Season 5 Episode 1: "Transcendent Musical Vision" feat. Concert Pianist/Educator, Dr. Sara...

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Welcome back to The Piano Pod everyone! It's the first episode of our new season— Season 5! I hope you all had a fantastic summer. I've really missed connecting with you. Before diving in, I encourage you to check out our introductory episode for this season, which came out last week. There you'll discover what's in store: exciting guests, inspiring topics, and our special focus on authenticity and joy throughout Season 5, including why we chose these themes. You can find a link to the intro episode in the description. I am thrilled to kick off this season by introducing our first guest, who truly embodies the essence of authenticity and joy, Dr. Sarah Davis Buchner. Dr. Buchner is celebrated for her musical command, cosmopolitan artistry, and visionary independence, making her one of the most original concert pianists of our time. Celebrated for her intelligence, integrity, and technical prowess and thoughtful artistry, she has won top prizes at prestigious international piano competitions, including the Queen Elizabeth and Tchaikovsky competitions. Dr. Birkner has performed as a soloist and chamber musician across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia with renowned orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, and in iconic venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Her versatile repertoire includes collaborations with film and dance, and she has premiered works by contemporary composers like John Corigliano and Yukiko Nishimura. A dedicated educator, Dr. Buchner joined Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance in 2016. After teaching at institutions like the Manhattan School of Music. As a proud transgender woman, she also advocates for LGBTQ+ visibility and inclusion, contributing her voice to media outlets and events worldwide. So, dear friends, today we explore Dr. Sarah Davis-Buechner's incredible journey as a trailblazing concert pianist and educator, focusing on her visionary artistry, mastery in piano technique, and her advocacy for both lesser-known composers and the LGBTQ+ community. Please stay with me until the end of the episode, as our conversation will lead to a more philosophical discussion later. So let's begin The Piano Pod's first episode of this new season with our guest, Dr. Sarah Davis-Buechner. Please enjoy the show. You are listening to The Piano Pod, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the future and thriving in a complex, ever-evolving world. Welcome to The Piano Pod with Dr. Buchner. Thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure to be here, a great honor.

Thank you. It's, it's really an absolute honor and pleasure to have you as our first guest of the season, and especially with our focus on Authenticity and Joy this year, and I couldn't imagine a more fitting guest to kick off this season. You truly embody the spirit of joy and authenticity. And first of all, I just want to congratulate you for your special recital at Merkin Hall last spring.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Yeah, and it was the celebration of your incredible 40th year— 40 years since your New York City debut, and I bought a ticket, and unfortunately I got very sick for 2 days. I couldn't go out nowhere, so unfortunately I had to miss, but I heard it was a spectacular recital. Could you share some highlights from that night and what it meant to you to celebrate such a huge, huge milestone in your career? How did it feel to perform at such a significant event?

Well, the recital came about a little bit of of a surprise for me because just my manager said, oh, they want to present you at Merkin, which had never really happened before. So it was just, you know, going to be another recital on the concert slate. But I realized that the date was going to coincide generally with the 40th anniversary of my New York debut, which was back in 1984, and I wanted to mark it by playing something special. As it happens, I had been studying a lot of piano music by a Hungarian composer named Péter Wolf, a set of pieces that he calls the Wolf Tempered Klavier, rather cleverly. It's jazz-inspired, very, very fun, somewhat demanding but fun pieces for piano. And this music had come to me through Péter's cousin, Veronika Wolf, who was my very first piano teacher when I was 4 and 5 years old. It's a wonderful story. Beautiful connection. She had sent me a few copies of some of the pieces that he had written during the COVID time saying, "I think you might be interested in playing some of these." And I was so touched, I remember getting into tears when I played that Adagio in E major, which I recorded on YouTube shortly after getting that music. So, around that time I got in touch with Peter by Zoom and I played most of those pieces for him on Zoom calls during the time of COVID it was sort of my project to undertake while I was at home mostly. I mean, I was teaching, but the concerts were dried up. So I used that time to study a lot of that music. And then here was this special recital. So I made that the second half of the program was the American premiere of 14 of these pieces from the Wolf-Temper Klavier. And Peter came from Budapest and we had a sort of a grand celebration of that.

Really? To the concert? That's amazing! Wonderful. And then also you performed, uh, besides those Wolf Temple Klavier, is it 14 out of 24, correct?

14 out of 48, actually. 48, about one quarter of them.

Yeah, wonderful. And then you also performed pieces by Mozart. And then also another Hungarian composer, Miklós Rózsa. Is that how you pronounce it?

Miklós Rózsa, yes. Yes, that's right. Well, you know, the thing about Mozart for me, also, this is the composer that I've loved most since my childhood, since I was 4. I mean, that's when I would walk to the radio in our living room whenever Mozart's Marriage of Figaro overture came on. It was every afternoon at 4:30, it came on as the tagline for this show, and my mother noticed me walking to the radio kind of fixated at that time. I've always loved Mozart's music, and it always feels, oh, I don't know, comforting or foundational to start my recitals with Mozart's music. So that sort of felt like a given. And then, you know, so there's something about foundations there, about Miss Wolfe and Mozart. And Miklos Rozsa was one of the great Hollywood composers of the 1940s and '50s. That's what he's most remembered for now, his scores to Ben-Hur, Double Indemnity, Spellbound, quite a few of these film noir classics that he scored. But he was also a very thoroughly trained composer, a great composer in my estimation, wrote some piano music. His variations were premiered by Clara Haskell in Paris, a lot of string music, a lot of orchestral scores. And this daunting piano sonata, which in my estimation is one of the greatest of the 20th century. It's a formidable kind of piece of work, quite virtuosic and difficult to play. I always loved movie music. I watched movies a lot when I was a teenager, in my early 20s, et cetera, and see that name come up on the screen for a lot of great movies, you know, music by Miklos Rosza. So I did a lot of reading and research, you know, and found a lot of the concert music. Also, fortunately, I played that sonata as a student and I had a cassette recording of it. And someone gave me Miklos Rózsa's home address in Hollywood. So I mailed it out there. And I got a phone call from his daughter who said how much he had loved it and he liked it. And a couple of years later, I went to Los Angeles and I played in the Hollywood Bowl. It was a pops concert. And I played Miklos Rózsa's so-called Spellbound Concerto, which is a— sort of a pops 15-minute piano concerto made of themes from that motion picture. And as I was rehearsing with the orchestra, I suddenly heard the musicians sort of talking, this kind of whistling, and behind me, to my astonishment, was Miklos Rózsás's daughter, Juliet, was pushing him in his wheelchair up the path, put him right next to the piano. He had several strokes and it was hard to communicate with him, but he wanted very much to hear me play. And they brought him to that dress rehearsal. It was, I think, one of his last public outings. So, I had a chance to meet him and talk to him a bit about his music, which was, you know, a superb honor, of course.

Wow, that's amazing. And how— what was it like to be in the venue, and what was the reaction from the audience by listening to all these contemporary composers?

Well, I think it was— I think the recital itself at Merkin was a big hit. You know, it was— nice generously sustained hand and, you know, standing ovation and all the rest of it. Times have changed. I mean, I had hoped that Peter's music would elicit a review in the New York Times or something like that, but they don't review so many concerts these days. So unfortunately, that didn't happen. But there was a grand party afterwards, and actually quite a few celebrities came as well. So—

Really?

Oh, yes.

Like who?

Well, that's between me and my gods. Okay. Okay.

Well, you deserve all the attention, of course. Yes.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah. That's wonderful. But do you plan to play all the Wolf tempered clavier eventually?

I think it's possible. I mean, it depends on the venue. You know, I tend to think that a concert of any one particular composer has to be particularly perfectly done, you know, because it's a lot to digest. I, myself, I've gotten bored at concerts of all Bach. I mean, I love Bach's music. At a certain point, you know, if that's all you're listening to for a program, it can get a little tedious. But, you know, it depends what it is, I think. The last 3 Schubert sonatas are a divine evening of music if they're played to perfection. I think anytime you play all Mozart, it's fantastic, of course. You know, lots of pianists have essayed all the Beethoven piano sonatas, but you have to be prepared to do it to about sheer perfection to really bring it off. So Peter's complete Wolf-Temperklavier would probably be run to about 2.5 to 3 hours, and that would be a devoted audience indeed. And I might get a little tired doing it too.

