Season 3 Episode 17: Hannah Reimann - Advocate of Stretto Pianos & Creator of Stretto Piano Concerts

Have you ever wanted to experience what it's like to play a piano that has narrow keys? Keys that could cut your practice time in half and make stretches feel easy? My name is Hanna Reimann, and I'm delighted to introduce you to the world of stretto pianos. Stretto means narrow in Italian. Last couple of months I've had the great joy of working on a keyboard which has a 6-inch octave rather than the standard 6.5.

Immediately I noticed a difference. Such a freeing experience to play what I wanted.

And so I think just having that experience really convinced me that perhaps piano technology needed to evolve a little bit.

It still had some ways to go. I have found that on this smaller keyboard I've been able to execute various musical ideas and technically challenging sections with much more ease and control. Welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod. I am your host Yukimi Song. You know this show, The Piano Pod, is all about bringing the classical music industry forward into the next generation, and so far I've interviewed incredibly talented pianists and composers, educators, psychologists, and entrepreneurs working tirelessly to do so by thinking outside the box. Today's guest is no exception. She is someone whom I consider one of the pioneers or innovators of our industry. So before introducing you to my guests, please hear me out. A recent study at the University of North Texas found that 75% of their piano students wished they had larger hands. The current piano keyboard was actually not really designed to suit most pianists. It dates from the 1880s and suited certain famous European male virtuosos of that time. And before then, piano keyboards generally had narrower keys and different sizes were available. So that got me thinking, how many of us pianists Worldwide are not reaching our full musical potential due to a keyboard being too big or too wide. According to paskpiano.org— PASK stands for Pianists for Alternatively Sized Keyboards— recent research into pianists' hand spans shows that over 50% of adults have hand spans that are too small for the conventional keyboard. About 87% of women and 24% of men have hands that are too small for the current-sized keyboard. Children are currently forced to learn on the instrument designed for men with large hands. And lastly, given a choice of keyboard, around 75% of adults would most likely choose a smaller size. So after all, the struggles you might have as a pianist are not because of your shortcomings, but maybe the wrong-sized keyboard you've been practicing and performing for your size. Today I invited Ms. Hannah Reimann. She's a fellow New Yorker and a pioneer and advocate of stretto pianos. Before getting started, I want to welcome everybody listening to or watching The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song for the first time. I'm a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a thriving and meaningful community of the classical music industry through this podcast. Please visit yukimisongstudio.com to find out more about my work. In each episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the industry. Before getting started, I want to thank everyone for tuning in. Please rate the show and review it on your favorite podcast platform because every rating and review will help people find my show. Please stay with me till the end of this episode to learn about stretto pianos from the very person who convinced Steinway Sons to build stretto pianos. So here we go, dear friends. Please enjoy the show. 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. I am honored to welcome Hannah Reiman, pianist, vocalist, composer, actor, filmmaker, and educator from New York City. She is also advocate of stretto pianos and creator of International Stretto Piano Festival and Stretto Piano Concerts. Nearly 30 years ago, Ms. Reiman felt the need for a different type of piano to accommodate her hand size, so she'd independently rebuilt her Steinway piano, and that's the beginning of her journey with stretto pianos. Since then, she has performed in Canada, in Japan with the stretto The Piano Pod and contacted and presented proposals and materials directly to executives of all the major piano manufacturers, including Steinway, Yamaha, Kawai, Bösendorfer, and Roland, to build these pianos. After 3 decades of her effort, stretto pianos are now available from Steinway Sons on a custom order basis, making Ms. Ryman the only liaison for anyone wanting an original Steinway stretto grand piano. In addition, her success with this instrument has made her the face of the stretto as the producer of concerts. Ms. Ryman was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and described as a, quote, "musician on the mission to make the world safe for small pianists," end quote. So welcome, Hannah. Thanks for being here today. Yay!

Such a pleasure to be here with you, Yukimi. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.

Oh, thank you. Now, I was introduced by our mutual friend Ethan Janney. He is a piano— wonderful piano technician from New York as well, and then he owns a company, Floating Piano Factory. Now, he is the one who introduced us, and until then, honestly, Hannah, I did not know anything about strip pianos. Shame on me. So I am learning You know, I feel like I was born today.

Please don't feel like there is any mistake if you don't know about pianos with narrower keys because they are just emerging as a large movement now. It's taken a very long time for individuals to embrace this technology. So most people don't know about pianos with narrower keys to accommodate small hands, which is why Pioneers like myself and some other lovely people who I'll tell you about have taken it upon themselves to raise awareness by collaborating with different people in the industry and creating concerts and rebuilding their pianos. So it's taken many years for there to be a kind of visibility, and still most people don't know about it. So that's why we're doing this. That's why I'm talking to you, and that's why I created a concert platform.

Wonderful. Now, when I visited your website strettopianoconzerts.org, and there were several small video clips, and one of them, especially one quote struck me. You, you mentioned that this piano creates creativity, equality, and joy for people. The word equality just meant everything. That's— this is one of the reasons I do this podcast, and that's the 21st century way of thinking about not just only music, but also piano, right?

Piano is the only instrument that doesn't come in multiple sizes in terms of keys for a wood and metal piano. And this, even though it does not seem like an issue to most people, there really is a history of pianists as they play more and more difficult repertoire, getting injuries. I mean, imagine playing a violin or a viola with a really small hand for years and years and playing extremely difficult music, even if you have a perfect technique, you're much more comfortable with something that fits you. And lots of pianists have not had that opportunity yet, including the smallest children who are virtuosos. So, you know, this just opens up a whole other market and a whole other way of thinking as it becomes embraced.

Right. So, dear Piano Pods listeners, here we are today to focus on the topic of stretto pianos. What is a stretto piano and why stretto piano? And these questions will lead us to more philosophical discussion later today and why Hannah is here promoting and advocating for stretto pianos. So maybe you already answered this question, but let's start with this simple question: what is a stretto piano?

Okay, so a stretto piano is any instrument with a keyboard that has keys that are narrower than the conventional size of piano keyboard, which it can be calculated different ways. You know, most piano keyboards with 88 keys are 48 inches. My reduced-width keyboard is 44 inches with 88 keys. But my colleagues around the world and other people have established a new way of measuring, and that is with an octave span. So the octave span of the conventional keys is 6.5 inches. Stretto pianos are different dimensions, but 6.0 or 5.9 or 5.5. And there are even some people making smaller ones. They can be in any kind of keyboard instruments, electronic instruments, wooden metal pianos. They don't have to have 88 keys. I asked my co-artistic directors, Rhonda Boyle and Carol Leone, who participated in creating the festival with me so it could become an international phenomenon, asked them, you know, let's— why don't we think of a name, a generic term, so we don't have to keep saying pianos with narrow keys. It's just, you know, it's kind of awkward. We need to define it and give it a brand so that people can understand right away that this is something that's here to stay. And Carol Leone, who is a fantastic pianist, virtuoso, and professor at Meadows School of Music, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, she volunteered the word stretto. She speaks Italian. We all know what stretto means in musical terms. It means narrow. In physical terms in Italian. So, you know, I thought it sounded great and we all agreed that we would use that word. And then I asked her if it was all right if I, as I formed Stretto Piano Concerts as an entity that could receive funding, I could use the word. And we just all agreed that it was a very catchy way to communicate what we needed.

