Part 1 of Season 2 Episode 13: Dr. Marilyn Nonken--Concert Pianist and Steinway Artist

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.

I'm Clara Zhang.

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So our guest of today's episode is Dr. Marilyn Nunkin, pianist, Steinway artist, musicologist, and Director of Piano Studies at New York University Steinhardt, my alma mater, actually. I attended there around 2007, 2008, and I already had my undergraduate and master's degree in Florida, and I was working as a college professor in Florida, but I just decided to pack up and put everything in my Honda Accord and then with the U-Haul trailer in the back and decided to drive. It took me 2 days to get to New York City just because I couldn't speed up so much with the U-Haul. And then I got to New York in January, the coldest time of the month, of the year, and it was like really shocking, you know, coming from really relaxed Florida, sunshine Florida, and then getting into New York City in such a cold day. But the experiences, the classes I took, and then the classes I took, and then the piano lessons I got, and then all the other training I received from NYU was just so priceless, and especially with the people I met. And so I'm very, very excited to be able to interview Dr. Nancan after, gosh, 15, 16 years. So I'm so excited to be able to reconnect with her.

Yeah.

And you have also, you've known Dr. Nancan, right?

That's right. I met Dr. Nancan once in person about, I think, 2008, 2009. You know, it's just like you. I actually, I had this fascination of studying at NYU. For some odd reason, when I was young, maybe I was watching too much Friends, you know? So I just, I almost like wasn't like particularly thinking, oh, Juilliard or Mahler School. Obviously those are beautiful schools, but when I was in Kansas, I really just— so I, you know, emailed Mr. Samuel Bernstein at the time and actually came to study with him in 2005, auditioned there and got in, and they, you know, hired me as adjunct faculty. But I was very young. I was like, I was just a little over 20, 21 years old, and my teacher in Kansas felt that if I came to New York by myself alone at that time, I would get lost. And so I went to UMass first, and then I came back to New York and I met up with Dr. Noken to discuss further on the PhD program. And so since then, I've been following her journey, and she's such an inspirational pianist and teacher, mentor, and a professor. So yeah, I'm very excited she's on the show.

Yeah, same here. Yeah, and then as we were learning about her for this episode, like, oh my gosh, she is, she is just an amazing woman. So, so I can't wait to reconnect with her after over a decade and since I graduated from NYU. So to, and to hear her personal stories, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, she is here, so let's get the show started. You're listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.

We are delighted to introduce our guest of Season 2, Episode 13, Dr. Marilyn Nunkin, pianist, recording artist, Steinway artist, musicologist, and educator. Dr. Nunkin has been regarded as, quote, "a determined protector of important music," end quote, by The New York Times, and, quote, "one of the greatest interpreters of new music," end quote. By American Record Guide. She has performed at the world's most prestigious concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Théâtre Bouffe du Nord in Paris, and Chicago Symphony Center. The composers who have written music for her include Michael Byron, Richard Carrick, Victoria Chia, Jason Eckert, and many others. Dr. Nankin is the author of The Spectral Piano, published in 2015, and Identity Diversity in New Music, which was published in 2019. She has recorded more than 30 discs and has published articles on various topics regarding 20th century music. Dr. Nunkin is also an educator. Since 2006, she has been a distinguished faculty member and Director of Piano Studies at New York University's Steinhardt School. So today we're going to cover the topics including Dr. Nunkin's early years as a student pianist, her career as a recording artist, educator, musicologist, and we also talk about her latest projects and so much more. So Marilyn, we're so honored to have you today on our show and being able to interview you during this, especially this special month, the Women's History Month. And personally, I'm so happy to reconnect with you after 15 years since I graduated from NYU.

It's wonderful, wonderful to see you and to be speaking with you, and thank you so much for having me.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Marilyn.

You're welcome. Yes, thank you. Thank you. So, you know, because I graduated from NYU, so we have to talk about NYU. We have to start with this COVID. So it's— it must have been such a challenging 2 years for you.