Reflecting on 40 years, like, since your New York City debut, how do you feel your artistry and choices in music have evolved over the years, over the decades? And are there elements from your early performances that you continue to embrace, or have your taste and technique transformed significantly?

Wow, Yukimi, that is like, you know, the question of the decade there. It's going to take a long, long time to answer that. I think that an artistic journey is a kind of evolution, of course, you know. If I think back to my taste in music when I was a child, you know, it was rather Catholic because it was shaped by my parents' desire to see that I, had good piano lessons and studied good music. And I think the first crack in that armor was probably when I was about 12 or 13 years old and the movie The Sting came out and it had music of Scott Joplin. And I went down to the music store and I got a lot of rags of Scott Joplin because I liked Joplin's rags. And I remember asking my piano teacher about playing some of those. And also the Gershwin Preludes for piano. And he told me, well, that's fun to play, but you can't play that on serious recitals. That's just for your own amusement. And that was just where it was. And I accepted that as common wisdom for a good portion of my life, frankly, until I had the courage to break out and say, I like this. I think this is really good and I can play it well and I'm going to play it. You have to get to the point where you're not worried that people will criticize you for your choices. Or if they do, who cares? That's their problem. Speaking of Miklos Rozsa's Piano Sonata, the very first time I did play it, I was getting my graduate degree. And one of my professors, he was in a musicology class, stopped me in the hallway. He says, I saw you're playing some Miklos Rozsa. And I said, yes. And he said, why are you playing that trash? You know, and I just said, "I like it." Best answer I could give him. Later, I thought I should have said, "Well, I like that trash better than your trash," but that would have been the best answer, you know. But you have to have great belief in your artistic choices to do something like that. And you can't fault anyone, myself or any other young pianist, for playing the traditional repertoire when you feel like, well, that's what you have to play. To be judged. So when I left my hometown of Baltimore at the age of 16 to go to Juilliard, I remember I was practicing Liszt's B Minor Sonata, Balakirev's Islame, the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, trying to think what else I was practicing, a whole pile of Chopin etudes, almost all of Opus 25, all of which is music I've played in concert. And none of which I've played in concert for probably the last 25 or 30 years. Not that I don't like that music, but it doesn't say something, you know, unique and really vital to me that I feel like I have to transmit. If I go to Carnegie Hall and I hear Christian Zimmermann play the Liszt Sonata in B minor, I am sure he's going to give that an incredibly committed and personal interpretation because he's playing it because he, feel something very powerful about it. And I think it's possible I would play that piece again in the future, but it has to be at a time when I feel like, oh, there's something in that piece that I have yet to really, you know, say in public. And ironically, it's the music that's much lesser played that I found so much richness in, in terms of music that, you know, it's so fresh to my ears, so fresh to a lot of people's ears because it's not played very often. And there's just much more to discover in great music that hasn't been, frankly, overplayed, like the Beethoven sonatas, the Prokofiev sonatas. I'm not saying those pieces shouldn't be overplayed. That's great, great music, of course. But when I start to make my own list of music that you almost never encounter in the concert hall, you can quickly make a list a very, very fine composer, starting with Antonín Dvořák and then Gabriel Pernay and Joaquin Turina, Gabriel Fauré, even works of César Franck are almost never played in recitals. Make a very, very long list of stuff. Even if you want to take on Bach, think how much Bach wrote and think really how much of his keyboard literature is played, a very small portion of it. I mean, there's tons of things that Bach wrote that you just never experience in the concert hall. Say, for example, the Art of Fugue. How often do you hear someone take on some project like that? So in terms of going back to your original question, my artistic journey, my evolution and so forth, I feel like I would describe it as a kind of an ongoing circle that just seems to expand and expand and expand. I feel sometimes a little scared that I can't control that circle a little bit better. I'd like to feel like there's a prescribed journey that one is taking. Like you're going from here, you're going to this spot, this spot, this spot. And then at the end, when your life is finished and you're on your deathbed and God appears and says, you've done the right things, you know, then you pick the music that you exit with perfectly, you know. But it's more like just this unending maze where, you know, you open this door and then that door leads to to this and this and this and this, and there's endless other things. You know, the world of music is just enormous. I knew it was big when I first went to New York to study, but I had no idea just how big it really could become. And of course, it's not just investigating the past. Music is created every single day. So in addition to expanding in terms of what you don't know from the past, what you don't know about today and what you don't know is going to be composed tomorrow. Uh, you know, there's just endless possibilities. So not only looking into all those possibilities, but then also deciding which possibilities are really of interest to you and which are not. Um, and I think after my own, uh, my birthday this year— I'm tempted not to say the number, but what the heck, I'm go for it. It's— I'll soon be turning 65. There's something in me that's saying it's time to say it's all right if you don't want to play that anymore, you know. I can live the rest of my life without playing that piece. Actually, I recently moved to this lovely apartment you see me in, and moving for a musician always involves countless, probably 200 boxes of scores. And there I was sifting through a lot of those scores, and some of them I looked at them and I thought, I'm not going to play that. I'm probably not even going to teach it, but I don't need it at my home. I'll put it in my studio at Temple University in case a student's interested in it. I'm starting to think about when I'm not here, maybe somebody can use it. So, and I'm not—

Not yet. Not yet. You're very young.

No, I don't want to get too morbid about any of that, but there's something a little bit comforting in a way about that, you know. I recall the first time I walked into the Juilliard Library and I saw, as a student, as I said, I just turned 16 or 17, and I see these aisles and aisles and aisles of scores and so much music. I had no knowledge of what it was. I was terrified, you know, my God, I've got to learn all this. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do this, you know? So now it doesn't terrify me so much that stuff is actually kind of endless.

And are you still like learning new repertoire on a regular basis?

Yes, it's kind of, I often tell people that planning, say, planning a recital program is a little bit like plotting out a gourmet meal, right? You're going to have a dinner party and you want everybody to have something they like, you know, there's got to be some salad, there has to be some side dishes, a couple of main courses, maybe some desserts, maybe some side snacks, candy here and there, you know, or something sweet to drink and so forth. And in terms of either recital programming or what I feel like if I'm studying and I have a good balanced program to work on, well, there's things to study that are of technical interest that help me maintain just my ability to play. And there's never any shortage of challenging etudes to look at, of course. Then, of course, there's Baroque music, and if I'm not really so much in the mood for Bach, actually these days I'm finally sitting down, I'm trying to read about 10 to 15 Scarlatti sonatas every day so that at some point I can say, yes, I played through them all. It's really important. I think of him as one of the very, very great composers, composer I dearly love, and I don't want to climb into the casket without knowing, yeah, I did it. You know, I don't want to feel like, oh, there was Volume 10 and 11 I didn't get to. That'll be sort of disappointing.

Yeah.

What's, of course, intriguing about Scarlatti is that in his writing, he seems to have thought of every possible technical device used by composers from much later centuries. Think about double notes and octaves and crossed hands and different articulations and registrations and speeds. I mean, the variety is simply astonishing, you know. Then there's classical sonatas, and these days, you know, I always find myself catching up on the ones that I don't know quite as well. These days, probably Schubert, and the Romantic repertoire has been pretty much covered. I'm much more of a— of a Chopin and Brahms person now than I used to be. You know, Liszt has had his run in my life. Youngsters with the fast hands can play all the Liszt. That would be just fine. I'm sort of getting into Dvořák all over again. People don't generally know that he wrote a lot of piano music, and although some of it is a little unwieldy in terms of his keyboard writing, it's quite beautiful. And very refreshing in a way. Then in the 20th century, there's just always more Busoni and Martinu and, yes, even some more Miklos Rosza and then new things. I mean, Peter Wolf. I'm always looking for new Japanese composers to play. I'm very intrigued by that country and its music as well. And, you know, composers do send me scores and I tend to be kind of picky. I'll read through things and in general, if I'm not interested, I'll just lay them aside. But I do make it a kind of a commitment that I don't just play old music, that I do actively try to premiere things, not just by a famous composer, but by generally a lesser-known composer who I happen to have met, someone who needs a champion, you know. Part of the process for me.