Wow. So actually, the word Stretto Piano is your creation? Your—

Well, our team, and we decided it together. We had different words. And yeah, it just, it makes, it makes more sense than saying narrow keys, right? Because it's, you know, for some people, they're not narrow, they're just normal. For the other pianist, fat. So it's, I don't know, it gives the, it gives the definition a little bit more of an artistic flair as well. You know, Italian is the language of music, right?

Yeah, exactly. Do you want to continue with the presentation? I can share the screen.

Yes. So that's my piano. My parents bought me a 7-foot-4 grand piano that was originally built in 1900 when I became a professional pianist. And in 1997, I had it rebuilt to have narrower keys. And you can see that the cheek blocks are fatter. And, you know, if you zoom in on your computer, you can see that the black keys are a bit narrower than— they look narrower than normal ones. So that's my— that's the keyboard of my piano. So the next one is a chart of pianos from the 1500s until now showing what the— what the key width is, how narrow they are, and how as you go down the list, you see that the pianos become more and more close to having a 6.0 or a 5.9 width octave. And as we move towards the 20th century, the keys get fatter and fatter with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. And, you know, people like Franz Liszt who influenced how the piano was built and the size the piano was built. Closer and closer to a 6.5-inch octave until there's standardization. But you can see, if you look closely at this table, that there are very many, many varieties of key size before standardization occurred in the 20th century. I got this table from a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the, you know, historical musical instruments collections back in the 1990s, because I just wanted to know what exactly had happened with key size.

Right.

And here are some zones of hand spans showing that males and females have different size hands. I mean, everybody knows that, but here's a graph that can show you, if you look at it closely, that females really— their hand doesn't fit the 6.5 octave piano keyboard the way that it fits men. And here are the current situation of who has large hands, who has small hands, and what's comfortable for people in the current situation and what would be comfortable if pianos with narrow keys were embraced. You know, there's like females, many, many more females would be playing things that fit their body as we embrace this new technology. This is very interesting. I just want to remark that this data came from Rhonda Boyle and Carol Leone, who are two pioneers of what we now call stretto pianos. They have examined statistics around piano competitions, and unless you're competing with pieces by Mozart and Bach, most of the prize winners are men who fit the larger repertoire like Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, you know, post-romantic material that has much stretchier stuff, that has bigger intervals, different kinds of physical challenges. And it's not that women can't play those things. It's just it's easier with an instrument that fits you.

Right. But this really shows, like, you know, I used to think, oh, there's no way I can play this literature. Or— but I mean, obviously it's not about my ability. It's a lot to do with the instrument that you're using, right?

That's right. If a violinist was asked to play a really difficult concerto by Bruch or, you know, 20th century composers on an instrument that was too big for them, they may not win the competition either, you know.

Right. Yeah.

And here is a comparison of string competition winners and piano competition winners by their ages. And as preteens to adults in string competitions get older, the females are the ones who are winning more prizes.

Wow.

But with pianos, it's the opposite. So, you know, as you, as you play more and more advanced material and you play stretchier stuff, um, as an adult and you don't have an instrument that fits you quite right, you have to be, you have to compromise. I think that's what Raph communicates.

Yeah, exactly. Wow. This is a huge difference, right?

Oh, this is the COVID of Piano Today magazine, also back in the 1990s. I wrote an article. I think the next page probably will show the article that says A Modest Proposal. And you can see the two keyboards that I have for my one piano. And I, you know, I wanted to discuss this and present this idea to people. It actually was executives at Steinway Sons that made introductions for me to things like Piano Today magazine. And other people who were involved with pianos with small keys back in the 1990s. So, you know, I really did get help from Steinway Sons. I'm an official Steinway educator, and I've known all of the presidents since the '90s. And it, you know, that was how I connected with this journalist. And he was very interested in knowing the editor and the journalist who publishes this magazine. He's very interested in knowing my take on this. So I wrote an article, and then I think the next Next slide probably is another article. It's the second page if anybody wants to see it or look at it online. So after writing articles and networking with people and talking about it, another journalist wanted to interview me for The Wall Street Journal. And lo and behold, my face was on the front page. I was in complete shock and I started getting letters. This was back in the days when people actually wrote letters. And put them in envelopes and put stamps on them. I started getting letters from all over the world. I started getting phone calls and there were people in Italy and California who were— they were so grateful that I had rebuilt my piano because they wanted pianos like this too. So this was really exciting for me and I just knew after this article came out, that there was some validation and I had to continue on this quest. I mistakenly thought, you know, in a few years we're just going to have pianos with small keys all over the place. And I wrote a global— a global plan for the development of the narrow width keys for acoustic pianos. I sent it to people. Maybe we can put that up on the screen later in the presentation. But it really didn't happen. I just had to keep doing research and keep pressing the piano companies for many more years than I thought.

Wow, that's incredible. Oh, what is this?

So one of the things that happened when I talked to Frank Mazurko, one of the presidents of Steinway Sons back then in the 1990s, he said, said, you know, do you have a patent? If you don't have a patent, we can't do business with you. And I wasn't exactly interested in going into business, but then I realized that was what somebody had to do to make this work. So I acquired a U.S. patent. I spent years and thousands of dollars making this, working with technicians. You could go to the next slide and you'll see some of the images and what the technology actually is.

Goodness.

Wow.

Um, certain amount of time, unless the patent is licensed, it becomes in the public domain. You know, it's not a business proposal anymore. And I— Steinway told me that they would license this, and we were about to start working on it together, but then it expired. And they always got a little bit too busy. They've got their timeline, they have the things that they need to do. So this is a technology for converting One piano, uh, to have another size of key, uh, and the technical things that have to happen. Uh, it's about the key pins that hold the keys into place that are connected to the keyframe. Uh, and you know, anybody can access it online now.

Wow. Okay.

It was a huge effort.

I bet.

After that, I went to SCORE New York, which is a small business advisory, uh, city-run agency down in the financial district. And I got a mentor, a business mentor, and I said, I need help with this. How am I going to make pianos with small keys mainstream? You know, the industry doesn't want to embrace it. What should I do? And my mentor, who is the developer of the first Star Wars action figures, he wanted me to go to the Toy Fair because he thought it needed to start with kids. So I went to the Toy Fair and I found this red piano on display that Schoenhut Toy Piano had made. It's not a toy piano, it's a real string, hammer, pedal piano, but it's sized down so that a 4-year-old or 5-year-old can put their feet on the ground. It has narrower keys. I think it has 63 keys, and I just sat down and started playing it. And for several years they hired me to come to the Toy Fair and, you know, advocate this little piano. Unfortunately, It was so expensive to make in China that they had to stop production. It was just more expensive to make because, you know, pianos are expensive to make and to sell them, they would have to charge so much money to sell it retail. They had a very limited production run. So this taught me a lot about what people need to do to make pianos and what a challenge it is to change the way things are.

