Season 1, Episode 8, Part 1: Frederic Chiu - Concert Pianist, & Deeper Performance Studies

You are listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.

Welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Eric Hunter.

I am Clara Zhang.

I'm Yukimi Song.

Our guest today needs no introduction. We are very excited to have Frederic Chiu on our show. Who is an international concert pianist with performances on 5 continents in venues such as Lincoln Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Châtelet in Paris, and the Mozarteum in Buenos Aires. He has recorded over 30 albums. He is the founder of Deeper Performance Studies and recently a distinguished faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and the Hartt School. His non-traditional and innovative approach to art, including interdisciplinary collaborations and integration of new technologies, distinguishes Mr. Chiu as a 21st century pianist. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Frederic Chiu.

Yay, welcome! Thank you so much for joining us.

It's a great pleasure to be with you.

Frederic, I wanted to start off with a little anecdote. I'm sure you don't remember, but I actually played for you in a masterclass many, many years ago.

I thought so.

Yeah, I know I didn't mention it before now, but Yeah, I was thinking about that, and, uh, you made a big impression on me in just this, this one class, and I wanted to share that with our listeners. I'll probably paraphrase you very badly, but I remember we were working on some Bach, and you were having me work on a passage, and you told me, don't think about whether it's good or it's bad on each repetition that you do, but think about what is my ideal that I want it to sound like and how much closer or further away from it am I getting? And that really stuck with me. That became an integral part of my practice after that, just from that one masterclass. So I wanted to just—

I'm so happy, first of all, you saved it for the show, this big reveal, which is good. You got a reaction to it. And second, I'm very honored that you have a memory of that that's stayed with you, that's helped you. That's, you know, my goal in playing and teaching is to leave a memory, and that obviously worked. So I'm really happy to hear that. And what you're saying is great, and that's a point that always comes up. A lot of people when they play, they, you know, nobody likes to make mistakes. But of course, a mistake is a great doorway into understanding something about your playing. I mean, nothing happens by mistake. A mistake happens because it's supposed to happen that way for whatever reasons. All the things that you brought to it caused that to happen. And if you take the opportunity to look at it instead of judging and saying, "Ooh, that was good. Ooh, that was bad," and somehow being attracted or detracted from it because of some value judgment, then you're not going to learn as much as you can from that moment. And it's really about learning. And anything that we play, no matter how good or how bad, if there's some learning that we can extract from it,, uh, then we've improved ourselves, you know, then we've added to our knowledge base and we're higher for that.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. At the time, I think I had a very harsh inner critic, which I feel like a lot of musicians struggle with in their practice at one point or another. And you got me to kind of view it from a larger perspective, you know, as a natural part of the process. Mistakes Mistakes are— that should really be in quotes, right? Because a mistake is not a mistake. Like you said, it shows you where you are. It's information, right? And it's just another step on your journey towards becoming the kind of musician you want to be.

Also something, you know, for pianists, we have to do a lot of our work alone, and even a lot of our end goal is done alone. We perform solo stuff alone. And we're very much in our own heads and, you know, to be very self-critical is a great thing but it's also a very dangerous thing in a vacuum, in an isolation from others and that's also something that I found for myself that when I started teaching, when I started working with others, there's so much that I learned from trying to communicate and communicating badly and then figuring out good ways to communicate. There's, there's so much to learn from just being forced to interact with other people and communicating things, and that takes you a little bit out of your bubble and gives you that perspective. So that's, that's also very important.

Yes, well, thank you. I just— that's become a permanent part of the pianist that I am today.

Well, thank you very much.

All right, so can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you came up you know, your early studies and then, you know, how that transitioned into your career.

Yeah, I think my early, like, first 10, 15 years is probably pretty typical looking. My parents are both immigrants from China, very strong work ethic at home. Not very social in the sense of, you know, having sports and all these kinds of things to do. So, you know, like just doing a lot of good homework and a lot of good piano practicing.

Good Chinese parents.

Good piano practicing, you know, that kind of thing. I feel like music was something that I gravitated towards more because I was able to accomplish things, but not because I, you know, like saw a piano and said, "Ooh, I want to play that thing." It was— I can't really do something that I could do well at. It was suited, uh, and I just moved ahead. And I, I think a lot of people recognize that, especially, uh, uh, Asian, Asian-American background.