Wow. That's quite amazing. You know, lately, a lot of young musicians started performing more, you know, lesser-known compositions or lesser-known composers, compositions by lesser-known composers or whatnot. But you've been doing this for decades, and you're way ahead of everybody else. That's— and then, yeah, and then, you know, to do this, my podcast, I actually get to learn about each guest, but also I get to learn so much about different piano literature. And then as I was learning about you and listening to all sorts of your recordings on Spotify or YouTube, I came across so many interesting pieces. So for example, this morning I was watching a performance of Poulenc Variations by Koji Taku.

Koji Taku, yes, yes.

That's a fantastic transcription.

It's a very great piece, and that's a wonderful story to tell, which links into all of this. You know, there are basically, I would say, two central characters in my life who really inspired me to think about music on a very cosmopolitan basis. The first was my Baltimore main piano teacher, after Miss Wolf, she took me to play for her teacher who was a brilliant Filipino pianist named Reynaldo Reyes. And Reynaldo was a graduate of the Paris Conservatory. He got second prize in the Busoni Competition and a few other notable things. But he settled in Baltimore around the time when I was a kid to teach piano. And of course, every American dollar he earned doing that went back to the Philippines to support a family of about 2,700 cousins. The tradition of that place. But he inspired me so much because he spoke 7 or 8 languages. And I remember as a child to go to his house or his studio, I loved it when the phone would ring because my brother and I would look at each other and we'd play a little game. Guess what language were we about to hear? Because we could never tell who he was going to talk to on that phone. Now, this is in like 1965, '66. And international phone calls themselves were a huge, huge deal. So this man would pick up the phone and we'd hear French, we'd hear German, we'd hear Italian, we'd hear Tagalog, we'd hear Greek, you know, for God's sake, he spoke so many languages. And he loved to opine that language was the key to the world, that you could, if you spoke languages, you could go anywhere and do anything. It left a very serious imprint upon my brain. I didn't even study any foreign language until I got to high school. I studied French and I studied some Russian. Only later in life I studied a bit of Spanish and Japanese as well. But that cosmopolitan outlook made its impression upon me for sure. And then shortly after I got to Juilliard, we had the most marvelous teacher of piano literature. He was a great pianist named Joseph Bloch. And Jimmy Bloch became a very, very dear friend. He was a very witty man. He was also a very well-traveled man. He didn't have the gift of language per se, but he was someone who reveled in the exotic, and he brought this kind of zest and joy about that into the classroom in the most wonderful of ways. You know, he would wax eloquently about composers who were never played at that time in the 1970s, like Al-Khalil, right? And he had this very theatrical way of speaking with his hand held high like this. Alvacon, the etudes in the minor keys, you poor little boys and girls don't know what you're missing. Say this kind of stuff, you know. So I remember one of his very first lectures giving the whole history of the piano literature, which he knew, you know, encyclopedically. He just reveled in this. The very first class was about the Elizabethan Virginals book, here's this music for these instruments I didn't even know existed and composers like John Bull and William Blow and Giles Farnaby. And it was amazing to me. And I went and I started learning some of that and I brought it to the class the next week. And I think it was a piece by Farnaby. He stood over me and he said, wonderful, you were born to play Farnaby. Which is not necessarily a compliment, but I just love this adventurous and funny spirit that he had. Mr. Block also loved the country of Japan. He had been in the Army and had served in the Army during the occupation of Japan, and I think during that time he had met artists and musicians. He was sort of an aesthete, you know, I mean, it was part of his personality. And I became interested in Japanese culture, and we sort of bonded over that and also other things. We both liked silent movie music and things like this. But it was Joseph Bloch who really particularly inspired me in terms of he would make the students come up to sight-read scores in the class, and I quickly learned how poor most musicians are at sight reading. It was, you know, sort of a bad skill. As it so happens, my very first teacher at Juilliard was not a bad teacher, but certainly not a good one. He was mostly a non-teacher. He slept through a lot of my lessons, had a nice nap. And I was rather distraught about it at the time. And I remember thinking, well, what am I going to do about this? And, you know, it was not a time when people ever dreamed thinking about to change your piano teacher. But I, in that state of mind, I went into the Juilliard Library one day and I thought, I'm in New York City, this is Juilliard, and I'm looking at this wall of things that I don't know. And basically, what if I just start playing through things? And I embarked on a 2-year project. It took me pretty much exactly 2 years to read through every volume of piano music on those shelves. Now, I skipped some that I didn't like so much, like Prokofiev. It's pretty hard to sight-read Prokofiev. It's not my favorite composer, frankly. But I started with Isidor Atron's Rhapsody No. 2 one morning, and then 2 years later, I remember finishing up with the Piano Concerto of Ephraim Zimbalist. So, you know, it took me from A to Z. And of course, what happens when you do that, you know, okay, when you get to A, you have to deal with, Al-Khan, who I wasn't too crazy about, but Albanus was pretty interesting. And to fudge my way through Iberia was rather a challenge.

Oh, so good. Oh, so good.

Then you get to see, you suddenly hit someone like Clementi and realize, oh my God, there's 4 volumes of Clementi sonatas that nobody ever plays. And then there's Chabrier, who's a marvelous composer, you know. And then I hit the 4 big volumes of sonatas by Jan Zlatysław Duszek. Some of them are very, very beautiful. And then when I got to F, there was Fauré waiting for me, well, to play through all the barcarolles of Fauré. Over the course of those 2 years, I became a very good sight reader, and I was accompanying a lot of friends on string instruments as well. So I became a kind of a sought-after accompanist for recitals, and my skill sets improved, you know, quite a bit. Sight reading will improve your technique, improve everything. And that was kind of like my thing. I would spend at least an hour, sometimes two, in the practice room in the beginning of the day. The very first thing I would do is just read, read, read, read, read. I really had no idea how much I was helping myself out in terms of being able to speed up my learning process and learning repertoire. But I gained such an appreciation for those composers who you just didn't hear. In the concert hall, and then I wanted to play those composers. You know, I heard my classmates up and down the halls of Juilliard playing all the Beethoven sonatas brilliantly, Chopin etudes like nobody's business, Liszt etudes, works of Chopin. These were the, you know, the stock and trade, and I had to study those things also as well. But gee, nobody was playing Mujeres Españolas of Joaquin Turina. And it's so beautiful. I'm so happy I recorded that.

I love, actually, I love the album. And I see the painting in the back. Is that—

Oh yes, I noticed.

Yes, yes, I love the album. I mean, so many genres you tackle in recordings and concert venues, right? And then, oh, I also love the album called Jazz Nocturne.

Oh yes.

And then, you know, I I had to go to Amazon and buy the score because I absolutely fell in love with all the pieces in that album.

Oh, well, Dana Suis is a marvelous composer. I realize I skipped— I started that long diatribe, and then I totally skipped over— you had mentioned the Poulenc Variations of Koji Taku. Because I wanted to bring this full circle.

Sure.

It was many years after I was out of school, and I was living in Western Canada, but when I came to New York, I would always visit Joseph Bloch at his home in Larchmont, and he was becoming rather elderly in the early 2000s. And he had these two volumes of collected Japanese piano music from his occupation days. It had been published by Zen On, I think, or whatever. And I asked him if I could borrow those, and he said, "Oh, sure." And I took those home and in the middle of that collection of music by composers who I'd never heard of, here was this piece by Koji Taku, who I'd never heard of either. And it amazed me. And I went back to Jimmy's house, I don't know, a few weeks later and I played the piece through for him and he loved it and so did I. And I started to put that onto my concert programs. I didn't know much about Koji Taku. I just knew that he was He had been trained in Paris, studied with Courtauld and Boulanger, and then become kind of a jazz pianist later in life. But at some point, his daughter contacted me. I had no idea he had a daughter who was still alive, and she's sort of a pop musician. And she was delighted that I was playing the piece. And then a Japanese publishing company asked me about preparing a new edition of the piece because they had a lot of problems in the score. And I did that. I prepared a rather thorough edition of that piece, and then another edition has come out since that time, and the editor of that edition pays homage to me and thanks me for doing such a wonderful job with the thing. I'm very, very proud of that. In a way, I plucked something of total obscurity that no Japanese musician remembered at all, and brought it back to life. I'm— I can go into my grave knowing I did something good in my life. It's a good feeling. I think it's a great set of variations, and I played it a bunch of places, and, and I'm so proud that it's back in print because of me.

