation itself?
Sure.I'd be happy to tell you.
The Cortona Sessions, like I said,it's the flagship project of the IFCM.
It was founded in 2010.
It's called the Cortona Sessionsbecause it used to happen
(25:49):
every summer in Cortona Italy.
It's a program for composersand performers who are interested
in contemporary music tocome together and be mentored
in that professional interest.
It lasts for two weeks.
The composers write a brand newcomposition for a performance premiere
(26:10):
at the sessions, and the performers come with interest in collaborating
with the composers on the premiere of those works.
One thing that makes us stand apart is
we offer a conducting track of study
as well, so young conductorscan come and be mentored.
(26:31):
There's very specific skills that come along with conducting contemporary chamber music
that we mentor them in.
We also offer a track of studyfor preformed chamber music ensembles
who want to specialize in contemporarymusic to come and study with us
and be mentored and coached,not only in their music making, but also
(26:51):
on the more business side of what ittakes to run a chamber music ensemble.
One thing that we pride ourselves on
at the Cortona Sessions is...
Our focus is on artistic excellence, absolutely,
(27:13):
but we never sacrifice the feeling of safety,
welcoming, warmth, friendship, compassion
for the sake of some artistic ideal.
Our focus is on community.
My first interactionwith the Cortona Sessions back in 2018,
(27:35):
I came as their resident piano fellow, soI was more on the student side of things.
I was so surprised to find thatthe faculty at the Cortona Sessions,
they didn't hold themselvesseparate from the students.
It wasn't like this hierarchical feelingwhere it's faculty up here and students
down here, and we must pay homageor something like that.
(27:56):
It was not like that at all.
It was a feeling of collaborationand mutual support, mutual interest.
We're all learning from each other.
The only thing that setsthe faculty apart is just
that they've been doing this longer.
I found that so helpfuland welcoming and supportive.
(28:19):
I have continued to try to operatein that spirit, and I'm really proud that
we continue to offerthat spirit of community.
How many applicants do you take each year?
Our program has room for about 45 people.
That breaks down to three or four
(28:41):
preformed ensembles, about 12 composers,
two or three conductors,and then the rest are performers.
The instrumentation that we focus onis what's known as the bureau ensemble.
That would be flute, saxophone,clarinet, violin, cello,
(29:02):
percussion, piano, and voice.
Very impressive.
Thank you. It's a really interesting challengeto run a program like that because
I'm talking about issues of welcoming and
(29:22):
trying to create a feeling of safety for
as many identities as we possibly can.
It's difficult to...
Nobody can ever do that perfectly.
We can always try to do better.
But from a financial standpoint,making a summer program of study
like that financially accessibleto people is a continual challenge.
(29:47):
There are not many institutions out there who are interested in
supporting a program like that financially.
It just is not the priority of a lotof foundations or philanthropists
for whatever reason.
But it does cost moneyto run a program like that.
(30:08):
That's been an ongoing challenge.
It's the financial side of the accessibility.
Well, yeah.
Especially right now, you have someonewho's coming to the game who is not
really fond of arts, your new president
who is really today as we are speaking.
(30:32):
You know, I was so grateful that
we decided to schedule this interview
on Inauguration Day.
For me, it's a welcome distraction.
I'm not focusing on thoseceremonies right now.
Very good.
(30:54):
Well, I have also a question about youas a pedagogue, as a music educator.
So I will...
You mentioned that you have this tremor.
As an educator, how did itchange your own education practices or
(31:17):
your conversations with the students, maybe?
Did it change something?
Oh, that's a really interesting question.
I've never thought about that before.
Here's what I can tell youit did change for me.
I'll have to think aboutthe educator part of it.
But when I started the Tremor Project,
(31:41):
I admittedly had not directly
interacted with ideas of disability
or research around disability,
really at all, not very much at all.
(32:02):
I had a wrong belief in my head
before I started the Tremor Project,
and this was wrong, but I really did think
that people who lived with disability,
it was a firmly defined category.
(32:26):
There are people with disabilityand people without disability.
It was separate categoriesthat could be defined.
As part of that separateness, I think Ithought that there was some outreach
that needed to happen to connectthose two separated categories.
(32:49):
But what I discovered is actuallydisability is a part of everybody's life,
and there's no separation at all.
It's a spectrum of a sort.
But I realized how closelywe all live with it every day.
It's just these unjust, poorlydesigned social structures and things
(33:15):
that separate us from each other.
And so I guess as an educator, that realization,
perhaps over time, it's changed how I
approach my students just to realize
(33:38):
you never know what somebody is going through
internally, in other parts of their lives, whatever it might be.
You don't know when there's neurodivergenceor chronic pain or somebody else
in their family who's dealingwith things and they're a caregiver.
(33:59):
I think I just operate with a different baselineof compassion and understanding
as a result of doing this project.
It's too bad that I didn'trealize that before, but I'm glad
it brought me to that realization.
I hope that this project is bringing
other people to that realization as well.
(34:20):
Also, I think that with the conversationsyou must have had with Molly Joyce,
who's really working on the idea of duality,
of how do we conceive disability,
the part that is working vs the part that is not,
the part that we say vs the part that we don't say.
(34:42):
She does such an amazing jobin trying to conceptualize that
into her music compositions.
As a musician then,
more than as a pedagogue, as a music educator,
these conversations must have been thetriggering point of you trying to change
(35:04):
your own conception of disability, right?
Yeah.