This episode is presented in collaboration with our good friends at Forte, a free alternative to Zoom purpose-built for music teachers. Forte offers features optimized for classical music lessons, including audio quality far superior to existing platforms and allowing you to hear every nuance of your students' instrument. Their colleagues at the Royal College of Music, Aspen Music Festival, Curtis Institute, and and the Berklee College of Music have even used Forte in their own programs. Forte's mission is to radically expand access to high-quality music education worldwide. Forte always puts teachers and their students first. This means you can use Forte with your own students for free forever. And Forte will soon introduce paid features allowing you to connect with new students around the world. Sign up for free today at www.thepianopodwithyukimi.com or click the link in the description. The size of the octave. So conventional size is 6.5 inches, but then the stretto piano can come in 5.5 or 6.

Yeah, 5.5 and 6.0 are the, are the two largely selling sizes that a small company in Titusville, Pennsylvania has been making since the 1990s. They're called Donison Steinbühler, DS Keyboards. I had my keyboard made by Kluge, which is the company in Germany that makes keyboards for Steinway Sons and many other companies. I, you know, the technicians I was working with wanted me to have the Steinway standard. So I was also very complicated to do this, to communicate in the 1990s with Germany, you know, pre-internet. But we all, we did things via fax. We had to do charcoal rubbings of different parts of the piano. It was really like a very elaborate effort. So my keyboard is 5.9-inch octave. I'm pretty sure. I had the smallest size that Kluge was willing to make for me back then. But my colleagues, Rhonda and Carol, and a group of other people, including David Steinbühler, who makes the keys himself, they you know, settled on 5.5 and 6.0, and lots of people around the world are purchasing the size that they want from him.

Oh, wow. Okay. Now, it comes in different types. Let's say one can be built, rebuilt, you know, just like you rebuilt your piano. And also, as I, you know, introduced you, you are the, you know, Steinway piano liaison. So if you want, if you have the financial means, you can build your own original Steinway.

You can custom order a piano that has narrower keys. Now, I haven't communicated with Steinway in quite a while because I've been very busy with the festival and there are supply chain issues. So people should know about that. You know, everything has supply chain issues these days and there are backorders even for custom Art Case pianos, people have been waiting a year. It's like, it's all— I'll get back in touch with them to find out what's going on now. But, you know, there are not that many people who can spend $120,000 or $130,000 for a piano. And the custom order is an additional bit of work and time. So, you know, if anybody who is listening to this wants to have a custom-built new piano made by Steinway, they should contact me and I will get in touch with the right people and let them know that there are people interested. I did get— when we first let the world know about that in our network of people who love small keys, I did get two orders, but both of the orders were people who wanted Spirio pianos, which most people know are like player pianos, digital player pianos. You can listen to Lang Lang or Horowitz or even Rachmaninoff playing your piano like a ghost, and you can record yourself. But Steinway was not willing to combine the two technologies at once. They thought, you know, we have to perfect this. We don't want to put it out until we have it just right. So innovation takes time in a big company like Steinway that's owned by a billionaire. You know, there is It's not a simple thing. It's like an electric car that you're asking for a special order before electric cars are available everywhere.

Right, right, right. Wow. It just goes so much into it. And I didn't— I don't realize. So, right. Then I'm also curious about the history. You briefly mentioned about the history, but can we talk about the history of piano? Let's say, you know, piano, the size of the keys were not this. Big or fat like this conventional modern piano, right? So it started—

that's—

so what happened to that piano? Tell us.

Yeah, Mozart and Chopin and Beethoven did not play a 6.5-inch octave. I can't imagine Mozart could have written his operas at age 5 or 6 and all those piano pieces in the way that he did with the big keys that we have today. Well, everything got bigger. Oh, it's— God, I could just talk about this for hours. Let me zero in on the most salient facts, the things that are important. What I learned from the Metropolitan Museum and examining things and talking with the curator and, you know, doing some reading, reading books and things, the size of the inch was actually different in different European countries, which is one of the reasons the metric system came to be. Like, you know, I think the inch was either this part of your thumb or some part of your body they called an inch. And fingers, bodies, thumbs were a different size in Italy than they were in Norway or England or Germany. So the Italian inch was smaller than the inch in Denmark. And they had different sizes of keys because they were measuring in inches. And they were also just, you know, accommodating their bodies. So as people became more spread out and this industry began to grow and more and more instruments were made in factories, and as people like Franz Liszt told the companies, I need a bigger piano, I need more keys, I need a cast iron plate. I need a bigger sound. He was the first person to say, you know, le concert, c'est moi. I am the concert and I need this piano to fit me. And he was a very large Caucasian man from Hungary. He was like a rock star before there were rock stars. He traveled all over the place and all of many, many countries in boats and horses and then trains eventually, you know, The world changed, so the piano changed. And by the time the 20th century came around, companies like Steinway said, we just want one size. However, there were always disruptors to this. There were always people saying, I need smaller keys, including the great Joseph Hoffman, who was my inspiration when I was a student. Well, Joseph Hoffman was a diminutive pianist. He was a small man. He was a great composer. He was a close friend of Rachmaninoff's. They were alive at the same time. So, you know, there's Joseph Hoffman and here's Sergei Rachmaninoff. They had different size hands. And Steinway built a number of pianos for him that had narrower keys. He, I think he was credited to have developed the windshield wiper and other inventions. He was an inventor. His name was on many patents with Steinway and Sons. He was very much a part of the company. And I believe he used to travel with his pianos. He had several, you know, around the country. And he could play Rachmaninoff's music with the ease that Rachmaninoff played his own music. I didn't know who he was until One of my teachers said to me towards the end of my being a student, he said, you know, Hana, you're playing great. You can play whatever you want now. You know, proud of you, but your hand is a little small. Why don't you find a Joseph Hoffman piano? So I called Steinway and I asked them to help me find one, and it was impossible. Frank Mazurko, who I adored and who helped me so much, I mean, it's like, send me on this wild goose chase all over the country. Oh, there's one here. Oh, there's one there. And I would call up and have Ephraim Zimbalist, you know, an actor in California, measure the keys on his Hoffman piano. But they were all the same size as the conventional keys. So I kept, you know, like it was taking a lot of time to do this work while I'm teaching and practicing and performing and wondering, you know, why is this so difficult? And eventually I talked to Henry Steinway, I had to get to the top of the food chain. And I said, where are the Hoffman pianos? And he said, oh, we burned all of those after Hoffman died. We wanted to make sure that there was nothing out there. So we didn't want to have to deal with making this size for this person and that size for that person. Standardization is what we needed. I was in such shock when I heard that. Now I can't remember exactly. I think that might have been why I really wanted to rebuild my piano. Either that or I had already put it into motion and I knew for sure that it was the right thing to do to do it myself.