Oh, oh, that's beautiful. Honestly, as I was listening, your performances are actually really distinguished by a deep intimacy and profound understanding. Of each composer's roots, history, and culture, language, and allowing you to connect with their stories and convey the compassion in their works, really. So can you share how you personally approach the process of understanding a composer's intentions, especially you perform so many different works by various composers from the dead to the living, you know?

So Well, that's— boy, Yukimi, you brought the heavy artillery today. I'm sorry. That's all right. That's all right.

Fair enough.

Fair enough. I'm thinking back again to a very big influence upon my life, particularly in my teen years, was the world of paintings and of visual art. Probably starting just from class field trips to museums. We lived in Baltimore, but we would— my dad would either drive or take us on the train down to Washington and see museums for our cultural betterment. But particularly, I guess, it was the Impressionist composers always left a very, very big influence on me. I just loved, you know, a lot of people do love the canvases of Renoir and Monet and so forth. But it fascinated me that these canvases were like a portal to a totally different world. And if you stand transfixed into one of these places, you can absolutely— you can smell the breeze, you can feel the air in those things. You know, it just enables you to relive something that in a sense is gone, but it's immortal there in front of your eyes. Even as a child, I was kind of dazzled by portraits of Rembrandt, you know, because I would look at them and yes, they were beautiful, but what stunned me was that the people were alive to me. They weren't dead at all, you know, their eyes, their hands, everything, they were telling me their stories. And I think that I had this connection between what art truly is. It is a kind of an immortality. It's this portal to someone's story, somebody's existence. And I mean, this is what humanity is. It's a series of stories. We all have our story to tell. So that's the part that maybe fascinates me the most about the music I hear that really intrigues me is where is it bringing me to? What kind of story is it telling? Say when I'm playing Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Paganini for piano orchestra, you know, it's such a strong rhythmically absorbing piece. And the minute you get into, I don't know, it's Variation 7 or 8, and the dies irae is heard, you know, now you realize that the composer is telling you something about the devil, the violin, the power of the A minor tonality, and the inevitability of death. You know, I mean, he wrote this piece towards the end of his life. He wrote it around the same time as the Symphonic Dances, which also used the dies irae and the The Isle of the Dead and so forth. And, you know, you want to climb into Rachmaninoff's head. I mean, what was he thinking about? What were his thoughts about the meaning of life, about the brevity of life, or his own contribution as a creative artist, you know? I find that so completely absorbing, you know, and it's probably one of my favorite concertos to play because it just sucks you in. You know, from the very, very first notes. It's a perfect piece of music. I can't say that about a whole lot of scores, actually, that, you know, even of Beethoven or Mendelssohn, Schumann, et cetera, et cetera, we can hear things that are great. It's a great, great piece of music, but to say something is absolute sheer perfection, you could not change a single note, dynamic, anything in that score. I do think of that piece that way, the same way as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, perhaps. Or the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré. In any case, you know, this, you know, idea of studying the music from the musical outside of it, like it's a great tableau, it's a story, it's an autobiography, it's someone's life. It's so totally absorbing to me. I mean, I can't imagine starting the study of a piece from the aspect of, okay, let's see, I want to win a piano competition, so this part I want to play fast, and then this has to be accurate. I mean, those technical details will come in when you analyze the piece, pick it apart, have to practice it, you know, like the master watchmaker take all the mechanism apart and study it. But I think that comes later. The very first thing is Does it excite your passion? Does the piece excite your passion? Does it pull you into that composer's world? And that's what a great composer does, you know, really pulls you into their story, not your story, but their story.

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You mentioned a little bit about technique, so how do you balance the need for technical precision with the express expressive demands of the piece, do you find that one often informs the other?

I think ultimately they do, although like I just said about The Watchmaker, there's this aspect of study. If you start from the top of Mount Olympus, you know, imagining, well, let's pick a piece. Let's say the— actually, I think I'm going to restudy the Mendelssohn Rondo Capriccioso. Because I played it when I was 12 and I think I can do it a little bit better now. So I think from the Mount Olympus of, oh, that's going to be light and frothy and the opening will be incredibly beautiful and moving and then it'll be sprites and elves dancing and so forth and the thunder sock is at the end. I mean, what a great dramatic piece. Okay, that's my mindset. That's where I want to end up. Well, to get there, means lots of slow practice. The opening has to be perfectly calibrated and voiced with taste and style. And then a lot of questions about tempos. Is it going to be very slow, somewhat slow? You know, how are you going to approach that? Then what about the speed of the scherzo? As a kid, I used to just whomp it out, play it as fast as I could. Well, that's not going to happen now. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And then the octaves, are they, you know, you don't want those just to be show-off bangy octaves. Like when I was 12, that's what I did. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Well, no, you know, it's a storm. It has to have some evocative picture and so forth. So now you have to break it down into, okay, technically, what are the things I have to be in complete control of so that I don't have to think about the technique? My favorite, definition of piano technique is by pianist Beryl Rubinstein. Not many people realize there's so many Rubinstein, Anton and all. Beryl Rubinstein was, I think he was the head of the Cleveland Institute, but he wrote a couple of short books on piano technique. And I love his definition where he says that technique for a pianist is like money in the bank. The more of it you have, the easier your life will be. However, To show it off for its own sake is very bad taste. Perfectly said, you know. It is, of course, the means to the end, and if you have a prodigious technique you can rely on, then you can set about to controlling the sounds and the speed and the tempo and the message of what it is that you're doing. I was really surprised when my teacher, Mr. Reyes, passed away. I think shortly after that, my dad dug up out of the basement all of my old assignment books that I had had since studying with him starting around age 7 or so until I went to Juilliard. And he mailed them to me, you know, he sent them to me. And I was looking through them. And my remembrance of Reynaldo Reyes when I was a child was that he danced around the room. He explained the difference between words. Like vivace and living and animato and talked about French sculpture and paint the colors in French paintings and what is the real meaning of Impressionism and how do you half pedal and quarter pedal, blah, blah, these things, you know, because these are the intellectual things that so absorbed me about his brilliant conversation. I was not ready to open those assignment books and see week after week after week after week Specific assignments, this scale, this scale, this scale, this scale, contrary, parallel, staccato, legato at the third, at the sixth, the octave, the Czerny, the Kulak, the Piszczyna, all the Bach inventions, Bach symphonias, you know, just piles of that stuff. I do remember kind of hating the Bach three-part inventions and him getting mad at me once and he said, you know, you have to practice. Didn't like to practice those things. But he had schooled me in these kind of fundamentals, as well as having a weekly solfège class also for all his students. We used to— the college students and the kids, I mean, the whole range, the whole panoply, we'd do in front of each other. But this sort of reinforced to me that you really can't be a virtuoso unless you attend to your equipment. It's like you can't be a race car driver if you don't open up the hood and see if all the parts are working inside. So at some point, well, let's see, we're leading into a discussion perhaps of my own approach to teaching the technique of the piano, which kind of opened up for me shortly after I moved to Canada in 2003 when I started to teach at the University of British Columbia. It was a colleague of mine who mentioned to me, he said, did you ever see those technique books with the big red covers on them? And I thought, yeah, I remember in the old Juilliard book sale, they used to throw those things out. You know, what was in those things? And then by chance, I was approached by Dover Publications about doing some editing. And eventually I actually became the chief editor there for a little while. But I thought about those books and I thought, you know, I don't really even teach much technique to my students, and that's not very bright. Maybe I should. I should give those books a look again. They were, of course, the 7 volumes of the Master School of Piano Playing and Virtuosity by Alberto Jornás, which are still a very, very unique and incredible resource. I found a couple of those volumes somehow. And look through them, and they're just fantastic documents because, of course, they have this very, very scientific, really intelligent approach to studying keyboard technique from many different angles, buttressed by many exercises by Honás himself, as well as these exercises by 20 or so of the world's greatest virtuosos of the time because they were friends of Honás. So I brought the idea of republishing these. They hadn't been in print in decades to the powers that be at Dover, and they were keen for the first two volumes, which they didn't have to pay any royalties on. So I said, well, I've got to write something about the— you don't just put them out there like they're just, you know, whatever. I need to know more about the person who did these and make something kind of special about this republication. So I started to research the life and work of Alberto Honás, who was a very important pianist, a good friend of Ignaz Paderewski, and he happened to premiere Paderewski's Piano Concerto in New York and also in Boston. And he had taught in Berlin for a while and then come to the United States, taught in Philadelphia and New York primarily. But he taught some rather prominent people, and it's sort of— I had this bingo moment, this recollection, of talking about Alberto Jónás decades before with the composer Vincent Persichetti, who was a teacher at Juilliard during my time there, because Persichetti had studied this kind of mirror writing with Jónás, who proposes it in his study of scales. That is, that an E major scale played in ascending with the right hand, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, and so forth. In mirror pattern, the opposite direction will be C, B-flat, A-flat in the left hand, and with the two hands doing the same patterns of white and black notes in opposite directions. And it's a very, very good way to practice things so that you develop the same facility for both hands. I guess I'd seen that somewhere. I think Ernest Bacon also mentions it. And I saw Mr. Persichetti in the hallway one day, and I said something about his mirror etudes, and I said, Is that something similar to— I saw those exercises by Alberto Jonas and he got very animated. He was a short, very wiry Italian man. And he said, oh, oh, yes, yes, mirror writing is a very exciting way to write for the media. Incredible harness. Yes, yes. Jonas showed me, you know, I just sort of like forgotten about that. Oh, yeah, right. Alberto Jonas and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, so one of the things I wanted to write about kind of short biography of Mr. Honos to put into the preface for these volumes. And I started to look up all the students he had taught, and some of those names are a little obscure to us now, but some rather prominent pianists at the time, primarily Hélène Balland, who was a very famous French Québécois pianist. But this one name came up, Rea Sadowsky, and I was going crazy trying to find her biography, and particularly her obituary, because I just couldn't find it. And then I saw there was an address in Ann Arbor, and then there was another address in Berkeley. And I said, no, could it?