Well, I think so many people have suffered during the last few years, and it's been, I think, very difficult for those of us involved in the performing arts I'm one of those for whom live performance is so important, and I've always, always been a performer who treasured really meeting audiences and playing for people and playing on particular pianos in particular spaces, and that form of connection with the audience. So I personally have found it very difficult. I've never become a big fan of listening online and remotely. It's been— the whole art of live performance has taken on a different meaning over the last few years. And I also think as a teacher, all of us who teach students have really missed that connection with students and hearing people working with them and being sort of bodies in real spaces. Thank goodness things are changing and opening up. Actually, at NYU, we have been in person for piano lessons for most of the pandemic. Facilities were open, and because it's just two people in a very large room, we were able, with a lot of health protocols, to, to continue a little bit of in-person work. But I think the whole landscape for performance and teaching has been really altered over the past two years, and many of us would like to see things go back the way they were, but of course we have learned a lot over the last two years, and that's really transformed the way we see what we do.

Yeah, it's so— as much as we reminiscing about our past, but things happen, and, um, but sometimes these challenges bring us something, of course, beneficial to us too. So we can talk about more about that. And also, I want to talk about this new building where you are right now, beautiful building of this piano department at NYU, which was not the case during my time. So I'm actually really proud, and I got to visit so many times at this beautiful building that you're in, just especially downstairs when you go, the state-of-the-art practice rooms. So tell us, like, when did that happen?

Oh my, it's hard to say exactly when that happened. I would say probably maybe 7 or 6 or 7 years ago, but—

oh, already?

It's been a while, but we are here at 3rd Avenue and East 11th Street. It's a facility that Piano Studies shares with the jazz program. So we really are very, um, it's very exclusive in terms of making sure that it's very limited in terms of who has access to the pianos. And as a result, we can take really good care of them, really control the humidity and the, um, oh, exciting things like HVAC, to make sure that the pianos are really cared for and protected, um, and that the people who are playing on them are really you know, respecting the pianos and using them in a way that's beneficial to the pianos, which so often at institutions are inadvertently abused or neglected. So it's a little— it's a very special place here. I should add that opening next year at NYU is a huge new performance facility at 181 Street, and that has been under construction for the last probably 4 years, but that will have a full theater with fly space, practice rooms, I believe a swimming pool. It's a really— Oh my gosh! Enormous building which also have public space, be open to the public, but it's a huge project and that provides also for NYU students and for the community what will probably be, you know, a very big center for culture and performance here in a in Greenwich Village, and I believe we're purchasing something like 75 pianos for that space.

Wow, amazing!

That is so incredible. But I—

that kind of thing has the capacity really also to change the neighborhood, right, to transform the cultural life of this area. So it'll be really exciting to see performances beginning again. That project has been delayed a little bit because of the pandemic, so But if anyone is driving around the neighborhood of Houston and Mercer, you'll see this enormous building that has gone up, and it's, it's pretty incredible.

Wow.

So, but are you, uh, the NYU is going to keeping the current, uh, yeah, our, our, we will be sharing that facility with the Tisch School for the Arts, and of course the university will have access, but a lot of our musicians, our ensembles, um, orchestra and musical theater, some of that will move into that bigger space, um, which also then will open up other theaters, smaller spaces like the Loewe Theater on West 4th Street, to pianists and things like that. I hope.

Wow, that is so exciting, and it's actually really fitting for the characteristic of NYU, the state of the art, and also the community-based culture that I got to experience.

I think NYU is always, you know, struggling with the neighborhood, the historic neighborhood village and reaching out. There's always that bit of tension I think you have in a lot of places where you have a university and the sort of honen-gown, the idea of how can we serve the community better. But I think this facility has the potential for bringing the arts to a lot more, a lot more people.

Oh, wonderful. It's so great to hear, and it's so great to catch up after so many years. As I was— we were learning about you more through this, uh, to prepare this interview, um, I got to know so much about you, and you're just an incredible artist, and you— the one thing is you just never talk about yourself so much. So we really want to know about you. For our show, we usually start from the early days because we're very interested in you as a person, as an artist, how you became who you are. So what was that childhood like? Did you grow up in musical family, or what was that first piano lesson like?