Since then, what a long journey, but you've come this far.

It's like 30 years.

Wow.

Yes, that's really amazing. Then also there is a group of people organization, Christopher Donison and David Steinbühler.

You know, yes, that's— I earlier— DS, that's Donison Steinbühler, DS Keyboards. They started a business together, but Chris Donison is not part of it now. David Steinbühler kept the name, and he has a foundation. I mean, the most important thing to know about DS Keyboards is that They're a small outfit in Titusville, Pennsylvania that makes keyboards that are narrower width than the conventional ones. And David has helped dozens of people all over the world rebuild their existing instruments to have narrower keys. It's really been a very noble effort for so many years. I met them back in the 1990s and I'm just so impressed with how productive they've been. They're not part of the manufacturing industry per se, The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, manufacturing industry. They're a small cottage industry and they can build— what I last heard is they can build and install one per month. So, you know, 12 pianos a year, that's not really enough to make the impact that we need for everybody to know about it, which is why you didn't know about it.

Right, right. Right. Of course. So I wanted to talk about the challenge. To make these— this stretch piano known and eventually become— I wouldn't say, but why not mainstream? Why not? Because as I was reading the articles, 75% of pianists say they prefer to have narrower keys. That is insane. Then there is something wrong with this modern piano, right?

Well, you know, it's useful. I love all pianos and I play it. I haven't stopped performing. I've never had any injuries. I don't, you know, I don't hate the big fat keys, as I sometimes call them. But, you know, I really enjoy playing my little keys if I'm playing difficult music.

What's it been like to convince a big company like Steinway to build them? What was the journey like?

Oh, well, I mean, it was fascinating. Because they were supportive. They really did help me. But they're afraid of upsetting the industry. Like, you know, I think the electric car is a very good analogy. Because we don't want to vilify big companies for caring about their stake in business, you know. And it's a complex issue because Steinway is a, as a luxury brand. You know, they are catering to the top 2% of the world and they want to be known as a, as a luxury brand and they want all of their products to succeed. So, you know, on the one hand, Ron Losby, who has been one of my advisors and who I also adore, he was the CEO and the president for many years. He's retired, but he's still related to the company. I've known him since 2016. He took my proposals to China, to Germany. I made a PowerPoint presentation. I mean, I really did everything that all these presidents asked me to do. I got the patent, I made the presentations, I got myself on the front page of the paper, whatever. I did everything I could as an individual, but they just kept telling me, Hana, you do it, you do it, you do it. And I finally figured out from looking at all of my own literature and my own analysis of the industry that the way in is with performance and that all of us who have pianos and if we can perform on them, you know, there's only so much talking and presenting and graphs that you can do, that the proof is really in the playing. So if I have my piano in a public space, if I found my own concert hall and, you know, raise money to have a hall for 2 or 3 years and invite as many people as I can of all ages to just sit down and make music. We don't have to have these arguments anymore. All of us all over the world, we were there, there are 40 to 50 people all over the world on 5 continents, many of whom have been on our online festival once a year. We all know this is happening. It's not something we're waiting for or praying for. We live with our instruments. We know the difference. We know the comfort. We know the joy. And the creativity and the expression. We just need to have a little bit more media exposure and have a lot more playing. So that's how I feel the industry will be affected. I am not interested in knocking on people's doors and trying to persuade them of something that I know in my heart is just wonderful. So I decided to take it upon myself to create a space in New York City where people can come from all over the world and have the experience to play pianos with narrower keys or have a choice of key size, right? And have two pianos there so people with big hands can come and play too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's really the success is within changing people's perspectives and mindset toward it, right? Yeah, just like you compared this situation with the electric car and how our mindset has changed and then electric car is more becoming more mainstream.

The only way people could really know that is by experiencing that, not by talking about it.

Right.

So, you know, if an electric car was just noisy and clunky and horrible and, you know, uncomfortable, it wouldn't be accepted. But once— and there were a lot of prejudices against electric cars. The first electric car was introduced in 1890. You know, that was a long time ago.

Oh my goodness.

Pianos with narrow keys have been around forever. They've never, they've never been eliminated and they will continue to be around. It's just the words you use, mainstream. How does that happen? There are a lot of challenges, but I really do believe that new technologies, new materials, you know, ideas that my colleagues and I have that stem from the experience of playing, it's all happening right now.

Wow, this is exciting. So speaking of that, so next step in your Strato journey?

Well, I'm raising money if anybody wants to donate. An active fundraising page and we'll launch our campaign end of April, beginning of May, knock on wood. To, you know, I'd like to raise $500,000 or more to rent a space in New York City and put both of my pianos in there. And invite people from all over the world to come and play concerts. So, you know, there are two steps. Right now I'm looking for a dedicated space that's temporary, either in a university or a gallery or someplace where we can share the piano with an existing space, or we'll rent one for the festival. I've had my pianos in recording studios and in churches and other places for years. I've done this to, you know, raise awareness and then to really have a dedicated space. You know, I have to be willing to give up my teaching studio, to give up a lot of other things. I mean, I've given up a lot over my whole career to pursue this because it really is time-consuming. But I'm willing to do that really for the community and for the betterment of other people and also for myself so that I can play concerts on a piano that fits me in my town. And hopefully we can have venues like that all over the world and people can tour around in the designated spots and play on pianos that fit them. That's, you know, step by step we can put a system into place.

Now, so one of the things, amazing things you do to promote is obviously the International Stradivarius Piano Festival and so forth. But before going in there, so I have this, I wondered, what it's like to adjust from the regular-sized piano to the stretto in terms of playing-wise. I mean, you know, for someone like us with, you know, smaller hands, it's much— it feels easier. But however, we were trained in such a way that we have this muscular sort of memory of, let's say, I can sort of feel the octaves now, without touching the keys, right? So how is it to adjust from— especially you can go back and forth between a conventional-sized piano to stretto piano. What's it like to adjust?

It's much easier than most people would imagine. That's like the biggest argument. I mean, I studied with Herman Diaz, who was the pupil of Claudio Arau. And I remember Mr. Diaz always used to tell me, you know, when you get the right technique, it's natural. And what's natural is easier to adjust to than what's unnatural. So play the natural way. And, you know, it's when you're doing something that really fits you. I mean, actually, what you're— when you have something that's too big for you, you're adjusting, you're adjusting and adjusting and adjusting. Have you played harpsichord or forte piano ever? So, you know, you play like, you know, Goldberg Variations or some Bach. It's not that hard to go from the harpsichord to the piano. I also with Ken Cooper, who was, you know, this big tall man. He was a great pianist, but harpsichord was his instrument. He played— he changed all the time, and he was big. So I think it's a much smaller deal than most people think. I mean, if you're playing virtuoso material, of course you've got to spend some time practicing. It should be memorized. You should use your eyes, you know, They're every now and then when I'm playing Claire de Lune, I really like the big keys because I got started. You know, it was just like it feels good actually to move that way. It feels smaller, but it is easier. I think everybody who has one of these pianos will attest that it's not difficult. We can, we can ask all of them at some point.