They—

this idea that if you do this step well, then you go on to the next step. Of course, you do this step well, and then you find yourself suddenly on this treadmill, and you're at, at a far reach of that treadmill, and then you wonder, oh, how did I get here? And for me, that moment of turning around and looking to see where I had been and deciding what to do going forward didn't happen until I was in my mid-20s. And by that time, I had already gone to the Jacobs School in Bloomington, I had already gone to Juilliard, I had already won competitions, I already had a manager, you know, so it wasn't like that. It was not a conscious choice until I was in my mid-20s, and there was a moment where all of a sudden everything came to light, and this was when I was struggling a little bit, first arrived in Paris after finishing my studies. And, you know, Paris of course is an incredibly inspiring place, and particularly for classical music, I think. And I was there for a year, at least that was the plan. And that year started off all of a sudden in catastrophe, and I found myself almost homeless for 7 months, and certainly piano-less.

Oh my goodness.

Kitchen-less, bathroom-less for 7 months.

Oh, I had no idea.

There—

I knew that I was going to end up okay, but so it was just a matter of getting through these months. But, you know, it was pretty traumatic and certainly very, very different than what I expected and different than what I wanted. And that was a very difficult time, but it was during this time that I was going all around Paris looking for practice spaces and arranging with various contacts, you know, can I practice at your place tomorrow? Can I practice your place next week? And one of the places was a little teaching studio in a a private building near the Galerie Lafayette, Chaussee d'Antin. And that happened, I came to the building, there was a plaque on the door that said Chopin lived here from 1833 to 1836. So he was 23, 26 years old when he lived there. I was 24 at the time. Somehow everything that I had studied up until that moment in history class, all the things I had read, all these facts that we load our mind with as pianists all of a sudden came to life. It was like, oh wow, Chopin's a real person. Yes, Chopin was my age. I happened to be on this street in Paris that was probably still with the same cobblestones paving the street, and certainly this was the building. I'm going up the stairs, perhaps Chopin put his hand on this rail, and just like I am. And even though the life was completely different, all of a sudden I was able to connect and empathize with Chopin as a person. And everything came to light, and all of a sudden everything that I was doing was put into a very different perspective. And I realized, wow, I've had this training. It's brought me to a point where I can obviously have some expectation of being able to achieve something. And that was when I doubled down and really decided, okay, I'm going to be a pianist. I'm going to do what I can with what I have. And all of a sudden I started practicing more, I started developing other ways to practice, I started seeing every moment in my life as an opportunity to practice.

Yes.

And to enlarge the idea of what practicing means to not just the time I spent sitting at the piano moving my fingers, but also non-piano playing time and non-music time, all of that was just feeding this, this system that allowed me to play the piano.

Yeah, so can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I know for you non-musical activities are a big part of the way you practice, right? And, and contribute to your music making. And I'm particularly interested in how you got this idea and how you drew the connections to see how it was affecting your musical output.

Well, it was during these 7 months where I literally was not practicing piano. I mean, not in the sense that I was expected, you know, that I had come to expect and need, kind of emotionally need those hours of practicing at the piano. I wasn't getting that. And so out of desperation, I tried all sorts of things like making a to-do list of passages that I really desperately needed to practice in the limited time that I had. Uh, and then the to-do list got me to open my scores to find things, and then I was basically doing a kind of improvised score study through that, uh, exercise. Uh, and then just the extreme emotional experiences that I was having during these 7 months. My life was pretty normal, you know, like, you know, happy and sad and nervous and whatever, but up until that moment, it wasn't life or death, and it wasn't, uh, you know, extreme stage fright when I did go on stage during these 7 months to play or to record something, it was just harrowing. Because even before getting on stage to see how I was reacting, I had convinced myself that I could not be playing at my best because obviously I had not been practicing what one needs to practice in order to play at one's best. So it was just a self-defined thing. And then of course, the self-fulfilling prophecy— I didn't play well a lot. And then the system kind of reverts to the mean, and all those years of training made me play okay. You know, helped me to— I don't forget C major scales just because I'm nervous and because I haven't practiced C major scales. So the basic tools were still there, and all of a sudden I realized that I could still kind of play. It wasn't terrible playing, and in fact my memory was a lot better and I started to calm down. But it did take, you know, it's like going through withdrawal. It did take a number of weeks and months to get to the other side where I could look at myself and say, hey, the results aren't horrific. I'm still alive. And in fact, I'm gaining insight into areas that I didn't have before. And what is that coming from? And that's my natural kind of scientist side. Just analyzing things and putting one thing after another, you know, just structurally trying to recreate what was happening. And my understanding was, okay, it was actually my work with the score, my work without the score, and then I started defining those things. I started reading stuff that, you know, like The Inner Game of Tennis and—

Great book.