Could it?

Anyway, the address in Berkeley also had a phone number, so I dialed it, and this voice answered. It was a voice out of 1935. Hello? The New York 1935 voice. Um, is it possible that I could speak with Mrs. Rea Sadovsky? This is she speaking. May I please have the honor of knowing whom I am speaking with? And I was so stunned, I said the rudest thing imaginable. I said, uh, my name is Sarah Davis Buchner, I'm a pianist, and I'm doing some research on these life and work of your teacher, Alberto Jornós, and I'm astonished. I'm very, very happy to find that you're alive. And she said, well, I'm very happy that I'm alive also. Fair enough. So I bought a ticket to San Francisco 2 days later, and I bought a minicam and I filmed My first thing I did with Raya was film a 3-hour personal interview with her because she had an incredible, absolutely incredible life story. And it's one of the shocking and disheartening things in a way to be a concert pianist, to realize that our work is playing the music for others and so forth. And we may have a career for a while, but after we die, you know, you're not going to be up there like Bach and Mozart. It's, you know, how much are you really going to be remembered. She was originally born in Canada, had emigrated to the Bay Area, was a great prodigy, studied with Honos in Los Angeles, also with both Joseph and Rosina Levine in New York, gone to Europe, was a good friend of Mischa Levitsky and Egon Petri and people like this. Her husband was a Hispanic scholar, so they lived in the 1940s in South America where she premiered a lot of really important piano music by some of the greatest composers in that continent, in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, you name it, you know. And in 1931, she gave a New York recital where she played the American premiere of Prokofiev's Third Piano Sonata. It was an amazing life and an amazing pianist. And at the time I met her, she was 92 years old with a mind as sharp as a tack, and she still practiced every day. And at the age of 95, to celebrate her birthday, she learned and memorized the Album for the Young of Tchaikovsky and played it live on Canadian radio.

Oh my goodness.

Because I had made some connections there for her with the CBC up in Vancouver. You know, she just had a mind that was just incredible and great. I should say also, by the way, after doing that little radio broadcast, that then when The Cake and Candles came out, She said, "I feel like a little bit of Bach," and walked to the piano and played the second movement of the Italian Concerto more beautifully than I ever will hear it in my entire life. It was just incredible pianism and great, great music. Anyway, so when those two volumes came out, when Dover republished them, they have a sort of a one-page little testimony by Rhea and then a couple of photos of the two of us hanging out in her house. At the time. She's of course passed on since then, but she told me quite a bit about Honás's teaching, what a master teacher that he was. And, you know, in the pre-internet age, he wanted to put something out that would have incredible universal application. So the 7 volumes, which divide the aspects of piano technique into various important areas, also have text in 4 languages, I believe. Let's see, English, Spanish, French, and Italian, so that they can be used pretty universally, you know, around the world. They came out in 1929, shortly before the Great Depression hit, and they were expensive books. I think they were priced at $10 a volume, which is well beyond the range of most people's ability at that time. And after the Depression hit, they just went out of print. Like pretty quickly, which is a great shame because it's the work of a master pedagogue showing you. Volume 1 starts from— or I guess I should say that series of those books basically takes the approach of from small to large, from the smallest aspects of piano technique to the largest. So starting with Volume 1 is mostly devoted to exercises that help extend the reach of the hands flexibility of the muscles. And it has all kinds of intriguing exercises by Honós himself, by Alfred Cortot, by Busoni, by Joseph Levine, an incredible stretching exercise by Joseph Levine. You know, these are great, great exercises by great, great thinkers on the pianistic art. Volume 2 devotes itself to the study of scales and all sorts of permutations. Volume 3 is arpeggios. Volume 4 is about the art of playing double notes, whether it's double seconds, thirds, fourths, sixths, you know, and Volume 5 is devoted to chords and octaves, and Volume 6 about other musical concepts associated with the piano, including the longest, most useful chapter ever written on the art of pedaling the piano that I've ever seen. They're sort of like must-haves. And at the time those first two volumes were republished, none of it was available on IMSLP. Now the whole thing is on IMSLP. You can see it for free. So I send it to my students, you know, all the time. And I try to grill them on this and that, but it's not just the exercises. It's also after these exercises and suggestions for practice, then Honos puts examples from the classical piano repertoire. Where it's used, you know. So, you know, talking about playing double thirds, he's got a lot of scales with various fingerings and so forth in double thirds. And then he's got, you know, a few excerpts from, of course, the Chopin etude, but also other parts of other pieces, say concertos or chansons where there's passage work like that, or music of Brahms or Mendelssohn, you know, might have this aspect or that aspect or that aspect. That aspect, and helps integrate your understanding of, you know, you're not just practicing exercises just to do an exercise, you're acquiring the skill to be able to play that kind of piece. So it's, you know, it's, it's fantastically useful stuff. And that influenced my own pedagogy to a great degree, because I thought, well, here's one of the greatest teachers of the 20th century who left behind this great, great record of just what he thought was important. And it was kind of amazing to be in Rhea's house and she opened up her old volumes that she'd use when she was 13 years old and studying with the man in New York City and showing me the circles that he made. Well, this one is not for small hands. This one will help extend this, you know, whatever. And I saw that, you know, he— these books are very, very large. He didn't intend for anybody to go through every single part of it. He just pick and choose, you know, this one, this one, this one, this one. He wanted to have a great resource as a teacher. And that's what it is for me. It's a great, great resource for me as a teacher as well.

You have the series of School of Virtuosity titled School of Virtuosity on TonBase explaining Hone's technique, right? Or rather, it's not just a technique. It's really book itself is like a really the resource for pianists And then I'm not part of ToneBase, so I'm not promoting anything. But yeah, so these 7 courses, 7 video series, you are explaining about his book, basically.