Wow. Yeah. And then I was watching some of the videos that was posted on the organization, uh, what is it, uh, paskpiano.org. And some, some of the pianists, like, when they first experienced the stretto piano, you know, narrow key pianos, they were in tears because just the sensation that they felt. They didn't have to, you know, make their hands try to make them bigger, you know. They felt natural. They felt like and then one of the pianists was like crying, and she says, "Wow, my hands look bigger." Yeah, they do, they do.

You think, wow, this is what it feels like to be a big man. This is really interesting, right?

Yeah.

Oh, no, a little bit more about their experiences. Yeah.

Hey, TPP friends and listeners, The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song is in its third season. Thanks to all of you for watching or listening to every episode since its launch in 2020. I started this show with a simple question I had in mind for quite some time, which is, how can we as classical pianists and music educators present the beautiful classical music tradition to the 21st century audience in a fun, contemporary, and engaging way? It's been an incredible journey for the last 3 years. I love what I do through this podcast, providing a platform a platform for pianists and educators to reflect and discuss freely how we can keep the classical music industry thriving and relevant in this rapidly changing world. Now more than ever, I need your support so that I can continue my work by bringing you highly valuable content biweekly by interviewing groundbreakers in the industry. Your support will go directly to all the costs of The The Piano Pod, such as a yearly subscription to the podcast hosting platform, the software I use for high-quality recording sessions, and tech gear, as well as all the hours I spend researching and audio and video editing. You can make a one-time donation or monthly pledge by clicking the PayPal link in the show notes or going to TPP's website at thepianopodwithyukimi-song.com. Www.pianopod.com. As a thank you, you will receive The Piano Pod's fun logo sticker in the mail. So please support my show today and don't forget to subscribe, continue listening, and tell your friends and colleagues about The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. Let's continue with the episode. Now, so let's talk about the International Strato Piano Festival. Um, so can you— what's the mission? Where does this festival take place? And when Does that happen?

Well, I decided to create this festival after a composer from Germany gave me a piece of music that I could not play the first chord. And I thought, I want to play all the notes in this chord if I'm going to play this piece, if I'm going to premiere this work. So I decided I would only play it on my piano with little keys. And I said, you know, I'm going to invite other people. Let's have an event in New York. It was— everything was shut down in 2021. This was pre-vaccine. And I decided that I would have an online festival. Actually, I think it was like Ron Losby and I were talking about this. He, he was the one who said, let's put your piano in a public space and see what happens. So the pandemic was actually— had a lot of silver linings for the Stretto Piano because the church where the piano was, the gallery space, was pretty crowded before the pandemic, and then suddenly I could practice there every day and I brainstormed and I was like, yeah, I'm going to have an online festival. I've been playing all these online concerts. There was a company that was doing online streaming concerts, and that was what led me to contact Rhonda and Carol. Rhonda Boyle of PASC Piano. She and Carol and Erica Booker created PASC, and Carol Leone, as I told you, is this wonderful professor and pianist. They've got the worldwide network. I had the idea and I had a location. And the Stretto Festival was originally completely online because we couldn't have live audiences. And we had 18 concerts, people from 4 different continents. We grossed $8,600. There were 400 people in attendance. We did not market anything. This movement is so powerful. And when I told Ron that, I mean, I could hear the silence on the phone when I said, we made $8,600, Ron. I think he was— didn't know what to do because he didn't think we would have success. That was year one. And then the second year, we had 32 pianists on 5 continents, and I had many more live concerts with live audiences. I switched locations because we outgrew the first location. And at that point, the world was opening up more in 2022, and people didn't want to be online quite as much. So I try to tap into, with my friends in the entertainment industry, what's happening online and what's happening live in person. People want to go out and hear concerts. So my intention is to, for the next 2 years, is to make the festival more and more in person, definitely in New York and wherever else we can do it. Around the world and hopefully have some solidarity with whatever those spaces are. I'm, you know, I'm hoping I would like to propose that to the community. But meanwhile, this year we have in-person concerts in New York and then we have uploaded virtual concerts during the festival period, which is July 15 to 23, 2023. And, you know, we are working very hard at it now in between all the other things that we all do in our our careers. I have a fantastic new assistant whose name is Julia Furlan. She graduated from University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her master's, having worked, you know, playing a stretto piano for years. So she's part of this community. She now lives in New York, and I really enjoy working on this with her. In fact, I'm hoping that we can have a few minutes with her on this podcast and she can talk about her experience in university.

Here we have Julia Furlan, pianist and editor of The Violin Channel, and she is actually a fellow Brooklynite. We're very close to each other, and also she is Hannah's assistant. So Julia, thanks for being here today.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Yeah. And then the reason I wanted to include you in this episode is that you do use stretto piano and actually received your master's degree in piano studies with Stretto Pianos. That's amazing. So tell me your journey as a pianist. How did you discover Stretto Pianos and then end up getting a degree with Stretto?

My story started out a little sad in a way. I was in college and playing around 6 or 7 hours a day, and the overuse and the constant— it's a piano performance degree. You're playing a lot. But by my junior year, I started getting some really bad tendonitis in my forearms. And I think part of it, and what doctors were telling me, they basically said, "You should just stop playing." After dedicating your whole life to playing an instrument and your whole college degree, that wasn't really an option. I think I remember vividly playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in B-flat major and just thinking, "I wish I had a bigger hand. It would be so much easier." Those loud octaves and chords. Were so uncomfortable and was creating so much tension. So I got through the degree with quite a lot of painkillers and physical therapy and all that. And by the end of it, I heard from a friend that the school in North Carolina called Salem College was offering a degree in piano performance that specializes in injury preventive technique, which isn't very offered in many places. So I got on the phone with the director. Her name is Dr. Barbara Lister-Sink, and she was walking me through, you know, they do a lot of retraining for injured pianists and you do an overhaul of your piano technique basically. And she mentioned during this phone call, oh, we have these small narrow keyboards that we allow our students to play on. And I was shocked. I said, well, what is this small narrow keyboard you're talking about? And when I went down to North Carolina to try it, it, it was one of the most emotional experiences I have ever had. It was a combination of so much happiness because it felt so much comfortable, more comfortable. The forearm tension was barely there after years of dealing with it. Um, and then the other emotion was a little bit of anger, if I'm being honest, because I had never heard of these and I couldn't help but think, oh gosh, you know, what could I have avoided if I had known these existed? And I had come from a pretty top-notch musical education, so I was just shocked that no one had known about these or, you know, educated myself and my colleagues in it. So, um, yeah, it was, it was quite an emotional journey, but once I found the narrow keys, I, I kind of haven't gone back since.

So, right, Salem College seems to be really open to this idea, but did you have a hard time convincing them, uh, in terms of getting your master's degree with stretto?