The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, all these.

Also a great book.

All these great books and kind of philosophical disruptors, and that disrupted me. I was disrupted already, so it was great to have that, and that helped me codify some things. And I was wondering many years afterwards, when I had kind of settled these things for myself, I was saying like, why? You know, somebody could have taught this.

Yes.

Somebody could have at least given me some insight into this. And not just kind of depend on the random encounter with a person who happened to talk about these things or experience these things. So I set out to create a curriculum which turned into Deeper Performance Studies and, you know, taking people through some of these seminal experiences that I had that really give perspective that we don't get necessarily in school.

Yes, we definitely want to ask you about Deeper Performance Studies. Oh, I have so much to say about that. What a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it. I think I'm gonna latch on to the last little bit where you said you wish somebody could have taught you. You know, one thing I'm finding as we interview more people for the show is a lot of people have this point where you've learned what you've learned, you put in the work, you went to school, did what you're supposed to do, right? And then at some point you're just flying blind. For whatever reason, nobody can help you anymore. You're on your own. You're faced with something that you never dealt with before. And for anybody listening, I just want you to know that that's natural and normal and inevitable for many of us, but how you come out of that defines the kind of artist you're going to be. Yeah.

Yeah, and I would say to encourage all pianists, I truly feel that it's there already. If you can— if you have the experience of getting on stage and playing a Beethoven sonata from memory for an audience, I mean, it takes a lot of work, a lot of different kind of work over many, many years to be able to do that.

Yes.

And embedded in that work is all the stuff that you need. It's just inside of you. You may or may not be aware of it, and you may or may not be confident or even knowledgeable about how to apply that to anything else except playing that Beethoven sonata, right? But it's there, you know. It— you know, if I think about, um, you know, somebody who goes to a country and is immersed in that country and learns the language they can leave the country and still speak that language. You know, it's— they don't have to deal with things there geographically in order to use some of the skills that they learn. And playing the piano is like learning a language. It's a, it's a physical language. We have this understanding and control and sensitivity to our body and strength and balance and timing. It's this mental world where we're, especially for pianists, multitasking constantly. We're strategizing. We're decomposing and recomposing things. We're understanding theory and architecture. And it's this emotional life where we deal with students. We deal with teachers. We deal with chamber music colleagues. We deal with a person you're playing for. You deal with 100 people that you're playing for as a group. You're dealing with an anonymous unknown listener behind the microphone who may be listening 10 years down, 100 years down the road. We're thinking we have all these opportunities to think about these interpersonal, really diverse interpersonal relationships, and how many people really get an opportunity to practice these things, you know, to have the opportunity to get on stage and have full attention of people even for 5 minutes? To memorize something and to be a master and solo, you know, responsible for something. To have the day-to-day experience of discipline and delayed gratification to arrive at being able to do something incredible.

It is a rare opportunity.

Most people in the world don't even get the chance to experience these things, and we have all of that, and that's our life. Yeah, and so I really think that that is one of the things for pianists to encourage— that encouraged me. And I think that's one of the great things. If you've already gone through all those years and you're frustrated at the end, you have to turn back and turn in and take those things and somehow appreciate them and redirect them. It may not be in piano playing, it might be something completely non-pianist related, but your sense of discipline and your ability to present is going to aid you because you have it. Your ability to coordinate your fingers to type, you know, like pianists generally are pretty fast typists, you know, that's kind of— because we have a lot of digital control, you know. A lot of people don't know how to type, they're typing with—

that's my wife, you know, no offense, Masha, but you know that That's—

it's kind of silly, but that is something that we have an advantage over other people in that area.

I think the most valuable thing—

it's something really to appreciate and to draw out, because that will make you a better pianist. It will also make you better whatever, yes, whatever else you want to do.

I mean, I think one of the most important things anybody can learn in life is how to learn, and, you know, serious study of musical instrument teaches you that.

Because they teach it, it teaches you humility among other things.

Among other things, you're making, you know, like, what, what piano performance does not have a mistake in it? Of course, you know, and if you play something, you know, God forbid you play something perfectly once, right, does that mean that you expect it's going to be just staying there and plateauing forever? Yeah, of course not, but a lot of people don't experience that day to day. We experience that day to day and we've found ways to deal with it. And that's a huge emotional strength that pianists have, that musicians have. Pianists in particular have that.