Wow, I don't come from a family That's music, I think, in a professional— musical in a professional or a serious sense. I started taking piano when I was 5 years old from just the woman around the corner from my grandparents. It was not a serious or disciplined kind of teaching, and I think that reflects the belief in my family. We also lived in a small— in a village in a small town in the Midwest. I think it just reflected a belief that as part of your education or as part of being a well-rounded person, you would learn how to play an instrument. And my dad played the accordion when he was a kid and had stories about, you know, playing accordion for his mother's friends. Or my great uncle was a very enthusiastic amateur pianist who, you know, taught neighborhood kids. My great uncle, I think, played the— another great uncle played the clarinet when he was in the military. But, you know, it was very much a playing music just sort of for the fun of it and not to be serious. And so I enjoyed playing a lot. But I also was not— I didn't have to be asked to practice. I liked to play. But I was never in a situation where I had a lot of quality control. Or telling me this is the right way to practice, or this would be the right way to hold your hand, or something like that. So I, um, I think it was a case of, um, just sheer sort of love of playing that got me to a point where my teacher would just sort of give me music, like, oh, why don't you play this? Why don't you play this? I think we see this sometimes when we're teaching talented kids. Oh, can you play this? Or give this a try, check this out. And so, you know, I developed to a certain point where people say, oh, you know, this, this is a talented child, you know, why don't you start doing competitions, or why don't you learn pieces and, um, give little recitals or things like that. But it was, um, always very, I think, in the spirit of, of just exploring whatever talent or love I had for the instrument without an idea of being professional in any way. And when I was about, I don't know, must have been about 14, I had changed to a different teacher. And she recorded one of my lessons sort of secretly, like I was doing a run-through of something. I don't even know the piece. And she recorded it and sent it to Interlochen Music Camp. I guess they were looking for students who might want to apply for a scholarship or maybe to play for some master class or something. So it turned out I was accepted to play in a master class with Leon Fleischer.

Oh wow.

I didn't know who Leon Fleischer was, and packing up the car, you know, the middle of winter, and driving up through Wisconsin up to Michigan. It's a totally different world. And, and suddenly realizing there are all these serious musicians, you know, my age, you know, people who are really you know, they were there going to boarding school, really practicing, really taking it seriously, and looking at brochures for conservatories. And I was— so for me, that was very eye-opening because I think I just sort of got there by the skin of my teeth, you know, really whatever, you know, I hate to use the word talent because it's very much a commodity that we deal with in music, but, you know, basically just on talent managed to get that far. And then I I realized, wow, maybe if I get disciplined and actually learn what I'm doing, and maybe I could do this. Maybe I could go to school for music. So I was at that point really, I would say, 14 years old, I think. And I went to Interlochen for one summer, to the summer camp, and found that quite a culture shock. And I still do a little bit. And then I was just suddenly surrounded by so many people who had been serious for such a long time, had been trained from a really early age, and really to me seemed so knowledgeable and confident and refined, and I was really, really awestruck by that, and I did not feel particularly comfortable in that environment. Really?

Oh my goodness.

Strange though, because I think when you are there's— I think many of us love playing, and there's a point when that enthusiasm and that passion becomes more about how hard are you willing to work, and becomes more about comparing yourself to other people, and concerns about preparing audition material, or concerns about competitions. And that sometimes, you know, it infringes a little bit on that early love we have for what we're doing. And definitely, um, sense that, that kind of conflict between doing something you really enjoy, like a hobby, right, something which is more like your life is going to be— your career is going to rely on this, and are those things compatible or not? So I think I was very aware of that, um, when I got serious about music.

But sounds like it just comes from, uh, in the organic way. That you reached your, let's say, career and career path?

I think it was very organic. That's a good word. But I also think, you know, when I meet people who've had a more disciplined teaching upbringing as a musician, of course, I went down a lot of blind alleys. I had to overcome technical issues. Having a less disciplined path to where I am. I think I was always very aware of things that perhaps were missing or things that I needed to take care of or something like that. So I think I always have a slight bit of envy for people who had a more rigorous—

Right.

Really? Wow.

I mean, I think especially at that age, right, this is actually quite unique, right? Because Like today, you know, all of your students, I'm sure a lot of the students you meet, that they start training, you know, such early on, right? Like in my generation, the long, long age, you know, everybody started training when we were like 2 years old. So I think sometimes that organic, um, you know, vibe, it's actually missing, right? So this is beautiful.

It's strange though, because also even I have such wonderful colleagues here at NYU, but of course they've come through very different educational systems as well. You know, my colleague Jeffrey Swann, you know, plays the complete Beethoven sonatas, or, you know, my colleague Eteri Antiparitsa, who comes from the real, you know, Georgian tradition and the training she received in Eastern Europe in that time. So you see people who come from very different pedagogical backgrounds and So I often feel that I— yeah, it's not— well, I'd say it's one of many ways to become a pianist.

