This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube trailer titled "Official Trailer ✅: S4 E2: A Team of \"A Seat at the Piano\" - Promoting Inclusion in Piano Repertoire" (posted 2023-09-17). The excerpt is an interview-style conversation among multiple participants (labelled SPEAKER A–D) who describe the A Seat at the Piano project — a database/resource and advocacy platform to surface underrepresented composers and expand piano repertoire — followed by a promotional sign-off from The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song announcing the episode premiere. The content is promotional/audio-visual in nature and centers on inclusion in piano programming and the project creators' backgrounds and motivations.
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So A Seat at the Piano is essentially a platform to raise the voices of a lot of composers who have been less heard or historically excluded or underrepresented. It is a database, it is a resource, it's a blog, it's kind of a lot of different things that we've combined into one, kind of a one-stop shop for a lot of pianists, teachers, students to go to if they're seeking different kinds of repertoire that are outside of the normal kind of canon. During the summer of 2020, our whole nation was dealing with solitude and also racial reckoning, social reckoning, a lot of the disparities that are within our society. And I think there was a big call to action. I feel like as musicians, even within our silo, within our bubble and our sphere, we can still do a lot of influence.
I come at it from a pretty different background than a lot of people. I grew up in Canada. There's an organization, the Royal Conservatoire of Music, that I grew up playing their syllabus from. They actually have always included a lot of composers, usually Canadian composers, and Canada is a pretty new place, so we've always had female composers and people of color and everything in that syllabus. I actually didn't realize till I moved to the US that that gap was there. And so for me, part of wanting to do a seat at the piano was to sort of give people the experiences that I was lucky enough to have.
So growing up, I certainly was introduced to certain Black composers. However, as a pianist growing up, I certainly found myself making it a point to prove as a Black pianist that I could play Bach, I could play the Mozart, I could play the Chopin Étude as well as anybody else. I wasn't necessarily rejecting learning about more Black composers because it was still a part of my upbringing to a certain extent, but I certainly wasn't going out of my way to necessarily make it a part of how I programmed. So I was really excited to put a lot of effort into just expanding my knowledge of not only Black composers, but of course that's where it started.
Through this project, I'm finding a part of my own identity because I, from day one until I graduated with my DMA, I've been playing Beethoven sonatas, Czerny etudes. The more I got to work with within ASAP, the more I found all these cool composers that, you know, I almost feel like I was robbed of, like, learning this in my primary education. I guess working on ASAP has been really empowering.
Come visit us at aseatatthepiano.com or visit us on social media. I can promise you that you will find something that interests you.
Tune in tomorrow night, Tuesday, September 19th at 8 PM Eastern on The Piano Pod's YouTube channel for a fascinating conversation with the team of A Seat at the Piano. The audio episode will be divided into two segments, with Part 1 launching simultaneously on your preferred podcast platform during the video premiere. Make sure to hit subscribe or follow The Piano Pod. Find all the necessary links in the description. Catch you this Tuesday!