Once I started telling people that I haveessential trauma, one of the questions
that immediately comes up asthe next question that they have
when I say, Well, I have essential tremors.
(35:24):
People always say, Oh, my gosh.
Well, how do you play piano then?
How?That must be really difficult.
And my answer is actually,
it's not that difficult
(35:45):
because I live with it every day.
I'm never not shaking.
If the tremor is affecting my artistry,
I don't really know that it is because
I'm just not aware of it because I don't know what it means to play piano without shaking hands.
(36:08):
It's possible that if I woke up tomorrow
without the tremor, I would have to
relearn my artistry and developa new approach to the piano.
That would be actually more difficultthan just living with the tremor.
One of the composers for this projectis this wonderful woman named Adele -
(36:31):
Adeliia Faizullina, who'sa blind from birth composer.
When we were chatting about the project,she said to me, Well, you know, Brianna,
it's not like when I wake upin the morning, the first thing
I think is, Oh, no, I'm blind!
You know...(Laughs.)
(36:52):
Most of the time, these conditions,
we don't think about it.
The difficulty comes in when the world is not able to welcome us,
even though we're fully comfortable in our own bodies.
(37:13):
Again, that's another point that I'mtrying to illuminate with the project.
When it comes to performing and working
in classical music, specifically,
there's an obsessionwith virtuosity in classical music.
I hate the way that it's traditionally
(37:37):
defined as physical mastery, playing
faster and louder than anybody else.
I think that's boring, and I think it'sa harmful way to look at mastery.
It separates us from humanity, I think,
and I'm much more interested in a virtuosic -
(38:01):
a virtuosity of expression and authenticity
and vulnerability and heart-to-heartconnection through the music.
Anyway, these are all things...
I'm rambling now, but those are all thingsthat I think about with this project, definitely.
Well, I have a question that is kind of related.
(38:21):
In the way we conceive a disability in our social life today that is, as you say it,
people discover that it's not reallythe conception that they had for a long
time because in society,we are taught that this is the way.
(38:43):
There are organizations
with multiple artists who work in
the field of disability and music.
We frequently speak whenwe meet, I'm one of them.
I'm a wheelchair user, I'm a singer.
Some people say, Okay, so how do yousing if you're not standing?
(39:07):
Things like that, which is what?
Okay, I just sing.Oh, yeah.
But it triggered conversations aboutthe way accessibility and disability
is seen in the arts itself.
I love this question because everybodyhas a different answer to this question.
(39:29):
What does accessibility or working in a world where you have
touched disability culture, what does it mean to you?
Hard question, I know.
It's a big question.
How to put it into words?
The more we can welcome...
(39:56):
and...
Gosh, even the word welcoming bothers me sometimes
because there's a connotationof otherness in the word welcome.
You were out here,and now we brought you in here.
Welcome.I just mean that beautiful things to me...
(40:19):
Art to me is about accessing beauty,but beauty to me is not something
that's perfect.
It's not something that is virtuosic.
This effort of accessibilityand welcoming,
(40:40):
it makes everything more beautiful.
The artistic possibilities
when all voices are included, are...
it's just artistically more interesting.
I'm not being very goodwith my words about this, but
(41:04):
it makes everything better.
Molly's work is actuallysuch a great example of this.
She taught me about how
when you are creating an artistic product
and you include accessibility measuresin the artistic product, it enhances
(41:27):
the artistry of that product.
It's not a distraction from it.
It's part of the artistic interest of it.
Even just something as simpleas the programs that I printed for
my Tremor program have braille on them.
(41:48):
Braille is beautiful.
It's a beautiful thingto touch and experience.
It's a beautiful thing.If you can see it, it's a beautiful thing
to see that texture added to the paper.
And so it's only enhancing what we're doing.
It's not an accessory.
(42:10):
I don't have a succinct wayto say what I think about this, but
man, does it make things more beautiful.
It can only be better.
Right. There are many notions.
For example, there is this conceptof universal design, which I really like.
(42:32):
Some people are struggling a bitwith this concept of universal design.
But if you think of a productor a building or something that you use
every day and you don't think aboutmaking it accessible, you think about
making it usable by everybody.
(42:54):
Whatever you are, whatever ifyou're a child or if you're an adult
or if you are big or if you're tallor if you have, I don't know,
four fingers, it doesn't matter.
Everybody should be able to use thisentrance or this building or this product
the same way, or at least an equivalentway, not exactly the same way.
(43:17):
I like that in arts, too.
There are some foundations ororganizations right now working on
inclusive concerts or adaptive concerts
where you have as many
(43:37):
possible elements in the room that makesyou feel good attending a concert,
whatever where you're coming from or what
you identify yourself with, whatever.
You come here and you feel goodand you have fun and you enjoy the music.
I love that concept, really.
(44:00):
Yeah. Yes!
Ok, good, you're jogging my brain a little bit with this spot because,
again, this is a lesson I learned throughthis project and something I feel
passionately about now is
you never know who has something to gain
(44:22):
from creatinga universally designed experience.
You know, you can't...
If you go just to the idea
of an artistic product, you create
an artistic product, you cannot controlhow somebody receives that product.
You cannot control howthey're going to connect to it.
(44:45):
I think that's also true for...
In my case, I do a tonof concert production.
You cannot control how someone's goingto respond to that concert production.
Sometimes an accessibility measurethat's designed to reach a specific
audience, it's valuable forother people for all kinds of reasons.