You mentioned about technique, you know, that around that time when you were a teenager, maybe you felt a little insecure. But to me, when I heard your recordings for the last few days, I mean, I've been listening to your recordings pretty much every day. Love the tone production. I don't know how you do it, the crystal-like, but it's not cold. It's just something warm about it. I don't know how to describe, but it's just so comforting as well at the same time. Very specific technique that you have. How did you develop that? Is there— was there any method you encountered or teacher?

You know, it's funny that you use that word crystal, and I I share a tiny anecdote, but my very first mention ever in a newspaper for a review was when I was in school and I played— this was at Eastman— and I performed on some student recital Luigi Dalla Piccola's Quaderno Musicale di Anna Libra, which is a beautiful set of miniatures from 1955. And the reviewer used the word crystalline to describe my playing, and I was so touched, and I thought, that's such a wonderful word because it is kind of the sound I would hope to have, something that's very clear and etched, but yet at the same time have a kind of shimmer to it. What was so disappointing was when I first came to New York, my first New York review, the reviewer for The New York Times also used the word crystalline. I was just crushed because to get two press quotes which use the same word is absolutely useless. And so it was a word that I I really like being applied to my playing, and yet when I first was starting out, I was just crushed that the word was used more than once because it would have been so useful to have more than one word to use for my talk about the press quotes. But, you know, it's funny because I tend not to like a lot of piano playing, and I'm not a pianist that loves to listen to recordings of piano music. I find a lot of piano playing quite ugly. And I find writing for the piano quite ugly. And I think that having a beautiful tone is not that easy on our instrument. I find— I mean, I didn't like to go to a lot of piano concerts. My inspirations for how piano sounds maybe come from very few recordings, you know, very few recordings, very few instances, and maybe even more of an ideal sound that I want to have more than a sound I've really heard. I know my teacher, my main teacher David Burge, who is a great mentor to me, he very much believed that the sound a person has comes from either their body, their physicality, their anatomy, that a big, big man is going to have a very different sound than a smaller man, or somebody with a certain kind of anatomy and approach to sitting at the piano. That's where that individual sound comes from. And he really believed that, and I do too, that if a person is relaxed and playing naturally, they will have a natural sound that is theirs. And no matter how much you want to sound like someone else, I mean, you, if you're playing the piano in a natural way, you're going to sound like yourself. And the goal is not to develop someone else's sound, but to find, you know, your own sound as a musician. So I think for me personally, trying to find beauty and balance and a kind of softness, a soft feel in an instrument which is inherently percussive, is always my goal, always to find a kind of beautiful resonance. Has been something I'm very interested in in the piano. Not so much lyricism or melodic, like not so much the singing quality, but the quality of resonating, vibrating, and the sense of that instrument really being alive and being able to somehow convey that to the audience.

Do you receive these inspiration, let's say tone production, from different listening to different instruments?

I suppose there is something to that, different, maybe not so much instruments, but different kinds of music. I remember being very influenced by when I heard Sri Aurobindo's Poem of Ecstasy with the orchestra playing that, the tremendous kind of lush quality, and, you know, feeling a little sorry that my instrument maybe doesn't have that, but trying to get that. Or to hear something like the cello solo in Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, wonderful kind of vibrating quality that a beautiful cello has, or an incredible singer, you know, somebody like, I don't know, Fischl-Dieskau, something like this. Or even I love to listen to music of other cultures. You're listening to gamelan and wonderful kind of shimmering sound, gamelan, or listening to, I know, gagaku, Japanese gagaku, or something like this, or Korean pansori music, or listening to these different kinds of timbres. And realizing how there's that kind of richness and trying to get that richness and variety out of the instrument that I happen to know how to play.

Wow. I think that also just comes back to this organic idea that we were talking about. It really seems to me, and also when I listen to your music, it's just so different sometimes. You can feel the music comes from the heart. It's very genuine, it's very, you know, real. And I think that is something really very different in this day and age we live in, right?

So you are the, I'd say, champion or queen of contemporary music. So when did you discover your love for the music of living composers?