Yeah, sort of explaining about his organization of all that material, but then demonstrating as well. So it's good to have somebody showing because ToneBase has the camera like above the keyboard so you can see my hands, you know, showing, say for example, the stretching. So this is one where you play octaves with 1, 3, and then silently substitute the second finger so you can stretch this particular muscle or something like that. So just sort of demonstrating a good or proper way to do it. But then those excerpts that I mentioned, you know, some of those show that, you know, why would you want to do that and what's the the idea behind all of this. There's so much to it. I mean, you know, say to play an octave passage from, let's say, Liszt's B Minor Sonata, you know, to discuss all of that would be first to practice the passage with the thumb alone with a very loose wrist to promote the relaxation of the hand, then for accuracy, probably want to make sure— are you using just 5th finger, 4th finger, 3rd finger? What is the fingering of some of the outer parts? The aspect of up and down with the wrist, moving in and out of the keyboard, all this. Would you want to transpose that exercise, for example, to get maximum impact out of it? Do you want to practice it legato, staccato? I don't know, there's just all sorts of variation possibilities there which are going to improve your piano technique. And ToneBase is designed for both professionals and amateurs. I mean, amateur players, I think, like having this kind of like inside scoop on how do professional pianists really prepare something, and they learn a lot from that. But I've heard some awfully good amateur players also who benefit from this kind of thing. And I think all of it helps to promote the art of piano playing, which, And frankly, these days, you know, we've come down from the great high long ago of the 1920s, '30s, '40s when everybody took piano lessons to a time now when, you know, everybody takes guitar. That's a shame. I mean, the piano is a marvelous, magical instrument with not only affords us many, many hours sonic joy, but there's still something so wonderfully gathering about a piano that everyone stand around and admire and talk and contribute. And that's how it was in my home, particularly at holiday time, you know.

Really?

Around the piano and sing things, you know. It's a very American thing to do.

Well, but that's actually the start of anyone's journey, right? So I think these days, because I'm teaching young children too, sometimes that's something missing from home because, you know, anyway, but I'm just curious. So I think you mentioned probably in the tone-based video, because I watched a little bit, uh, because I was so curious about Alberto Jona's work and I really want to check out the book. I'm glad because I was about to buy the book on Amazon, but you can do it.

No, no, you can get it for free on IMSLP. You know, before it was on IMSLP, of course, I wanted to— I was working on that edition of it, so I had to acquire a set. And it took about a year and a half and about $1,000 to get a set together. It's not easy to find. Yeah.

Yeah.

But anyway, in the video, you said, you know, you emphasize the importance of building a solid technique foundation. That is, that developing piano technique is not just a phase, but ongoing lifelong process, right? And how do you see this continuous development of strong technical foundation continuing to a pianist's growth and evolution as an artist?

Well, I mean, there's always something new under the sun, right? So, and if I really want to drive myself crazy, I'll open up my volume of those Ligeti etudes and start practicing some of those because I just I still recall the first time someone came, a student came to my apartment to play some of those for me, and I recall thinking, thank God I'm not under the age of 30 and I have to learn these for competitions. I would be just flabbergasted, you know, by that. You know, I had one specific experience which sort of told me that Piano Technique Never Really Stops. And that was a recital in Japan, I think. And I really had to play some Scarlatti, and I love Scarlatti, you know, but there was one sonata I thought, oh, I really want to play this thing. That's nice, nice opening. And I started practicing it and I realized it had extended passages of repeated notes, fast repeated notes in the left hand. I had never done that. I'd never played repeated notes in my left hand. And I had to spend weeks developing the technique to be able to play it. I still don't really have that technique to play it. But if I was going to play that piece, I just had to train my fingers to be able to do that. And I remember that was like the first time in maybe a few decades that I thought, here's something I really don't know how to do. And I have to teach myself how to do it. There's always going to be something. Yeah.

Another amazing gift you have is the improvisation, and you sent me the link of Meet the Met.

Absolutely.

Rhapsody in Orange and Blue. Are you a Mets fan?

I am a Mets fan. Yes, I've been a Mets fan. Well, I'm a lifelong baseball fan. To grow up in Baltimore was to be a Baltimore Orioles fan. And then when I went to college, I was a very huge Yankees fan for many, many years. But that came to an end when I moved to Canada and I started to spend a lot more time in Japan.

Japan.

I became crazy about the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka. In fact, here's—

oh, you're my enemy. I'm a Giants fan.

Oh, Japan, they say anti-Giants, you know, anti-Giants. In fact, a dear friend of mine, a friend of mine sent me this. This is a kanji, uh, Hanshin Tiger kanji drill. And the exercises are based on baseball scenarios, you know.

Oh my goodness. How adorable. How adorable.

It is rather adorable. I've got to work on that. So that became the baseball thing for a long time. But then when I joined the faculty at Temple, I was living in Philadelphia and I have to be honest, I just don't have any affection for the Philadelphia Phillies, but I always loved New York. I'm not crazy about the Yankees having moved to a new Yankee stadium. And anyway, I started rooting for the Mets. And at some point, a friend of mine challenged me. He says, you know, they have that theme song. It's really catchy. You should do something with that. I said, oh, come on, you know. But at some point, I don't know, I did it as a joke, you know. I started to write this crazy arrangement of Meet the Mets. Then, okay, so I made a video of it and the thing went kind of viral and I ended up playing it at Citi Field a couple of times for their— when they had the Pride Night. I played big Yamaha under the Jumbotron, which is great fun. I mean, I love baseball and I always have. It was always in our house. Everybody loved baseball. My grandmother particularly was the big baseball nut. So it's kind of fun. But that's not an improvisation. I'm really not able to improvise. That's a jazz skill. But I have composed a bit. When I was getting my doctoral degree, I wrote a song cycle and a set of variations for violin and some piano pieces. And I've lost my interest in composing, unfortunately. It's hard to do. It takes up a lot of time, and you have to be really inspired. But I'm glad I wrote those pieces, and sometimes I do play my own music from time to time. And I know several very accomplished pianists who really admire that Meet the Metz thing. I think I'm going to have to— I didn't write it down. I'm going to have to notate it down at some place.

Yeah, transcription or arrangements are always fun because it's somewhere between the composition and improvisation, and it's—

Right, right, right, of course. It's a very catchy tune, you know. What can I say? And you get to— it's got that part where you have to— you hear the sound of the crack of the bat, so you get to hit the piano too.

I know. I saw it. It's a brilliant arrangement. I enjoyed it so much. And then some of the octaves and chords and— oh, they are really, really difficult to do. Brilliant, brilliant arrangement. I love it. You have been teaching for as long as you have been performing. Artists, I'm sure. And then, you know, as someone who has taught at prestigious institutions like the Manhattan School of Music, the University of British Columbia, and Temple University currently, and what have you found to be the most rewarding aspect of shaping the next generation of pianists?