That's why we have resilience.

Great, right?

Amen to that.

Wow, these are really, really useful information. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I didn't know all this background, you know, when you first moved to Paris, but it's amazing. I mean, I feel like I almost can draw a little comparison with myself. You know, I moved here when I was 17 in Kansas, and when I moved to New York when I was 23, 24, I had already finished everything and life was great. You know, I decided to be a pianist when I was 3, but at that point I felt like everything was going smoothly, you know. I think that's also the problem when you don't have that big, you know, and then you don't— and all of a sudden you arrive in New York, you're like, wow, it's like you basically feel homeless, you know. Like, nope, you're here, everybody's here, you don't really know exactly how to get going, but here you are, you know, you just have to make something out of it. So I am so inspired now because of that. And I have this a little bit Chinese background, and I know your father is also from the city I was born in. Um, what is And when you went to Paris as well, I know you still do a lot of collaboration. For example, you work with composer Gao Ping, and also I saw this video, it was lovely, of a French movie, but they were singing in Chinese. Just because all of the musicians nowadays are all overseas, everywhere, you know, I want to hear your experience of drawing different culture and your born and raised here in America, right?

Could you tell us a little bit? Yeah, I think that's definitely a strength of mine, having a Chinese upbringing, American culture, and then somehow I went to the middle point between the US and China and landed in Paris and kind of immersed myself. And I was drawn to Paris, I don't know why, French was such a draw to me, but somehow a fascination with it. I never studied it in school, but I decided when the opportunity presented itself, oh, I'm going to spend some time in France. I ended up living 12 years there and having a whole life, getting married, having kids, uh, becoming a citizen. And I think those 3 cultures really have forced me to look at things from different perspectives. And, uh, you know, I didn't know it at the time, but, uh, I think that having 3 different points of view was very balancing and, and really kind of pushed me into a lot of the thinking that I was, uh, that I came to for piano playing. And I think that those 3 cultures really have such strong and very different distinct thinking styles. Their perception of time, their perception of work, their perception of beauty are also different.

Yeah.

And perhaps you could have said that about any three cultures, but for me it really was very striking and is always a point of reference for me. Like, am I American? And looking at this as an American, what would I see? Am I Chinese? And looking at it from a Chinese perspective, what does that mean? And French, you know, what, what, how would they see it? And I think that that kind of perspective just came very naturally to me from the very beginning.

Wow, I can relate that so much, and I'm sure a lot of our audience, you know, maybe later on watching us from wherever they are right now currently, right during pandemic, I hear everybody's back, and I mean I also, I moved to Kansas and without a word of English, you know, so that was kind of became my identity. So even to this day, people here in New York call me Topeka, you know, Topeka, Kansas. So it's a very interesting thing, but I want to hear, I know you had a CD with Gao Ping and the WLC. Can you talk about the connection that you draw from? I mean, obviously both composers are—

Yes, well, Gao Ping, I think he's a good friend and I met him many years ago when he was studying in Cincinnati at Cincinnati Conservatory. And I heard him play one of his vocalizing piano pieces. And I was just— my jaw dropped. And I was like, I got to get— I got to meet this guy. And I have to play that piece. I have to somehow do that. And he's such a nice person. For anybody who knows him, he's so nice. During the pandemic, I was in touch with him. Premiered a piece of his for violin and piano with my brother, who's a violinist in the Chicago Symphony. And we were all at home and doing nothing. And so I did this remote kind of collaboration with my brother to create a drop-in piece.

And he was on the TV, right?

And he— we interviewed him. Yes. And my brother was on a video screen, and we were doing a live virtual combination. And by that time in April, things had kind of calmed down in terms of the pandemic in China. They had already kind of gotten it in control. And so Gao Ping said to me, you know, can I send you some masks? Do you need masks? We have a lot of masks and I think we're at the end of our need for them. So I could definitely send you a supply. I said, that's so nice. That's great. So he put it in the mail. We ended up getting them in July. Because that's how long it took. Exactly.

I ordered some in the beginning too.

Yeah. And unfortunately, we still needed them in July. So that was not—

Yes.

But when they arrived, I was like, what did Gao Ping send us?

What's going on?