I suppose A very early example of it, which is a little strange, is my— I had this great uncle Milton, uh, who, as I said, was very passionate amateur player. And he had hoped— so he was my grandfather's brother, so he was a young man in the '40s, '30s and '40s, and he had a real passion for the music that was new at that time. Bartók, Schoenberg, early Elliott Carter, anything atonal. He was really, he was really into that. And he would give these little concerts at his home because he was not a professional musician, like Sunday afternoon, and with some friends. He'd play a little, some solo music and maybe some chamber music and have a singer and kind of these crazy concerts of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg and Weber. And I do remember Bartók and all kinds of stuff that to him, that was new to him when he was young. So this is in the 1970s and '80s now when I was hearing it. And so those composers were no longer alive, but he had a real passion for this stuff that somehow nobody really knew anything about. It was all new to everyone. Our family is not a musical family, so here's my uncle, you know, very enthusiastically churning away at some atonal music. And I was like, our crazy Uncle Milton, you know. But he was very enthusiastic about it. So I think early on I had a sense that there were these types of music that were out there that other people didn't know about, that weren't part of like the classical world. And they could be a lot of fun to listen to. Sometimes they were strange, sometimes didn't make sense, especially when he played it. It was never Note Perfect. And I used to sometimes turn pages for these little musical performances in his living room, and it was so hard to follow what was going on.

That was difficult to turn pages for contemporary music.

All the players would be in a different bar. You don't know when to turn. But there was a very exciting, adventurous spirit to that, which I think when I went to conservatory, I definitely didn't get that impression at a lot of performances. Obviously, at a conservatory in a very competitive environment, nobody is, you know, nobody is going to be laughing when people are in different places in the score. And that sort of, even the sense of adventure and discovering something new is not always what a conservatory is about. Conservatory is about conserving a tradition and discovering older traditions and learning about them. And so I, for myself, discovered playing music of contemporary music of my own time when I was at Eastman. And there were friends of mine who were composers in my class, and they could not get anyone to play their music because in that environment at that time, which is the late 1980s, you know, the students are practicing for auditions, they're practicing for juries, they're practicing for lessons, and they did not have time or any motivation in general to pick up a piece of new music written by a friend of theirs to play for a concert. You know, there just wasn't that sense that that was anything that was worth doing, worth spending time on. You know, the teach— they could not bring it to their lessons, their teachers wouldn't teach it to them. There wasn't this promise of what will playing this piece get me? And so I began to, you know, play some of these pieces, and I found that I really enjoyed working with the scores. I thought it was exciting to look at, and I really liked working with my— I don't want to say peers, my friends, you know, working with people my own age to ask them questions about the score. And I liked the feedback because what I was doing was very valuable to them. And that was, I think, maybe more than anything, the sense of having a purpose, that my performance of these works was really important. It didn't really matter if I played Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. No one was waiting for me to play that piece. Or I was in a studio at that time when I started where all the students were playing the same pieces.

That's right.

We assigned the students the same pieces. And what does it matter if I play this piece? I didn't understand. You know, these were obviously learning pieces or pedagogical pieces or pieces to learn because if you play this piece, you learn how to do certain things. But I found myself learning to do different things and play and develop a technique by playing pieces written by people my own age. And I think maybe one of the most important moments was I had learned a piece. I think this is— and I think my recording of it helped this young composer you know, win an international, get a prize. And I thought, wow, you know, it changed, it changed his life for a young composer to get a spot on an international World Music Days, or I can't remember exactly now the prize, but it was a performance which really made a difference to that composer in terms of setting him on a career path. And, you know, and so then suddenly I was like, wow, a performance from somebody like myself could change someone's life. And I was never going to change Chopin's life or Beethoven the same way, right? Those are already composers with— it's a different kind of activity to play their music. And so I suddenly realized that by taking whatever gifts I had and applying them towards, you know, living composers, it's like a whole different kind of ripple effect. So that's where that sense of wanting to do that came from.

Wow, thank you. Yeah, I never thought of that way, but it's true, right? Wow. Yeah. And then also you get to learn the piece from the composer, like living composer. It's—