(45:08):
You just never know howthat's going to strike somebody
and open them up to something.
I think it's really important.
Yeah, the universal designof concert experiences.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you.
I know it's always a trickyquestion, but in a way, it's...
people just have their own experience of it.
(45:32):
I'm very interestedin learning about that.
Well, I have a last questionfor this interview, and it's about people
who might have motivated youor have brought something to your life.
Sometimes I say inspire you,
even if it's not always the inspiration like we...
(45:57):
Everybody has a different notionof inspiration, too.
But if you had people to think ofwho brought you something in your career
and launched you in a way whereyou are today, who would it be and why?
Yeah.
The person that immediately comes to mind
(46:19):
always is my first piano teacher.
I started lessons with herwhen I was seven years old
and continued until I was 16.
And she...
Growing up in Small Town, Minnesota,
(46:42):
for better or for worse, I felt
a little bit alone in who Iwas as an artist in that surrounding.
It's just by nature of a small population,I didn't feel that there were a lot
of people who felt the way about musicand art and beauty the way I did.
(47:07):
But she was my sort of window.
Not only my windowto the outside artistic world and what
was possible, but also she was my window
into myself and what I was capable of.
(47:27):
She was the one more than anybody elsein my life who said, You can do this.
You have something to offer.
The world needs what you have to say.
And it took me a long time to believe her.
But man, to have that consistent voice
in my life for 10 years was everything.
(47:51):
When I was a little girl, I wanted so muchto just be exactly like her, down to
wearing the same perfume and everything.
I still, in many ways, feel like that
about her, that the way that she lovingly
held a standard up for me and keptconsistently telling me what was possible
(48:15):
for me in my life was really important.
What's her name?
Her name is Georgia Hanson.
She had cancer and passedaway a few years ago.
It was really sad,but I remember her so fondly.
I'm lucky to still be in close touchwith her whole family, and I'm
really grateful to know all of them.
(48:38):
It's important.
I think teachers in our livesare so important.
They form us and they make uswhat we are later in life.
We cannot value enough the positionof a good teacher Yeah, for sure.
It's true.
(49:01):
You know, I do a ton of teaching.
The thing that I've been thinkingabout lately in my role as a teacher
is how the voices of my teachersare still in my head.
20, 30 years later, they're still there.
(49:24):
When I'm interacting interactingwith my students, I try to interact
with them with that idea in mind.
It's easy to get frustratedas a teacher and feel like,
Oh, they're not getting it.
But maybe they'll get it in 25 years and
it's still a gift that you've given them.
(49:48):
I have to say,when it comes to being a teacher,
that was how I -
my original conception of my adult self was as a teacher.
When I was little, that washow I saw myself was as a teacher,
a piano teacher, specifically.
Even now, in all of the work that I do,
(50:09):
I think I'm still very much
deeply fulfilled by my work as a piano teacher.
The privilege of getting to sit
across from somebody week after week
after week for 45 minutes,dedicated time for years in their life.
You get to watch them grow froma child into an adult person.
(50:33):
You get to watch them discover themselves,and you get to see them use music
to form their identity and seewhere it falls into their identity.
They get to use music to expresstheir place in the world.
That is such a cool, wonderful,privileged position to have.
I love that part of my job.Man, is it wonderful?
(50:55):
It's very inspiring.
Yes, I feel the same.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Then leave a trace in these children
or adults that will make them think,
Oh, yeah, that was a great time.
(51:15):
I learned a lot.
Well, thank you so muchfor this conversation.
Have a good concert at the end of January
with the last date of your project.
I hope I can see it one day live.
(51:36):
Oh, that's so cool.
Yeah, that'd be wonderful.
Okay, Well, have a wonderful day
and have a great time
teaching and doing everything musical that you're doing.
Thank you so much. It was an honor to speak with you.
Thank you. Take care.
(51:57):
Bye.
♪ Closing theme music ♪
♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episodeof ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics,and project leaders who dedicate their
(00:25):
time and energy to a better accessibilityfor people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversationson our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
(00:54):
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversationwith Brianna Matzke,
a pianist, musical director, and music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
You can find the resources mentionedby Brianna Matzke during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
["Tremor" by Brianna Matzke]
(01:16):
I'm fine.
My hands just shakea little bit sometimes.
It's nothing.
These are my hands.
There's nothing wrong.
[She closes a drawer.]
(01:38):
It's genetic.
There's nothing wrong.
[She is pouring coffee.]
No, I didn't have toomuch to drink last night.
My hands just shake a little bit.
No, I'm not nervous.
I have essential tremor.
♪ Piano music - "Rêverie" by Claude Debussy ♪
(02:17):
I don't notice it at allwhen I'm playing on the keys.
(03:10):
When I play the piano is when I'm my most authentic self.
My shaking hands
are at the heart of that.
(03:35):
I'm not broken.
Welcome to this new episodeof ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Brianna Matzke, who isa pianist, a musical director,
and a music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hi, Brianna.
Hi.Thank you for having me.
(03:56):
Well, thank you for dedicating a bitof your time in your busy schedule
that I know is very busyto have this conversation.
I always start these episodes by asking
about you, about our guest today.
So would you mind providinga bit of background?
(04:21):
Where did your journeystart as a musician?
Thank you.
Sure.
Your introduction to me wasa great introduction to what I do.
I wear many hats, but I startedmy musical life as a pianist.
I grew up in Small Town, Minnesota.
(04:45):
As I was growing up, I was always...