I think the best reward that you get from doing that kind of teaching is you acquire a kind of perspective which includes hope because you're touching people. And it's funny, in the fullness of time, how many years I've now taught, I certainly had students who I thought were just about to just embark on huge, major, important careers and didn't. I also had students that I really didn't really assessed their talent level as very high and they went on to do significant things in music. You're always surprised by what the end result of things is. And you sort of learn that the human soul or the creative spirit takes an awfully long time to gestate. It doesn't happen quickly by any means. And maybe I should have intuited that earlier because I certainly, when I was finishing up at Juilliard, I was studying with Rudolf Firkuschny, a great, great teacher, a wonderful man. And at the time I got out of school and I was entering piano competitions, I played repertoire that I had studied with him, including Czech music of Martinu and Janacek that he played a lot. And people complimented me and said, oh, you play just like Firkuschny. That's a great compliment. But the problem is I'm not Rudolf Firkuschny. I'm Sarah Davis Buchner. I wasn't playing even that— I was playing the music well, but I wasn't playing it like me. It takes an awfully long time to play like yourself. And at a certain point, I stopped playing that repertoire and just laid it aside. I'm going to pick that up later when I know what I want to do with it. And I'm sure Rudy would have said that to me. You know, actually, he had a famous quote. He used to say that you walk in your own way, you play the piano in your own way. It's very, very true. But in any case, as a teacher, I think I always wanted zealously to give my students all these things that Mr. Reyes and Mr. Fukushini and several others had given me in terms of nurturing. Those teachers were like parents to me. They really took me in hand. And as long as I was devoted and worked hard, they would give me as good as I gave also. And so that was my, my sense of what the teacher-student relationship is really like. I was a little surprised in my first teaching position that it turned out not necessarily to be the case. There were some students who were very close to me and we forged quick bonds and others who were just casual and not much came of it, you know. And in a sense, they're not family. They're, you know, we are people who, you know, sort of ships passing in the night. But some of it is destined to be life-changing and some of it, you know, it's not. It's— you learn to sort of give up the control in that situation, that the other party is responsible for themselves. The best thing you can do is give them the tools, you know, and if they take the tools and, you know, they're good tools, they can do something with it. And I certainly have had plenty of students tell me years later how grateful they were to me for this lesson or that, that lesson. Now having said that, I remember one summer, I think it was 1978, I was having kind of a technical crisis in my playing. I was 18 at the time and I went for a summer class in Victoria, British Columbia, where one of the teachers was a man named William Aide who was the head of piano at University of Toronto, but more importantly, he was a co-student with Glenn Gould of a great pedagogue named Alberto Guerrero. And Bill Aid just looks— he's still around. Bill Aid looks like a piano prof. If you have piano prof in Webster's Dictionary, there's a picture of Bill with his bald head and his thick glasses. Looks like a piano professor. Bill Aid walked on stage as the piano prof, and we weren't really expecting one night— expecting very much from him the night he walked on stage and played Campanella faster than any human being had ever done it. I couldn't quite believe it, what I was seeing and hearing at that time. He was a great, great teacher of technique, and he helped me reshape even the way that I held my fingers so that I could move quickly and acquire great, great dexterity. He was a great, great teacher. And for those 6 weeks that I worked with him that summer, I spent many, many hours actually sometimes even sitting on the floor with my hands elevated to force my fingers to exaggerate and stretch, you know, sort of get them to be more dexterous doing these sometimes slow, sometimes fast kind of exercises. And I didn't just do exercises he wrote out. I fashioned my own out of them and I made a kind of a catalog. Dialogue of what was a good way to practice this way. And so, you know, decades later, I said to Bill something about how grateful I was for all that work that summer. And I said, you must have influenced, you know, so many hundreds of pianists who, you know, did those exercises. And he says, no, he says, you were the only one who really did it that much. I was stunned, you know, to hear him say that. But I had that experience myself of spending time with students and showing them meticulously all kinds of ways to practice. And then a week or two later, asking them, how did it work out? And they say, I didn't like it too much. You know, you have to let people go on their own journey in life and realize that some will place great value on your wisdom and advice and others have a different way. They just Either they don't see it, they don't want to see it, or they don't really quite understand the value of what it is that you're giving them, or frankly, or it doesn't work for them. So anyway, you asked me for sort of a positive statement about all the teaching, and it sounds like I'm making a negative statement, but not at all. It's more like, as a young teacher, I really felt like, well, I know all this stuff and I tell people this stuff that I'm going to have this incredible an incredible class of brilliant pianists like Liszt or Busoni, and they're going to transform the world. Well, you learn to give up controlling other human beings. And, you know, and that's an important lesson to learn for sure. But then how much more pride do you take in the accomplishments of students who do take what you give them and go their own way with it? And I'm thinking of three in particular. Who, none of whom is a professional pianist. They're all composers.

Oh, wow.

Tremendous composers. And I play their works in concert because they're great composers. I remember one of them, he's a Canadian composer, young fellow, and called me up one day. He says, Dr. B, can I stop practicing hon nasu? And I said, well, what's going on? He says, well, I was so impressed by what you showed me. I was doing that for like 12 hours the other day. My hands really hurt now.

Well, that's some dedication there.

Yeah, I said, I said to him, you're, you're a composer, stop practicing. But, you know, I guess the point being, you know, I mean, there was, there was those who became composers. There was one that went into music technology. There was one who became the director of the U.S. Marine Corps Band. I mean, you know, People have their own artistic muses and it might not be aligned with yours, but it's wonderful to see them follow it.

So, well, sounds like you are raising creative, innovative people.

Well, in a way, I don't know if that's necessarily such a totally positive thing to say. This has happened so many times to me that some student I've been teaching for whether it's 2 years or even 4 years undergrad student, it's usually in the last or the next to last piano lesson that they say, Dr. B, what do I do now? I always start by saying, find time to ask me. And the first few times that happened, I was really, really buffaloed and I felt inadequate because it's like I should be able to tell them, well, see, you enter this competition and you write to this person, you do this, this, like direct, micromanage their life and career. But it was when I gave up on that that I came up with far, far better advice, you know, because a few of them had said to me, a few students from time to time said to me, you know, I think I'm going to teach some kids for a little while and just put some money away and then maybe I'll go to business school or something like that because they're concerned about supporting themselves. I mean, okay, reasonable enough. But in general, when those students ask me about what do I do in the future, I say to them, please look at this world around you. Are we in need of more dentists, more accountants, more lawyers, more bankers, investment Wall Street types, you know, delivery men, I don't know, shopkeepers, blah, blah, blah. Imagine this world if even just 10% more of human beings pursued creative arts as their work, if they were painters, dancers, comedians, skateboarders, jugglers, storytellers. Fabric makers, think about just any way in which the human spirit can create something of beauty and of intrigue. What would this world be like if instead of the coin of money, we measured things in terms of the coin of creative donation? That is, that we're giving something to the world that makes it a better and happier and more delightful place in which to live. It really wouldn't take so many people. I often say to people also, you know, in a baseball game, typically you'll have 40,000 to 50,000 people cheering. If you could get 500 of those people to start going to classical concerts once in a while, the music business would be in incredible shape. Anyway, that's my way to try to tell them that you might have a hard life pursuing you know, a life as a musician, of course, but you're giving something so important and so valuable and so self-perpetuating that it means so much more than if you just say, okay, that was fun, but now I'll get serious. You know, the world is not a better place when everybody gets too serious. At least that's how I feel.

Well, you're a wonderful mentor and wonderful teacher. I recently watched the promotional video for your autobiographical theater show, Of Pigs and Pianos. Yes, yes. So as a transgender artist and advocate, your unique position in the classical music world is beautifully portrayed in this show, I'm sure, and which details your coming-of-age story in New York.

That's right.

Yes, yes, yes. So how has Do you believe the classical music community has evolved in terms of acceptance and visibility for transgender artists?

I would have to say no, I don't think it's really evolved so very much. I'm routinely frustrated by the words of various sponsors and presenters, and certainly my dedicated agent has put in more than 20 years of hard effort trying to get doors to to break open. There certainly is some change in view of transgender people, particularly in northern sophisticated cities. But if you see the horrific laws being passed that specifically target LGBTQ folks all over, particularly the South and the Midwest, you know, in many ways culturally this country is fighting the Civil War. Seems to be dedicated to fighting the Civil War forever, you know, and that's just rather maddening. That extends into the music business for sure, you know, because presenters are afraid of something that donors see as either off-putting or as— they'll use as an insult, DEI. Now, right now, that's like, oh, that's something bad about DEI, you know. I mean, I was hardened to see Michelle Obama, of that in her speech last week and say that, you know, about affirmative action, as if there hasn't been affirmative action for people in power for the last 2 to 3 decades, you know. That's been around. Now having said all of that, I mean, I'm well aware of my position in classical music and that to date there's really nobody else doing what I do as a transgender artist. So things will probably get better when there are a few more, and I think there are more pretty much on the horizon at the moment because you just can't keep burying people, uh, forever. I know that I stand for something. I know that when I walk onto a concert stage, that itself makes a statement, and I was aware of that when I transitioned as well. I, I didn't realize how direly it would just stop my career cold when I was 37 years old, that everything would just sort of come to a halt and I would have to go to Canada just to get a teaching job. But I'm proud that I survived it. And I'm aware that I have a kind of a social responsibility not to be silent about it, but to be very out about it, to be very proud about it, to be as tasteful as I can about it, but also to challenge people. And in the last year, particularly when these sort of bathroom bills are going around, I have made speeches from the stage, usually after playing a concerto. I'll say something about to the audience that if they value the worth of the music that they've just heard, to please value the worth of the musicians making it, which include people like me. And, you know, I appreciate your applause. Since you like me so much, please don't go into the voting booth and strip my civil rights away. It usually gets a big hand when I say that. Of course, you know, what people will say publicly and do publicly is often very different what they'll say privately. And one sad prediction I had at the time of the George Floyd riots and and sort of the birth of Black Lives Matter, when I saw the arts sort of responding to, okay, well, we have to have more Black representation in the arts, I sort of predicted, I said, I thought, I bet for 2 or 3 seasons they'll have lots of Black artists and then it'll go right back to the same old thing. And I sort of feel like I'm seeing that happening. You know, there were these Florence Price things, you know, bam, bam, bam, bam, lots of Florence Price. You know, this is, the true diversity that could be presented in the concert hall is far larger than what these concert presenters can conceive of. And I realized that I've been doing DEI myself for decades, you know, just because I love the diversity of art. I mean, classical music, if it's just Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, you're going to You're going to get mighty tired of that after a while. So the fly in that ointment is always economics. It's what they think is going to sell, what's going to sell a ticket, what's going to sell out a house, you know. And ironically, what I've learned myself over so many years of playing concerts is that you could walk on stage and play an entire program of really hard to listen atonal stuff. But if you present it in a charming and enlightened and interesting and passionate way and talk about the music and what it means and how come you love it so much and listen for this and this and this and make it a kind of an adventure, everybody will love it. I remember this wonderful quote in an obituary. I have a bad habit. I like to read the obituaries first thing in the morning, just first of all to see if anybody I don't like is gone. Gone. So that's a good day.