and when you ask, you know, about developing a technique, I have to say I've learned my, you know, most of my technique, you know, on pieces by either, you know, composers who are still living or composers who used to be living. You know, one of the early pieces, big pieces I learned with David Birch was Boulez's First Sonata. And I learned to do a lot of things on that piece. When I came to New York in the early '90s, I, with two composers, started a contemporary music ensemble. We just wanted to play music. We just wanted to play music of our friends and people we knew or composers we thought, you know, should be heard that nobody was playing. And I learned most of my technique if you call it a technique, way of learning the piano, way of— from playing things, whether it's Fernie Ho or Milton Babbitt or Schoenberg or people who are teaching in New York or young composers. I think that's most of how I learned to play was confronting new scores and also, like you just mentioned, working with composers. So saying, you know, I— how do I play this, or how do you want this? I remember very clearly I worked with a composer, Joshua Feinberg, who's my own age who now teaches at Boston University, and then he's also, I think, in Berlin. But I remember playing some of his music, which I recorded, and playing something, and he was like, that's not mezzo forte. You know, having this sense of— or playing for composer Jonathan Harvey, having grace notes in his score, and you say, well, those grace notes are too fast. You know, I can't hear them. And, you know, they're having— composers express your really personal thoughts about, "No, do this, you do this, try this. I don't like that. The way you want to play that, that's not what I meant. Try to get what I'm after here," with that kind of specificity, really, I think, helped me learn different ways of approaching how to play the piano, how to interpret things.

I think also just for the young, younger, you know, Pianists, when we are— this reading is like changing my mind so much. I'm so inspired. I remember when I first arrived in Kansas, when I went there when I was a teenager by myself and didn't speak language, and I had this friend who was a cellist, but then he decided to make this piece where, you know, we had to play a little and we had to speak in Chinese. And then my friend and I were just speaking whatever we were deciding, but it was a very contemporary piece, you know, for me, like growing up in China, I've I never had experience with that. So I think that now looking back, it kind of even boosted my confidence a little, you know, because since language was not like, you know, entirely there yet, and having this experience, I— yeah, this is really— and then, you know, fast forward recently when I was working with, uh, we interviewed some of my good friend, my friend Paulo, and at the Manhattan School, and I remember we were playing this piece that he wrote not too long ago, and really just how detail-oriented he is. And it was really such a beautiful learning experience. So, wow.

I think also what you say about confidence, you know, when you have to do something for which there isn't a performance practice, there's no one saying this is how it's that, or here are these recordings, you know, here's what you are after. When you have to make those decisions, it's scary. But when you've made your decision, you know, you own it. You know, it's your version of that piece. And I think, you know, I was able to develop more of a sense of confidence from developing a way that I began to interpret things.

We've been listening to your pieces, your recordings over the week, and personally, my favorite is Tristan Murai's "The Complete Piano Music." And actually, it just turned out that this album earned the record label company Divine Arts' best-selling title. That's amazing. But could you tell us more about that? These pieces are really Of course, he's a French composer, so has this Debussy-like, Ravel-like French school. But at the same time, there were at times that was just startling, like totally like out of nowhere comes this harmony or something. It just scared me almost. So could you tell us more about the album? Maybe you got to know the composer?

That's a great question. It's actually one of my favorite— hard to pick a favorite, but probably one of my absolute best experiences making that. Although I have to say, it's the complete piano music of Tristan Muray. And Tristan, his birthday is today, actually.

Oh, happy birthday, Tristan.

Happy birthday.

Oh my goodness.