This happens in a small town.
I was always the piano girl in town.
When it came time to choose what to do forgoing to the university,
I decided to get a music degree,went to the University of Kansas,
(05:05):
which is still in the Midwest,but a very different part of the Midwest
from Minnesota,for my undergraduate,
and got a degree in Piano Performance,and then moved to Cincinnati,
where I started grad school,master's and doctorate here.
I didn't think I would...
When I moved here, I didn'tthink I would stay in Cincinnati.
But once I got here, gotto know the city, I loved it here.
(05:28):
And so once I finished my graduate work,I did everything I could to stay
and was very lucky to find a position at a smallliberal arts school nearby to Cincinnati.
That's where I teach now.
But you don't only teach, right?
You do so many different things.
(05:49):
That's right.
My specializationas a performer is what has led me
to all the other work that I do now.
All through grad school, oneof the things that I did a lot
was collaborate with the composerswho are also going to school with me.
(06:13):
They'd have a new piecethat they'd written for piano,
and they needed someone to perform it,to record it, whatever it might be.
And I didn't think that...
As I was doing that in grad school,I didn't think that that would
ever be professionally viable for me.
But then as it came time to finish grad school,
(06:36):
some of my mentors encouraged meto develop some projects that
involved me commissioning new music from composers
and performing that and developing those projects
in a way that was conscious of not only being innovative in an art sense,
(07:00):
but also innovative inhow it involved the community.
That work of commissioning composersgradually expanded to commissioning
other artists as well and workingwith other community organizations.
Just by necessity of being ableto make those projects happen,
(07:22):
I learned how to fundraiseand how to be an arts administrator.
Over time, I've been askedto step in to leadership roles
in some various arts organizations.
Now, I'm lucky enough to serve as
the executive director for something
called concertnova, which isa chamber music concert series
(07:47):
and collective here in Cincinnati.
I also am the President and CEOof the International Foundation
for Contemporary Music.
Our flagship program is something calledthe Cortona Sessions for New Music,
which is a two-week summer musiceducational program for emerging
professional performers and composersworking on contemporary classical music.
(08:11):
That happens in the Netherlands every year.
I also - this project of commissioning artists and composers
is called the Response Project.
I'm the Artistic Director of that project.
So yes, I do stay very busy.
concertnova, it has been around for many years, right? If I read correctly on the website.
(08:34):
Yeah, that's right.That's right.
This is our 18th season,which is amazing.
Founded 18 years ago.
The thing that's so interesting to meabout concertnova is it was started
(08:55):
with the idea to take classical musicout of the concert hall and to put it
in unexpected contexts andto do interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the time when that happened,18 years ago, they were one of
(09:15):
the only organizations that I know ofanywhere doing that work.
Now, that's becomea much more common thing.
But when concertnova started,they were on the forefront of that idea.
So where are you going?
What's the typical example of a concertby concertnova outside the concert hall?
(09:38):
When people ask me that question,I don't have an answer for you because
every concertnova event looks different.
If you've been to one concertnovaevent, then you've been
to one concertnova event.
There's nothing typical about it at all.
We perform in the forest.
We perform at the beer brewery.
We perform in the art museum,on the street corner.
(10:00):
Whatever the idea is behind the music,however we want to bring it
to the community,that's where where we bring it.
Everything's different all the time.
That sounds very nice.
It's really fun.
I just had a meeting this morningabout our next season, Season 19.
(10:21):
One of the ideas for a concertis to do a roller-skating rink concert.
(Laughs.)
We'll see if we can make that happen.
What about the Response Project?
What led you to create that project?
I mentioned that a little bit earlier.
(10:43):
I was finishing grad school,and I had done a lot of work
with composers through grad school.
I didn't think it was viableas a professional avenue.
But I knew that alsowhat I had been studying for
(11:03):
my doctoral degree recitals and thingslike wasn't that interesting to me.
When you get a degree in piano performance, you study Bach and Brahms
and Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt.
Great music.
I love to play that music, but I didn'tfeel artistically authentic
in performing that myself.
(11:24):
I didn't feel fully myself.
So this was 2014.
In 2013, as I was approaching the endof my studies, I went to a music festival
here in Cincinnati put on by a person
named Bryce Dessner, who's the guitarist
(11:47):
for a rock band called The National,and also a classical composer.
He, for this festival called MusicNOW, brought together
artists and musicians from all genres.
It was sort of... genre went out the window for this.
He just brought together all thesemusicians he thought were interesting
(12:08):
and put them on the stage together tomake music together, performing their own
projects, but also making new projectsspecifically for that festival.
Maybe it sounds silly to say now,but I really didn't realize
up until I saw that festival thatthat kind of creativity was possible,
(12:30):
something that was alive,was very relevant, very contemporary, and
irrespective of genre,just existed as a creative product.
I was really inspired by that.
That was where I began to come up withthe idea for The Response Project.
(12:50):
It grew from there.
I knew I wanted to work withother creative people
to make something new together.
The model for that generated out of
that initial spark of an idea.
Over time, it started out -The first response project I ever did,
(13:11):
I just e-mailed five of my friendswho were composers that I had
worked with before and asked themwhat they would like to respond to.
They ended up selecting a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called Mikrophonie One.
Not to get too in the weeds about it, but
it's experimental electroacoustic musicmaking.
(13:36):
They wrote a response to that for meto perform five new pieces on solo piano.