Actually, no, it was pretty encouraged because there are all of these studies that show the benefits of playing on a small, smaller keyboard. So my teacher actually quite encouraged it. And it is important to note we played on both. So I would practice maybe like half my time on the Strato Piano and then my other half on the conventional keyboard. And I even did my master's recital on the conventional, but I practiced for it basically on the stretto most of the time, and you would be quite surprised how easy it is to switch in between. It's really not. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to ask, I'm very curious, like switching from, you know, stretto. I think that's one of number one question that people probably would ask, right? I'm sure you had the similar question. That's why probably a lot of people will have a little doubt. About strettos, but that's my next question. What's, what's like from switching initially from standard conventional pianos to stretto?

So we actually in our practice room had the conventional right next to the stretto, and I would use the stretto, especially if I was like feeling a little tightness in my arms that day and everything would go great. And then when I wanted to switch to the bigger key, I would say it would take me 15 to 20 minutes minutes to recalibrate. It's way quicker than you think. Your hands and your body know what to do. It's— I think people have the conception that, oh gosh, it'll mess me up. It'll— it really took me— it's very quick. The hardest thing for me was, um, the jumps and the leaps. That's the main thing that you have to practice getting again, um, because that's such an exact movement that you have to do. With Carmen And. So I have the master's recital to prove that you can practice on a stretto piano most of your days and then, you know, 2 weeks prior, start working on the conventional one and play a recital on the conventional keyboard.

So lastly, what's the message for our listeners who— most of my listeners probably do not know the existence of stretto pianos, and plus probably while listening, just when I first heard, it's like a little bit of a doubt in my mind. How is this possible? And how I didn't hear about this till now?

Yeah, I think the message is that when you think about all of the other instruments that people play, most of them can have different sizes, especially for children. They have children-sized violins and so on. And piano is really one of the few that don't have a different size and don't accommodate other small hands. When you think about it, the narrow key can really benefit not just children, but college students that are playing big standard rep with small hands. It could benefit a professional pianist. It could really open up a world, a whole new world of repertoire for pianists that didn't otherwise think they could do it. Um, yeah, the main message is that they should be more accepted and should be more known about. And the beautiful work that Hannah's doing with Stretto Piano Concerts and Festival, our main mission is just to get more awareness. And when people see professional pianists performing on these instruments, it'll be a no-brainer. They're like, "Oh, my, one of my favorite pianists performed on that. That's, that should be an accepted instrument." And we're just working on the steps to make it not as niche and just more commonplace.

So, right, that's wonderful. And then I'm glad that you're part of this movement, right, of stretch pianos. It could—

you could see it from the musician wellness standpoint. So many schools and universities these days are focusing on musician health, and they'll have a month or they'll have resources for their students. And I do think having stretcho pianos in your piano department can help with that. And would be a part of that and would be a really great idea to include that option for your smaller-handed pianists.

Universities all over the world now that have these pianos people don't know about, and they're getting degrees and they're playing repertoire that they would never be able to play without these pianos. Really? So I brought the PASC website up. PASC stands for Pianists for Alternately Sized Keys, and it's a great resource. There's one page that tells you where you can play these pianos. And I'll just whip up a few names. Universities and music schools in North America. At the top of the list, SMU Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, Texas, where Dr. Carol Leone teaches. She has many pianos with narrow keys. University of North Texas Denton, Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, Salem College, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, St. Olaf College in Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Um, oh yeah, The professor there, Jess Johnson, she's a fantastic pianist. She's had been part of our festival for 2 years. University of Central Oklahoma, San Diego State University, Tina Chung, fantastic pianist. She's also going to be playing with us for the second time this year. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Piano Preparatory Department of Southern Methodist University Dallas, Gray School of Music Dallas, and then in Europe, in Stuttgart, in Manchester, England, in Nuremberg, Germany, Australia, in Melbourne. You know, it just goes on and on. And Cape Town, South Africa. Every time we have a meeting, I hear about another location, another university that has Narrow Keys, and I hear about students who are benefiting. And if anybody wants to hear the testimonials, you know, you saw a short clip of our sizzle reel. You can go to the stretpianoconzerts.org and hear what people have to say in studios, universities, homes. Yeah, it's arrived.

Wow. Thank you so much. So stretpianoconzerts.org where you can find all these wonderful information if you're curious. And I would love for everybody to be actually on it, on this, on her project.

And importantly, passpiano.org because there are a lot more statistics and years and years of research and the graphs and the articles. We are really focused on performance, but we dovetail with Pass Piano a bit. Um, yeah, I just, I want to focus on the performance and getting people to come to things live, and Pass Piano can give you even more, uh, information about electronic keyboards that have smaller keys, uh, the universities, many, many things, much more information. And we'll be, we'll collaborating in the future.

Great. Hannah, where does this passion come from? I mean, with this thread, The Piano Pod, I mean, it comes from your own experience as a pianist, I'm sure.

Well, it does, but oddly, I was a very happy pianist, you know, from being a small child until I grew up. I just loved playing the piano. And I didn't consider my size a problem. I think that kind of confidence has served me because I don't really feel discouraged, you know. I am also a singer and I have all kinds of different outlets for my music making. If anybody ever told me that I had my hands were too small to be a pianist, I just didn't believe that. Them. I just, I loved making music. My father taught me my first Bach and Beethoven when I was a small child, and I just loved playing.

So your dad was a pianist? Is a pianist?

He, my dad was a doctor. He was a very good amateur pianist. He had a harpsichord. He played the organ. Yeah, his friend, his friend in, in university in Heidelberg, Reiner Schütze, was a harpsichord maker. So he had a, he, you know, had a kit and he built a harpsichord that I grew up with. He had this Steinway, Hamburg Steinway piano that I inherited. My father passed in 2014. So my dad was really, you know, a big influence on me. He taught me to love the great German and Austrian composers. And I wanted to play like him. He didn't have enormous hands. And I, you know, I'm also a multi-genre artist. I'm I haven't— I've never been only in the classical world. I sang in rock bands when I was a preteen, and I sang in a punk band, and I write music. I do all kinds of different things. I started making films when I became an actor. And I, I don't know, I think maybe the freedom that I've had, not being boxed in, even though it limited me to not like going for the classical career, I really feel like I've seen the entertainment industry in a slightly bigger way, and I love classical piano and I will always play it. But we all— we have to realize that, you know, an innovation like changing the size of piano keys, the classical world, you know, that's a very small part of entertainment. And for this to be embraced by the world, we have to include everybody, all the amateurs, all the children, all the people who play pop. All the people who could care less about classical music. It's a world of invention. So I don't know, seeing that has made me— I don't get discouraged easily by anything. I never wanted to quit doing this. I mean, I get tired of spending all this money and time and effort, but I knew that— I knew from playing and from from, you know, more testimonials that I heard and things that popped up on my radar over 30 years that this was not a waste of time.

But with all the time and effort you spent and also money too, eventually you'll have a piano named after you.