One of the ironic things about playing living composers is he has written over the last few years like 4 more piano pieces. So sadly, it is no longer the complete music of Tristan Muray. 2 CDs set, but I have just recently gotten these new pieces from his publisher and look forward to learning them. He's also written since then a piano concerto as well, so there's a lot of music. But Tristan Murail is a fascinating composer. I did not know his music at all, and in about— it must have been 1999— I was running this chamber music performance group, Ensemble 21, here in New York, and we were asked by the Guggenheim Museum to do a concert of contemporary French music. And we were grad students at the time, myself and two composers that ran the group. And we were like, wow, you know, what's going on in France? I really didn't— that really wasn't the kind of music I knew much about. I was playing mostly American, very difficult American music, kind of associated with Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, you know, very atonal virtuosic music. And I was playing a lot of maybe British, what they call the new complexity, a really complicated, virtuoso, atonal music, which I love. But that was what— that was sort of my thing when I was in grad school, sort of exploring my technique. And that's what people thought I was good at. And so we found this group of French composers, and it was called Spectralism. It was a movement. It kind of started in the late 1970s. In France, but it was this kind of return to very romantic kind of music, a return to almost the feel of Impressionism with a new focus on harmony, right? So after so many years of atonal music or music that was more about sensing the complexity and virtuosity, music would just kind of return to— Impressionism is a great reference because there is this sense of sonority and color and the joy in sound. And for this concert, our ensemble did music of Tristan Mirai, who's one of the main figures in this movement of spectralism, and Gerard Griseille, Mirai's good friend. And they were sort of really associated with the beginnings of this kind of music. And when I started playing Mirai's music, we played— I played a solo piece, one solo piece of his. Called La Mandragore, and one chamber piece for like 5 or 6 players, 5 players I think, called Le Barque Mystique, The Mysterious Boat. And I was just blown away by the writing. It's like you put it under your hands and you hear what comes out of the instrument, and I was just, I just fell in love with it. And I think it's that sense of recognition, like, wow, this is a person who knows how to write for my instrument. We have this feeling on different composers, like it just— everything seems to work: the resonance, the harmony, the beauty, the registers. I think all of us have played pieces where it's hard to get them to sound good, and this seems like, wow, it just— he knew how to work the piano, to play the piano, to make the piano vibrate and resonate in a way that was so attractive. And I think we love this in romantic music, right? I think a lot of us love to play romantic repertoire because it uses the piano in such a beautiful way with the use of the pedal and really the kind of effects and the joy in the sound and the beauty of the sound, which is different than playing, let's say, Bach, where it's a beauty of the music, but maybe it will work on other instruments. You can take a Bach piece and play it with orchestra or string quartet or marimba, and we still hear the beauty of the music. But this was really music that was so specifically written for them. Yeah. I was like, what else has this composer written? You know, how can I learn more about this? And one of my composer friends was like, well, you know, he's got a fair amount of piano music, but not that much. Maybe you should ask him for a piece, and then you could try to record his piano music. So it was really like a pie-in-the-sky kind of maybe he'll write something for you, and then there might be enough for a recording. In the old days, you know, maybe there's enough for a compact disc, you know, maybe there's 65 minutes of music there. That's true. And so I, you know, I applied, I started to learn the rest of his pieces and applied for a grant, was able to commission him to write a piece called "They travel only here," which ended up being a massive piece, ended up being a 35-minute piece. And then for the recording, Tristan, who I was not super friendly with at all, I hadn't known him at all, he found a piece he wrote when he was like 17 years old and auditioning for the Paris Conservatoire to work with Olivier Messiaen. And he's like, well, this has never been recorded, so maybe you'd like this too. So then it became this quite a large recording including early piece that had never been recorded or even published at that point, and then going up until a piece which had been just completed, you know, that year, really covering the the scope of his career from about 1967 until maybe 2000 or something. So his career up until that point. It was a great— it was a great big project. I did work with him. He came to New York. He was at Columbia University teaching for a while. I didn't have like— I still do not have a super close friendly relationship with him, but very much a relationship of, you know, interpreter and composer. And I found it incredible to coach with him because Juraj is so specific about what he wants. He's just so— and I respect that tremendously. You know, we look at scores of Beethoven and we look at those articulations and dynamic markings and rhythms. How do you do that? How do you do that? And with a composer like Tristán, there is— he's so specific about what he wants. And it's always been great. He plays piano okay, but for him to sit down and try to show you what he wants is very revealing. And I've certainly become more specific in how I play for working with a composer like that who's so demanding. And people who do not like to work with Tristan Murad don't like because he can also just be so relentlessly specific. And many composers are like that. If they're alive and they're working with the performer, they want to get what they want to get.

And—

Sure. It was a fantastic experience to have. I was just finishing grad school at the time, and it was a— I suppose for me personally, it was also sort of a career-making recording in that it captured people's attention a certain way, that music, and it helped me define a bit more what kind of repertoire I want, although I play lots of different different kinds of repertoire, but I think actual music and composers influenced it, influenced by that music. I loved that kind of repertoire.

You mentioned so about grad school now and Columbia, you meant, just I heard. So I hear that you got your PhD in musicology from Columbia University. And what was the reason, like, You already have this extensive work with— as a solo pianist, a recording artist. I'm very curious to know what was the reason of pursuing musicology, and specifically what area of musicology you got into.