At the end of that project,after I had premiered it,
somebody said to me, Brianna,this could be The Response Project.
This is great. This is a great model.This could be the thing that you're known for.
(14:00):
I hadn't realized that that was what I hadmade, but somebody else said that to me.
I decided to do another one.
I chose a different response point,a different set of composers, and then
brought in some visual artistsfor the next one.
Again, it went really well,was able to get some grant funding.
Then I did another one.
(14:22):
And another one and another one.
More people came to me and said, I wantto be part of this next Response Project.
That's how it's grown over the years.
It has been 10 years.
It has been 10.
I can't believe it.
So every set of Response Project hasits own name or its own setting?
(14:44):
Yeah. Every response project is centered arounda pre-existing artwork or pre-existing
idea that I choose as the response point,and all the artists involved
in the projectare free to create new artwork in response
to that in whatever way they wish.
Is there one of these pieces?
(15:04):
It's very hard becauseall of these pieces, you
interpreted them and you gave somethingfrom yourself in these interpretations.
But if there is one of these or twoof these that really marked you,
what would be these pieces?
Out of all the response projects...
(15:24):
Well, you reached out to me for thisbecause of one of the Response Projects,
my most recent one, the Tremor Project.
That's certainly what comes to mindwhen you ask this question, because
the Tremor Project is my most personal Response Project by far.
(15:46):
All the other Response Projectswere responses to...
We did a response to a Bob Dylan album.
We did a response to the compositionsof Pauline Oliveros.
But for this one, Tremor, I asked
all the artists to respond to something about me.
(16:11):
Should I tell the story of Tremor?
Oh, yes, please.
In 2020, I was diagnosedwith a neurological condition
called essential tremor.
This is a condition that causes
parts of the body to shake, and
(16:35):
it affects - Everyone who has essentialtremor, it affects them differently.
For me, it causes my handsto shake most often.
When I was diagnosed in 2020,I'd been visibly shaking
for quite a while before that.
But once I was officiallydiagnosed and I knew what it was,
(16:57):
it really freaked me out.
I wasn't sure how to process it,I didn't know how to move forward,
if I should start telling peopleor if I should keep it a secret.
I was very afraid for my career.
I was afraid of the stigma associated with
(17:21):
having shaking hands as a professional
performing classical musician,and also just the stigma of having
shaking hands in general and what peopleassume when your hands shake.
I decided that the best wayfor me to move forward
and process what was happening to me wasto do the same thing that I always do,
(17:43):
which is use creativity and collaborationto figure out the world.
I decided to do a ResponseProject about tremor.
The first person that I called
to develop the idea for Tremor,
once I knew I wanted to doa Response Project, was Molly Joyce,
(18:04):
who had already been a collaboratorwith me on two other Response Projects.
Molly is a wonderful composer and creativeperforming artist herself who
uses disability as a creative source
in her work and uses her creativity
(18:24):
to illustrate and illuminate and dispel
misconceptions about disability.
I called her because I knew Iwanted to use this project to explore
ideas of ability and disabilityas it relates to artistic expression.
(18:45):
But I didn't know if my condition
qualified to enter that space.
And I talked with her about it.I said, Can I do this?
Is it okay if I make a projectabout ability and disability?
(19:06):
She said, Yes, please!Please do this.
She helped me shape it a little bit.
Then I selected, with her consultation,I selected some more composers
to write music for me in additionto her contribution.
I sought out a community organization towork with for visual art for the project.
(19:28):
I'm so lucky they said, yes,the organization who worked with this
is called Visionaries & Voices.
It's an art studio for adults withdisabilities here in Cincinnati, where
they can go and be mentored and supportedin their career as a visual artist.
It's a wonderful place, and they helped mefind five artists to work with there.
(19:50):
I also got to work with a sound artistnamed Britni Bicknaver,
who lives with a stutter.
She interviewed all of the artistsfrom Visionaries and Voices and developed
these lovely audio interview portraitsthat have become a part
of the project as well.
Tremor turned into as the final product
(20:15):
a multimedia concert where
I play the piano, we look at the visualart, we listen to the interviews
with the artists, and I talk aboutthe project a bit as a whole.
I've taken that concerton tour around the US.
It was very scary to present this at first, very vulnerable
(20:37):
to admit what I was going through.
I have been just blown away by how peoplehave been reacting to it and
their curiosity and their gratitude.
It's been really wonderful.
Were you able to exchange with,
(21:00):
I guess, the surroundingsof these visual artists, for example?
Because being part of a projectwith multiple artistic practices
is something that they might notsee every day or live every day.
Were you able to exchangewith the teams who work with them,
(21:22):
with the other artists, and maybethe families, something like that?
Yeah.
The process of developing the visual artcomponent of this was really fun.
I visited visited the space,the studio, for Visionaries & Voices
multiple times, and started out just having personal
(21:44):
one-on-one conversations with the artists,talking about their experience
with art and their disability
and how they related to my tremor
and how they felt that it would manifest in their art making to respond to the fact
that I have a tremor as a musician.
(22:06):
Those conversations were great.
Then from there, the artistslistened to some of the music
that I've made in the past
and used that as a creative generation
for their own visual art making.
(22:27):
Then we put all of the art pieces
up in an exhibition here in Cincinnati,
and we invited all the artists tothe opening reception for the exhibition.
They got to come and bringtheir loved ones with them.
We performed some music at the exhibition and shared the
(22:51):
audio interviews from the artists with the audience.
It was really lovely.