Oh no, Yukimi. I mean, when I was in my 20s, I told my mom that I was like, you think there can be a Ryman piano? And she's like, Anna, just forget about that. Just go on your path and just do whatever you can. So I forgot about it.

Well, I can really see that happen. I wouldn't say next year, but you know, just keep going with this journey. And I'm—

Well, I was married to a man named Paul Coletti, who is a fabulous violist and, you know, famous violist. I remember when I had to consider taking his name or not, I was like, well, if I make a piano called Ryman, it's going to sound like it's going to last forever. But if I make it Coletti, sounds very artistic, but a little delicate. I want the German name. I don't know if that's crazy, but that actually crossed my mind when I got married. And now we're not married. So, you know, I have my name. We're still good friends. He's still a very important person Important in my life. person in my life.

Wonderful. Wow. So then I want to talk a little bit about your career. You have this interesting— as you mentioned, you are an actor, you do filmmaking, you do compose, you're also a teacher, right? So especially I'm very curious about your project about Joni Mitchell, the famous Canadian songwriter, singer-songwriter. And actually you resemble her a little bit. Yeah, like from her like late '60s to '70s, you know, in 1970s around that time of the picture, especially when she has the bangs. And I think I've seen your photos with the bangs, and then I was like, oh yeah, you look like Joni Mitchell. Anyway, so you devoted your part of your career interpreting you know, her music, Joni's music. And, uh, I, I think you have created the show called Both Sides Now, which is actually the title of her very famous song. And then as I was researching, Joni Mitchell actually like is encouraging you or advocating you, like giving you like a lot of praise, right? Or maybe the—

it's a website I don't know if she herself is aware of my interpretations. I'm, you know, I'm a very careful— I don't want to approach her in a pushy way. The quickest way for me to express this is Joni Mitchell is a wonderful composer whose music I love. I think of her the same way I think of Beethoven, or, you know, I specialized in Astor Piazzolla when I was in my 20s and early 30s. I love her music. And the same way I want to honor those composers, I want to honor her work. She's very famous in the pop music world. You know, there's a lot of guard dogs. It's a different world than classical music. There's like all this music publishing and millions of dollars involved with, you know, people of that stature. I mean, some famous classical composers the same. But, you know, if the opportunity arises that she hears our interpretations, me and my band or you know, me and my colleagues. I would love that. The best I can do is just, you know, continuing to play her music. I, I, I started that project for very deeply personal reasons when my dad was extremely sick with dementia and like from around 2010 to 2014. I mean, it's just— and like as a musician, can you imagine if you didn't have a memory anymore? You just lost your memory. I remember when my father, you know, he played the accordion, he played the piano. Eventually he just refused because he started to forget what to do. And it made him so angry that he just quit playing everything. But he would sing when I would accompany him. And we, you know, my movie has some— him singing a song by Schubert. Spirit. I made a movie about him and the last 3 years of his life, and the Joni Mitchell project is like related with all of that. Um, I turned to a record called Blue that she wrote in the late '60s and '70s. These were really special songs to help me heal from this terrible pain that I was feeling, and that was how the project started. But it was, it was not easy, as easy as I thought it would be, and it was so much work that, um, the guitar player I work with Michelle Temple, we decided to continue performing her music. And then I would hire, you know, more people to do the larger ensembles for birthday shows and bigger shows to celebrate her birthday. And it's been really very rewarding to play this music. I really— it's really taught me a lot as a songwriter and as a musician, as an arranger. Yeah, I'm very grateful to her for all the amazing amount of work that she's produced over the— you know, she'll be 80 this year. And it's quite amazing.

Wow, that's great. Now you also have made, you know, independent films. You are— you appeared in over 20 independent films and everything. Where does the— I mean, do you have like 27 hours a day or something?

That— and that, you know, my acting career was also interrupted by, um, by my father's illness. I had this dream that I wanted to play in movies. I wanted to play piano in movies because I kept seeing all these actors pretending to play, or they'd have a body double. I thought, "Maybe I could do both." I went to acting school and then I fell in love with acting and I started playing all kinds of roles. I realized that this whole thing about playing to camera, there's there's like this many roles with that. There's like, there's, it's very hard to create that role. And maybe I'll create my own film one day, who knows. Um, but I, it was also, I think, I think it's important for singers to study acting because it changes the performance, you know, of presentation of song lyrics. A lot of, of opera singers have dramatic coaches, you Yeah, I'm an artist. I don't really fit into a box, but it was a gift to me to become an actor and to work in those films because when my father got sick, I thought, I want to make a documentary about my dad and his illness. It gave me the courage from working on these very small productions to just do it myself in an inexpensive way, just work with cinematographers and get a camera myself. So, you know, my, my film is for sale. It's called My Father's House: A Journey of Love and Memory. I have a distributor, and I, I learned a lot from that experience. But that's, you know, it kind of dovetails with the Joni project.

Wow. Incredible. Wow. So for listeners, if you want to find more about Hannah's past project and current ones, and please go to Hannah Reimer. Pianopodwithyukimi.com.

And doesn't—

great.

Yeah.

So now I kind of want to more go toward the philosophical questions. I want to know your vision of the classical music industry. So what's your thought on keeping this classical music industry or classical music itself relevant and then thriving in this fast-paced society, especially in this post-pandemic era?

You know, that's such a great question, Yukimi Song, and I haven't thought about it for years, but when I saw it on the list of questions you sent me, I was like, wow, what a wonderful thing that you're doing, asking about this now, because life does race ahead, and classical music was built on this foundation of being in the moment, creating, you know, notes on pages that we we didn't use iPads for it. Like, I still use a pencil and staff paper. I think that's, you know, part of the beauty of great classical music. When I started this project with Narrow Keys, what kept ringing in my mind was, I want to meet the next Mozart. I want to put as many young kids in front of a piano that fits them and see who improvises and writes great music. That is, you know, okay, so it's going to be protected by copyright. They didn't have copyright back in the 1700s and 1800s. People shared ideas constantly. You know, being married to Paul and playing all over the world with Paul, we didn't steal from each other. We didn't, you know, we weren't possessive about a phrase of music. We wrote together. And like, I mean, I'm not going to compare myself with Mozart and Haydn, but, you know, they shared music. They learned from each other. They didn't have to pay each other fees to do this. I truly believe that compositions that come forth from improvisation and from the activity of playing is the most beautiful and pure expression of music. I'm not against academic music. That's, you know, like we used to call it plink-plonk music. That's just very mathematic and doesn't necessarily have recognizable melodies or harmonies or rhythm, which is what I always thought music was. But whatever the expression of passion and emotion that all the great composers that we continue to play and memorize thousands of hours where that came from, those kids, those young composers, I know they're out there. I know that there's beautiful music that can continue to be flowing from people's hearts and minds and hands. And I guess I would like to see that celebrated in whatever way is possible. And I, you know, that was what changed the development of musical instruments. Let's see if we can just have a little bit more fun with that and, you know, look into innovation and new practices.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think we're ever gonna change, like, you know, the harmonies and the scales from, from Western and Eastern music. They're mixing together the Indian scales, the, you know, we're both have East Asian blood. I'm half Korean, in case anybody doesn't know out there. You know, everything will continue to mix together, but we're not going to reinvent bent the wheel to an unrecognizable place, right?