It's a little bit of a skeleton in my closet, but I am— when I was in my undergraduate, actually, I think I was saying I was not entirely comfortable in that world of creating pianists, right? I, and I, I was not a good fit, and I left the piano program when I was an undergraduate halfway through my undergraduate degree. I, I have a degree in theory, but I don't have a degree in performance because, um, I thought, well, I'm interested in so many composers. This is me thinking as a college student, you know, I don't want to leave music, um, I want to be able to play and, and teach and work with people. So I thought maybe I'll go into theory because I'm not a composer, so I couldn't go into composition. It's very unusual. I was one of two theory majors at Eastman that year, and I did work with a performance teacher, but I thought, well, at least I'll be able to study music and teach about music and write about music and play music, have a career as a musician. And because I think at that time in that environment what I was thinking of doing as a performer just was not considered like a legitimate career path. It is hard enough to be a musician. It is hard enough to find work as a musician without saying, "I'm going to play this kind of music that nobody knows by composers no one's ever heard." And so the advice really was like, "Leave music," or, "This is not the career for you." And I thought, well, maybe I'll become a theorist and I can make this work. And then when I went to Columbia, theory and musicology were actually in the same program at that time. And so I went to as a theorist to Columbia. The idea of being able to study music and write about music and teach, you know, teach— I guess like teacher training and teach analysis or something like this. And so my dissertation is actually more of an analytical dissertation looking at— and I was interested in looking at psychology when we hear music that we don't know. What do we do? How do we understand it? And it was looking at really complicated atonal music. You know, when we hear pieces that just don't resemble music to us, right, when we hear some Xenakis or Ferney or something really, you know, really out there, what do we do? What— for people— and I was mostly interested in that question— for people that enjoy that experience, you know, what are they doing that people who don't like that— what's going on in some people's minds? How do some people come to understand what is going on with the piece when it's written in an entirely unfamiliar language? Which, you know, I was sort of looking at what had been written, you know, um, in psychology, cognitive psychology, about maybe what are the processes people go through to understand music they've never heard before. There's actually been a lot written about tonal music, and when we hear a piece and we find— let's say we're listening to a Mozart sonata and we find something surprising in it, you know, or there's a funny moment in Haydn and we say, what was that? You know, what was that crazy guessed, or what the— you know, Beethoven, something comes back in the wrong key, or, you know, there's a lot of studies about expectation and how we learn musical patterns and how a lot of music we love plays with that knowledge that we acquire. And so, so much of the interest of listening to tonal music is that there are a lot of models we understand, but what's interesting is how different composers writing in different ways, Schubert's sonatas or nocturnes or fugues or things like this. But I thought, well, what do people do when they're in an environment where it's not tonal and we don't have familiar patterns and models? So that was my— that's where I was looking as a musician and as a potential teacher to talk about that. How do we come to works we don't know, to different musical environments, and how do we learn to make sense of them? Or how do people learn to understand new kinds of music written in different musical languages.

Isn't that— doesn't that give you a very different perspective in terms of being as a performer, right? Because you're thinking music from a very different perspective. I'm sure that really is enhancing and helping your performance.

I think it was very tight, you know, I think it was very tied to my work as a performer because You think, what do you do? How do you make a piece make sense when you look at it? What is the story of the piece? What are the— I mean, in many ways, it's not that different than what we do in a tonal piece. But what's the theme? You know, what is the idea? What is the— what's the emotion? What's the character? What's the texture? What's the quality of the sound? What are the interesting harmonies? What— when you hear a piece that is— that's going to make sense, what are those things that we need to hear that will help us make sense? One of the great things about my teacher David Burge was he had this wonderful ability to play just the most adventurous, strange, unfamiliar music, and somehow he always made— it always made sense. You always could sense him guiding you, you know, listen to this, or this is important, or this is what's beautiful, this is the expressive quality of this music. He was able to really do that in such a wonderful way that even when you heard something very unusual like Stockhausen or whatever, it had— you sensed, you knew you were being guided through the piece. And I was sort of interested in, you know, what are those guideposts? What are the signposts that help you make sense of newer and unfamiliar kinds of music? So the degree is a musicology degree. I started as a theorist, but I've become a historical musicologist. In my— since graduating, my— as a performer, I've just always become interested now less in analyzing pieces but more in looking at the piano repertoire and finding these through lines and narratives that trace back from very contemporary composers back to the Romantic era beyond, really looking at this Well, history where there isn't such a separation between what is old and what is new, but what are the, the bridges and the things that relate newer music to more traditional music.

This concludes Part 1 of the interview with Dr. Marilyn Duncan. Tune in next time for Part 2, where we focus more on philosophical topics, advice for young artists, and more. If you liked this episode, don't forget to give us 5 stars and review on Apple Podcasts.