Yeah, a lot of interaction.
The composers were there?
The composers were...
No, I don't think any of the composers were at that reception.
(23:13):
The composers for this project,unlike the visual artists, the composers
for this project are located all over the country, and
it was difficult to get them all there for that particular event.
They've been at different performancesof this project.
I've met all the composerssomewhere along the line,
but they weren't there for that.
(23:33):
So where did you tour with this project?
I've done all overdifferent parts of Ohio.
I got to go to Boston and Vermont.
I've done Chicago,Minnesota, and Kansas City.
I'm so lucky that I was granteda sabbatical for my teaching
(23:56):
at the college this last fall,and that was my project to go on tour.
Those were all the performances that Imanaged to squeeze in one semester.
I'll be performing it one more timein a few weeks here at the end of...
We're talking on January 20th,and I'll be performing at the end
of January here in Cincinnati again.
(24:20):
I don't have any other datesbooked for this project, but
I'd love to continue performing it.
It's certainly worth taking toother parts of the country and world.
We'll see what happens.
Very nice.
Well, you're also traveling outside the States
for the International Foundation for Contemporary Music, as you were mentioning.
(24:43):
This is in Hollandfor the Cortona Sessions.
That's right.
How did you manage to do that in your academic year every year?
Well, I'm really lucky with that position
that I have a team of people
(25:05):
working alongside me to make that happen.
Everyone really generouslygives of their time and energy to support
the administration of that project.
I'd certainly would notbe able to do it alone.
No, it'd be impossible.
(25:27):
Can you tell us a bit moreabout that, the Cortona Sessions,
and also the foundation itself?
Sure.I'd be happy to tell you.
The Cortona Sessions, like I said,it's the flagship project of the IFCM.
It was founded in 2010.
It's called the Cortona Sessionsbecause it used to happen
(25:49):
every summer in Cortona Italy.
It's a program for composersand performers who are interested
in contemporary music tocome together and be mentored
in that professional interest.
It lasts for two weeks.
The composers write a brand newcomposition for a performance premiere
(26:10):
at the sessions, and the performers come with interest in collaborating
with the composers on the premiere of those works.
One thing that makes us stand apart is
we offer a conducting track of study
as well, so young conductorscan come and be mentored.
(26:31):
There's very specific skills that come along with conducting contemporary chamber music
that we mentor them in.
We also offer a track of studyfor preformed chamber music ensembles
who want to specialize in contemporarymusic to come and study with us
and be mentored and coached,not only in their music making, but also
(26:51):
on the more business side of what ittakes to run a chamber music ensemble.
One thing that we pride ourselves on
at the Cortona Sessions is...
Our focus is on artistic excellence, absolutely,
(27:13):
but we never sacrifice the feeling of safety,
welcoming, warmth, friendship, compassion
for the sake of some artistic ideal.
Our focus is on community.
My first interactionwith the Cortona Sessions back in 2018,
(27:35):
I came as their resident piano fellow, soI was more on the student side of things.
I was so surprised to find thatthe faculty at the Cortona Sessions,
they didn't hold themselvesseparate from the students.
It wasn't like this hierarchical feelingwhere it's faculty up here and students
down here, and we must pay homageor something like that.
(27:56):
It was not like that at all.
It was a feeling of collaborationand mutual support, mutual interest.
We're all learning from each other.
The only thing that setsthe faculty apart is just
that they've been doing this longer.
I found that so helpfuland welcoming and supportive.
(28:19):
I have continued to try to operatein that spirit, and I'm really proud that
we continue to offerthat spirit of community.
How many applicants do you take each year?
Our program has room for about 45 people.
That breaks down to three or four
(28:41):
preformed ensembles, about 12 composers,
two or three conductors,and then the rest are performers.
The instrumentation that we focus onis what's known as the bureau ensemble.
That would be flute, saxophone,clarinet, violin, cello,
(29:02):
percussion, piano, and voice.
Very impressive.
Thank you. It's a really interesting challengeto run a program like that because
I'm talking about issues of welcoming and
(29:22):
trying to create a feeling of safety for
as many identities as we possibly can.
It's difficult to...
Nobody can ever do that perfectly.
We can always try to do better.
But from a financial standpoint,making a summer program of study
like that financially accessibleto people is a continual challenge.
(29:47):
There are not many institutions out there who are interested in
supporting a program like that financially.
It just is not the priority of a lotof foundations or philanthropists
for whatever reason.
But it does cost moneyto run a program like that.
(30:08):
That's been an ongoing challenge.
It's the financial side of the accessibility.
Well, yeah.
Especially right now, you have someonewho's coming to the game who is not
really fond of arts, your new president
who is really today as we are speaking.
(30:32):
You know, I was so grateful that
we decided to schedule this interview
on Inauguration Day.
For me, it's a welcome distraction.
I'm not focusing on thoseceremonies right now.
Very good.
(30:54):
Well, I have also a question about youas a pedagogue, as a music educator.
So I will...
You mentioned that you have this tremor.
As an educator, how did itchange your own education practices or
(31:17):
your conversations with the students, maybe?
Did it change something?
Oh, that's a really interesting question.
I've never thought about that before.
Here's what I can tell youit did change for me.
I'll have to think aboutthe educator part of it.
But when I started the Tremor Project,
(31:41):
I admittedly had not directly
interacted with ideas of disability
or research around disability,
really at all, not very much at all.