But in terms of music, he also has— because he studied in the States, he has a perspective of Chinese music from a Western perspective. And his father is one of the great composers of traditional Chinese music. And so he's immersed in that. And so I think we connected on this differing perspective approach to things. And I find his music is that kind of bridge between Western and Eastern culture. And the combination with Debussy, of course, was I think pretty natural Debussy, the pieces that I chose were the ones where he was discovering Eastern culture, and that was such a big revelation to him and to Europe in general around the turn of the 19th, 20th century. So I think that there were in that particular program bridges from both sides that kind of met in the middle and exchanged, and I was very I was very proud of that, that particular program.

I really love that. Yeah, that's— oh my goodness. So you see, sometimes I feel like there's always connection between every culture, you know. We are so far away, but so somehow we are also very much connected, you know. And the last question I want to ask, actually, you heard, uh, I mean, you went to Juilliard, and also Juilliard opened up a campus in Tianjin, I guess your father and my hometown, and I have some friends working there now. And She knew someone who was the main architect designed it, you know, so I kind of, like my father said, he could see, they used to drive up just to see, you know, because they feel so proud that—

Nice.

Judy Yarr decided to choose Tianjin as the second, you know, and I don't know if you know much about, you know, China, Chinese culture, besides that we work hard, but there's also a lot of culture, especially in Tianjin, right? We have a lot of musicians, we have a lot of comedians, So what is your take? What do you think this means for the world? You know, now, you know what, I see my friends have so much more gigs than we have, you know, in Asia, in Shanghai or in Tianjin or in Beijing.

Well, I think, you know, I think China definitely is the future of classical piano. Uh, I mean, there's my parents left, uh, mainland China in '49 and came to the States in the '50s. And they weren't particularly exposed to classical music, but then when they were, they became extremely passionate about it. And, you know, more Catholic than the Pope, that kind of thing. Like, all of a sudden— all of a sudden, to have something revealed to you sometimes can be more inspiring than to grow up immersed in it. You don't really appreciate what you have. I think that was their case. I think, you know, to generalize very broadly, I think there is a kind of that— there's that dynamic happening in China. Piano music, the great canon of 400 years of piano music is inspiring. It is incredible.

Yeah, for sure.

And to not have it in your culture, then suddenly somehow have it at your disposal is a huge energy force that can power, you know, a lot of things. I think that's generally what one— you know, I can describe Chinese relationship with Western classical piano like that. And I think that there's a sense of work ethic and a sense of discipline that really coincides well with the work that one needs to do to become a good pianist.

Sure.

So I think that that general Asian kind of approach to working and time, even the concept of time, is very adapted there. But I do believe that there are some cultural vacuums, some misunderstandings that can happen. For me, that really has inspired me to see myself as as much as possible a bridge persona.

Yes, for sure.

Because I straddle both of those cultures and because I have been to China quite a bit and teaching there and hearing things since my first visit in 1989.

Wow.

Or in 19— let's see, yeah, 1989, just before Tiananmen happened. I was there for like a month for a residency teaching and playing.

In Beijing.

In Beijing, and she— okay, and, um, you know, and I've been there regularly since then, and I— it's always been very interesting to see that the talent of the 9-year-olds that I heard, no matter what year I went, there were always these amazing 9-year-olds, yeah, playing Chopin etudes and, and Mozart slow movements, and they're just like Oh my God, unbelievable! But then as the students got older, they became more and more fitting the mold and the personality was not there. And a lot of my work with the older students in China and people who have studied in China and who I've taught in Europe or the States is opening that up. Like, it's there, the knowledge, the desire for expression, the personal voice is inside, but there's no permission to let it out. There's no incentive to let it out, and there's no instruction from the schooling there currently to let it out. And it's interesting to see, even over the last 30 years of my experience, that that's been a pretty consistent situation. Right. So I really feel like there has to be this cultural opening that allows all this training to flower, to blossom, because it's amazing the potential.

Yes, that's true.

And as I said, not just for piano, you know, you have these hundreds of thousands of trained pianists, millions of trained pianists, and they all think they're going to do something in piano, you know, I hope not. But literally, these could be business leaders, these could be cultural community leaders, these could be inventors, these could be math— you know, these could be so many things informed by piano training, and that's exciting to me.

And you say that you have some, um, right, piano students even know, right, online that you're teaching, so I'm sure that's This pandemic maybe is changing something.

Yeah, it's the connection and the idea of who's teaching who and how and when. That's all opening up, which is, I think, a really good thing.

This concludes part 1 of our interview with Frederick Chiu. Tune in next time for part 2, where we talk about innovation and programming, advice for young artists, and more.