Then also, you do a lot of multidisciplinary project or creation when it comes to music, but also you have this multidisciplinary career anyway. You have your actor, filmmaker, composer, musician. So under the umbrella of classical music, you know, quote unquote, how far can we push in terms of multidisciplinary works and performances, you think?

I know more and more musicians like myself who switch genres. I think it's just much more accepted now. I mean, there are people like Steve Sandberg, Chris O'Reilly, David Amram, who's in his 90s. They're all going to be in the Stretto Festival this year, and some of them have been in the past. I know more and more pianists who switch from jazz to classical and to playing pop accompanying. I think it's a much more flexible world today than it was when I was a student. There were an enormous number of prejudices against me. Like, you know, you can't be a Renaissance person, you can't do all of these things well. Again, like, I just didn't let it discourage me. And I, you know, I listened to Joni Mitchell. She doesn't have a genre. She has like dozens of records and they're all different. They couldn't be put in boxes. Now suddenly she's getting all this acclaim for that. So, you know, I mean, business, creativity, those are the things that is the problem, that those things butt heads against each other and putting people in boxes. I think people are beginning to realize that they don't really care about that anymore, you know? Okay, so there's copyright, there's— there's— you can't make money off of CDs or albums anymore, right? What do you get, like 0.0017 cents for every stream? Like maybe after 20 years you might make $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 on Spotify. But you know, it depends on who you are. But I think in a way that has opened things up a little bit. That business broke down a bit and is really disappointing for musicians. But it's opened something up, it's allowed people to be a little bit more multidisciplinary. I mean, there are many— don't you think there are many more multidisciplinary artists now than when we were a lot younger?

Yeah, I've interviewed so many of them. Even they have this really straightforward classical career, classical music career, but then on the side, for example, they do a lot of multidisciplinary things. And then I did not know about, you know, after teaching for 30 years.

The other thing is, it's like, I think it's I think it's just good not to have prejudices against each other. Some of my students will only be classical musicians. Some of them will only be improvisers. Some of them will only, you know, sing a certain style. You know, I don't think anybody should attack anybody else for being this or being that. I think it's, you know, it's like you were talking in the beginning of our conversations about equity. People choose. They can make discoveries, have experiences, and choose. Choose what suits them. And if you can do more than one thing, there's nothing wrong with that.

Right. What's next step for you, for your career, especially with the Stretto? What do you— tell me.

I had to face that if I really wanted to devote myself to this concert series and, you know, put my pianos in a public space, I would have to make that the biggest thing in my life, even if it, you know, like I have to humble myself and put it before other parts of my career. But I need to balance that with the fact that I am a performer and that I'm a creator and that is part of my identity. So I'm— and it's a balancing act. I'm trying to find ways to progress with all of those things. But I feel like the time has really come to offer people a choice of key size. And since my piano is the only one in New York that's been in a public space, I don't really know in New York City where the other where other pianos with small keys are, or if there are any like my piano that we could have concerts on. So I feel like, you know, it's time for me to devote myself to that. It's very difficult in New York City with the price of real estate, challenges of real estate. That's really the biggest challenge of my life. But I'm confident that it will happen. And I encourage everybody to donate to our cause. Come and play the piano, help us put it in a place and play with us. You know, have fun. Let's do something enjoyable together. That's, that's what I'm devoted to right now.

Sounds great. So once again, Stretto Piano. And then if you want to find more about Stretto Piano and then the International Stretto Piano Festival, please go to Strettopianoconcerts.org. But also you can check out paskpiano.org to learn more about pianos of alternatively sized keyboards.

And as a side note, because I know my producer would kill me if I didn't say this, stretchopianoconzerts.org is really important. However, I am coming out with an EP this year. You know, I— it's been put off for years because of the pandemic. I'll have a new record this year. I just released a single. If you want to hear it, it's on my my website. There's a little teaser music video. I'll be working on some music videos. Um, I plan to go to Los Angeles to do my Joni show, and we'll have more shows in New York. And, um, I'll be, you know, making a solo piano record as well. I've been very quiet about that, but that's, that's something that I have been wanting to do for many years, and it's time to do that too with my stretto piano. So I— there, there's a recording that I made back in the 1990s that I never released, and I'm excited about, you know, getting that music out too, and just, you know, having the courage to be seen as a classical player as well.

Wow, you are amazing. Wow. I— not a lot of people even can accomplish half of what you're doing, so that's, that's amazing. That's great. Yeah, yeah.

I hope that you'll come and try the piano when it's in the right place.

I know, I would love to. I would love to really attend one of the concerts or festival.

Yeah, get it in a space before then. I'll invite you as soon as possible. Right now the piano's in storage and I'm anxiously hoping to move it, you know, by and have it in a place where people can come and try it.

Wonderful. Yes, please, please invite me. I would love to try it. Yeah, thank you. So this has been such a fun and really inspirational conversation, Hannah. And before I let you go, we have one more thing to do, which is The Piano Pod rapid-fire questions. And this is a part of the show where I get to ask fun questions to each guest. So here's a little warning: as silly as these questions may sound, your answers may reveal who you truly are. So ready or not? Okay. All right. So question number One, what is your comfort food?

Bibimbap.

Amen. Yes. How do you like your coffee?

I drank it black this morning, but I'm usually, I'm usually an oat latte or a half and half person. Depends on the day.

Cats or dogs?

Oh my God, that one I can't answer. I love them both. Sorry.

It's okay.

No, I'm okay. I'm a dog person. Person. But Solomon, my cat, you know, whatever. He's my soulmate.

What is your word or words to live by?

Carpe diem. Live in the moment. Presence. Now. Yeah.

What is the most important quality you look for in other people?

Authenticity.

Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead.

Joseph Hoffa, Maurice Curie. Um, and then the last person is going to be Elliott Sharp because I just met him. I have many people, but I just met him. He's a really cool composer, totally out of the box. Just heard him play, really interesting.

So name one piece in your current playlist.

The Boho Dance by Joni Mitchell.

Now this is the last one, so fill in the Music is blank.

My life.

Thank you for answering all these questions. So this concludes this episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Hannah Raven. Thank you, Hannah, for joining my show today and then sharing your stories and insights and expertise. You can learn more about Hannah and her amazing work through her website at HannahRaven.com, and you can find more information about Stretto Pianos at Strettopianoconzerts.org. All the links are in the show notes. And thank you to my wonderful audience and fans for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform you use. Remember to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to my YouTube channel if you're watching from YouTube, and follow The Piano Pod with social media to get the latest piano news via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I will see you for the next episode of The Piano Pod with everyone. And thank you, Hannah. Thank you so much.

Thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you.