(32:02):
I had a wrong belief in my head
before I started the Tremor Project,
and this was wrong, but I really did think
that people who lived with disability,
it was a firmly defined category.
(32:26):
There are people with disabilityand people without disability.
It was separate categoriesthat could be defined.
As part of that separateness, I think Ithought that there was some outreach
that needed to happen to connectthose two separated categories.
(32:49):
But what I discovered is actuallydisability is a part of everybody's life,
and there's no separation at all.
It's a spectrum of a sort.
But I realized how closelywe all live with it every day.
It's just these unjust, poorlydesigned social structures and things
(33:15):
that separate us from each other.
And so I guess as an educator, that realization,
perhaps over time, it's changed how I
approach my students just to realize
(33:38):
you never know what somebody is going through
internally, in other parts of their lives, whatever it might be.
You don't know when there's neurodivergenceor chronic pain or somebody else
in their family who's dealingwith things and they're a caregiver.
(33:59):
I think I just operate with a different baselineof compassion and understanding
as a result of doing this project.
It's too bad that I didn'trealize that before, but I'm glad
it brought me to that realization.
I hope that this project is bringing
other people to that realization as well.
(34:20):
Also, I think that with the conversationsyou must have had with Molly Joyce,
who's really working on the idea of duality,
of how do we conceive disability,
the part that is working vs the part that is not,
the part that we say vs the part that we don't say.
(34:42):
She does such an amazing jobin trying to conceptualize that
into her music compositions.
As a musician then,
more than as a pedagogue, as a music educator,
these conversations must have been thetriggering point of you trying to change
(35:04):
your own conception of disability, right?
Yeah.
Once I started telling people that I haveessential trauma, one of the questions
that immediately comes up asthe next question that they have
when I say, Well, I have essential tremors.
(35:24):
People always say, Oh, my gosh.
Well, how do you play piano then?
How?That must be really difficult.
And my answer is actually,
it's not that difficult
(35:45):
because I live with it every day.
I'm never not shaking.
If the tremor is affecting my artistry,
I don't really know that it is because
I'm just not aware of it because I don't know what it means to play piano without shaking hands.
(36:08):
It's possible that if I woke up tomorrow
without the tremor, I would have to
relearn my artistry and developa new approach to the piano.
That would be actually more difficultthan just living with the tremor.
One of the composers for this projectis this wonderful woman named Adele -
(36:31):
Adeliia Faizullina, who'sa blind from birth composer.
When we were chatting about the project,she said to me, Well, you know, Brianna,
it's not like when I wake upin the morning, the first thing
I think is, Oh, no, I'm blind!
You know...(Laughs.)
(36:52):
Most of the time, these conditions,
we don't think about it.
The difficulty comes in when the world is not able to welcome us,
even though we're fully comfortable in our own bodies.
(37:13):
Again, that's another point that I'mtrying to illuminate with the project.
When it comes to performing and working
in classical music, specifically,
there's an obsessionwith virtuosity in classical music.
I hate the way that it's traditionally
(37:37):
defined as physical mastery, playing
faster and louder than anybody else.
I think that's boring, and I think it'sa harmful way to look at mastery.
It separates us from humanity, I think,
and I'm much more interested in a virtuosic -
(38:01):
a virtuosity of expression and authenticity
and vulnerability and heart-to-heartconnection through the music.
Anyway, these are all things...
I'm rambling now, but those are all thingsthat I think about with this project, definitely.
Well, I have a question that is kind of related.
(38:21):
In the way we conceive a disability in our social life today that is, as you say it,
people discover that it's not reallythe conception that they had for a long
time because in society,we are taught that this is the way.
(38:43):
There are organizations
with multiple artists who work in
the field of disability and music.
We frequently speak whenwe meet, I'm one of them.
I'm a wheelchair user, I'm a singer.
Some people say, Okay, so how do yousing if you're not standing?
(39:07):
Things like that, which is what?
Okay, I just sing.Oh, yeah.
But it triggered conversations aboutthe way accessibility and disability
is seen in the arts itself.
I love this question because everybodyhas a different answer to this question.
(39:29):
What does accessibility or working in a world where you have
touched disability culture, what does it mean to you?
Hard question, I know.
It's a big question.
How to put it into words?
The more we can welcome...
(39:56):
and...
Gosh, even the word welcoming bothers me sometimes
because there's a connotationof otherness in the word welcome.
You were out here,and now we brought you in here.
Welcome.I just mean that beautiful things to me...
(40:19):
Art to me is about accessing beauty,but beauty to me is not something
that's perfect.
It's not something that is virtuosic.
This effort of accessibilityand welcoming,
(40:40):
it makes everything more beautiful.
The artistic possibilities
when all voices are included, are...
it's just artistically more interesting.
I'm not being very goodwith my words about this, but
(41:04):
it makes everything better.
Molly's work is actuallysuch a great example of this.
She taught me about how
when you are creating an artistic product
and you include accessibility measuresin the artistic product, it enhances
(41:27):
the artistry of that product.
It's not a distraction from it.
It's part of the artistic interest of it.
Even just something as simpleas the programs that I printed for
my Tremor program have braille on them.
(41:48):
Braille is beautiful.
It's a beautiful thingto touch and experience.
It's a beautiful thing.If you can see it, it's a beautiful thing
to see that texture added to the paper.
And so it's only enhancing what we're doing.
It's not an accessory.
(42:10):
I don't have a succinct wayto say what I think about this, but
man, does it make things more beautiful.
It can only be better.
Right. There are many notions.
For example, there is this conceptof universal design, which I really like.
(42:32):
Some people are struggling a bitwith this concept of universal design.
But if you think of a productor a building or something that you use
every day and you don't think aboutmaking it accessible, you think about
making it usable by everybody.
(42:54):
Whatever you are, whatever ifyou're a child or if you're an adult
or if you are big or if you're tallor if you have, I don't know,
four fingers, it doesn't matter.
Everybody should be able to use thisentrance or this building or this product
the same way, or at least an equivalentway, not exactly the same way.
(43:17):
I like that in arts, too.
There are some foundations ororganizations right now working on
inclusive concerts or adaptive concerts
where you have as many
(43:37):
possible elements in the room that makesyou feel good attending a concert,
whatever where you're coming from or what
you identify yourself with, whatever.
You come here and you feel goodand you have fun and you enjoy the music.
I love that concept, really.
(44:00):
Yeah. Yes!
Ok, good, you're jogging my brain a little bit with this spot because,
again, this is a lesson I learned throughthis project and something I feel
passionately about now is
you never know who has something to gain
(44:22):
from creatinga universally designed experience.
You know, you can't...
If you go just to the idea
of an artistic product, you create
an artistic product, you cannot controlhow somebody receives that product.
You cannot control howthey're going to connect to it.
(44:45):
I think that's also true for...
In my case, I do a tonof concert production.
You cannot control how someone's goingto respond to that concert production.
Sometimes an accessibility measurethat's designed to reach a specific
audience, it's valuable forother people for all kinds of reasons.
(45:08):
You just never know howthat's going to strike somebody
and open them up to something.
I think it's really important.
Yeah, the universal designof concert experiences.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you.
I know it's always a trickyquestion, but in a way, it's...
people just have their own experience of it.
(45:32):
I'm very interestedin learning about that.
Well, I have a last questionfor this interview, and it's about people
who might have motivated youor have brought something to your life.
Sometimes I say inspire you,
even if it's not always the inspiration like we...
(45:57):
Everybody has a different notionof inspiration, too.
But if you had people to think ofwho brought you something in your career
and launched you in a way whereyou are today, who would it be and why?
Yeah.
The person that immediately comes to mind
(46:19):
always is my first piano teacher.
I started lessons with herwhen I was seven years old
and continued until I was 16.
And she...
Growing up in Small Town, Minnesota,
(46:42):
for better or for worse, I felt
a little bit alone in who Iwas as an artist in that surrounding.
It's just by nature of a small population,I didn't feel that there were a lot
of people who felt the way about musicand art and beauty the way I did.
(47:07):
But she was my sort of window.
Not only my windowto the outside artistic world and what
was possible, but also she was my window
into myself and what I was capable of.
(47:27):
She was the one more than anybody elsein my life who said, You can do this.
You have something to offer.
The world needs what you have to say.
And it took me a long time to believe her.
But man, to have that consistent voice
in my life for 10 years was everything.
(47:51):
When I was a little girl, I wanted so muchto just be exactly like her, down to
wearing the same perfume and everything.
I still, in many ways, feel like that
about her, that the way that she lovingly
held a standard up for me and keptconsistently telling me what was possible
(48:15):
for me in my life was really important.
What's her name?
Her name is Georgia Hanson.
She had cancer and passedaway a few years ago.
It was really sad,but I remember her so fondly.
I'm lucky to still be in close touchwith her whole family, and I'm
really grateful to know all of them.
(48:38):
It's important.
I think teachers in our livesare so important.
They form us and they make uswhat we are later in life.
We cannot value enough the positionof a good teacher Yeah, for sure.
It's true.
(49:01):
You know, I do a ton of teaching.
The thing that I've been thinkingabout lately in my role as a teacher
is how the voices of my teachersare still in my head.
20, 30 years later, they're still there.
(49:24):
When I'm interacting interactingwith my students, I try to interact
with them with that idea in mind.
It's easy to get frustratedas a teacher and feel like,
Oh, they're not getting it.
But maybe they'll get it in 25 years and
it's still a gift that you've given them.
(49:48):
I have to say,when it comes to being a teacher,
that was how I -
my original conception of my adult self was as a teacher.
When I was little, that washow I saw myself was as a teacher,
a piano teacher, specifically.
Even now, in all of the work that I do,
(50:09):
I think I'm still very much
deeply fulfilled by my work as a piano teacher.
The privilege of getting to sit
across from somebody week after week
after week for 45 minutes,dedicated time for years in their life.
You get to watch them grow froma child into an adult person.
(50:33):
You get to watch them discover themselves,and you get to see them use music
to form their identity and seewhere it falls into their identity.
They get to use music to expresstheir place in the world.
That is such a cool, wonderful,privileged position to have.
I love that part of my job.Man, is it wonderful?
(50:55):
It's very inspiring.
Yes, I feel the same.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Then leave a trace in these children
or adults that will make them think,
Oh, yeah, that was a great time.
(51:15):
I learned a lot.
Well, thank you so muchfor this conversation.
Have a good concert at the end of January
with the last date of your project.
I hope I can see it one day live.
(51:36):
Oh, that's so cool.
Yeah, that'd be wonderful.
Okay, Well, have a wonderful day
and have a great time
teaching and doing everything musical that you're doing.
Thank you so much. It was an honor to speak with you.
Thank you. Take care.
(51:57):
Bye.
♪ Closing theme music ♪
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