What a way to start your day.

Okay.

But addition by subtraction. There we go. But no, I see the interesting lives that have lived. So there was a conductor I hadn't heard of. His name was Franz Ahlers, A-L-L-E-R-S. And he had pretty big old bit there. And he was a major conductor in Europe before the World War— before Second World War. And then, of course, like so many European Jews, he fled to the United States. And he found his employment primarily conducting in the Broadway pit orchestras, primarily the Lerner and Loewe musicals, which he had done. And this is great, great music, of course. And he was asked, you know, since he had been doing Beethoven and Strauss in Austria, and now he's doing Lerner and Loewe in New York City. He had been asked about it. Did he feel bad about the whatever? And he said simply, he said, there is no first or second rate music. There are only first or second rate performances. There's so much truth in that statement. If you have pride in what you do, if you're convinced of the excellence of what it is that you're doing, then you can do a great job or you fail and you don't do a great job. So this kind of informs my thinking about so many concerts. It hardly even matters really what it is that you're doing. Are you doing it well? Are you doing it in a way that connects with people? Are you doing it in a way that, you know, ignites people's creative spark, awakens their passion? That's really where the big money is.

Wow. So what advice would you give to young LGBTQ+ musicians who are navigating their own journeys in an industry that has historically been less inclusive, although we're trying?

Well, there's always been those folks in the industry, of course. I mean, you know, music, creative arts are just full of wonderful LGBTQ folks. It's just in the past it was sort of like it was shielded. It wasn't talked about, you know. As one of my ex-managers said to me after he met me after I'd come out, he said, well, it just wasn't done. It was like it was an Emily Post rule or something like that. I think, you know, there are good and bad aspects to the technological age, of course, as we all know, with cell phones and so forth. But I think young people are just much more connected than ever before, and their knowledge of the world and acceptance of things that are very different than their understanding is huge. I mean, I almost— I, you know, I can walk into a classroom pretty much anywhere, nobody's gonna give me a second look or a second thought or anything about who I am or the fact that I'm trans. It just doesn't mean anything to these young people, which is— I think it's a very, very wonderful thing. I guess my tack has been that patience is my best friend in terms of, you know, if you live long enough, the old fuddy-duddies do do die off the vine eventually. And then they're replaced by people who have a very different experience of the world and a fresher appreciation of reality. I mean, even politically, I would say, I think it's the young people who are going to bring us into a better era, hopefully at the end of this year. So, you know, we need our young people. We rely on them. We need their fresh blood. We need their fresh ideas. We need their energy and we need their enthusiasm. And that's all there, you know. The young people that I meet, young musicians I meet, have, you know, I don't even think they think there's a separation between straight and LGBTQ. It's all, it's the human race. We're all humans. So what's the, what's the issue? It's, it's sort of like the old, the old stick in the mud. So I don't want to insult my own dad, but Well, poor dad. He's a good man, but I'll tell that story. It was, yeah, I think it was in Vancouver. He came for a visit and we walked into a Starbucks. Now my dad was born in, gee, probably 1933 and worked on the railroad as a young man. And, you know, he's a blue collar, blue collar white guy. So I don't know how much he'd ever been into Starbucks. But we walked into Starbucks. I said, Dad, you want to get some coffee? He said, sure. So I took him into Starbucks and he started shaking. He looked up on the board there and he saw these things, you know, these Frappuccino things, cappuccino things, half whip, no whip, decaf, half calf, you know, whatever. He just started shaking. He literally was shaking, you know. And the barista said, yes, sir, can I help you? And he got mad. You know, and he said, I want a cup of coffee. And I said, Dad, she'll make you a cup of coffee. It's okay. You don't have to pay attention. What's all that stuff? You know, it was sort of upset. And I, I tried to talk him, talk him down to, to, you know, you could have what you want and those people can have what they want too. It's, it's all good. It's okay. You don't have to get upset and challenged by that. I think that's kind of like the problem. The problem folks are the ones looking at the board and just wondering, why has the world changed like that? There's too much. It's too confusing. It's too much. I can't deal with it.

No.

And I don't want to even critique that. I mean, like I said, I started this interview mentioning my age. I mean, I don't feel old. I don't want to None of us really— I think we like the idea of old as revered.

Wiser.

Yes, wiser. Yes, there we go. But old as fuddy-duddy and stuck in the mud, that's not particularly all that attractive. And yet, you know, the world changes with incredible speed and it's very, very hard to keep up with things. And I know anytime I have to use my cell phone, I mean, you know, you see people doing shh, right? I'm not one of them. I'm the person doing— and I'm fine with that. I don't want to change.

You're not missing out so much, so.

I hope not.

Yeah.

No, no, no. Anyway, so that's my diversity story.

Oh, well, thank you. Well, you know, living authentically, especially in the face of challenges, it requires such immense energy and courage and can be also, but in the end can be the source of joy in life. And from your performances to your advocacy, I think it really shows. So I appreciate you for being here today. Really.

Thank you, Yukimi Song. Thank you so much. You're so kind. It's such a lovely interview.

What is your next step? I believe you are Greenwich House School of Music School's inaugural German Diaz Memorial Piano Chair.

Yes, this was offered to me, I guess it's going back about 8 or 9 months ago, just like out of the blue. Rachel Black, who is the head of Greenwich House Music School Concerts.

In New York City, yes.

In New York City, yes. Sent me an email and Germán Díaz was a very fine pianist, a great pedagogue, and he had been the chair of that music department for about 60 years. He was a good friend of mine. He was a teaching assistant to Claudio Arau, good friend of Arau's also. His brother, his older brother was a very prominent Cuban composer as well. Hermann was kind of like the royalty of Greenwich House for many, many years. He taught a lot of really gifted pianists who went on to find careers and went to— after that school, they went to Juilliard and Mannes and Boston Conservatory and places like this. Anyway, Hermann died, I guess, about 10 years ago, and Rachel sent me this email and she said, you know, we had this meeting the piano faculty. She said, it's been 10 years since Hermann left us. And we all agree we need some sort of a flagship person to be our, you know, head of our department and put a face on our department. She said, and your name was brought up and übzünenanimus, everybody wanted you. I was so touched by that. And I thought to myself, I mean, I'm very happy to be teaching at Temple University. It's a full-time job, although, you know, I have to be there basically about 2 days a week. And I thought, well, you know, I had left New York many, many years before and missed it. And I said, you know, Alberto Jónasz used to commute between Philly and New York. Is there any reason I can't also? And of course, well, first of all, I can't afford Manhattan. Nobody can. But I found this lovely place in Newark, New Jersey, which is 20 minutes out of Manhattan and about 50 minutes north of Philadelphia. So it seemed like it was sort of like meant to be. And particularly, you know, for the last time I'm going to mention my age because it sounds like I'm consumed with that, but I did think to myself, in terms of my pedagogy, what is it that I want to leave when it's my time to go? And I think Greta Schaus has this great history. Of course, amateur pianists can go there, professionals as well. They have a beautiful concert hall. It's a lot of advantages. The piano department is probably one of the finest in New York City. I mean, some fantastic pianists teaching there. It's a great environment. And I thought, well, this will be a chance to work with very young people again, and that's maybe a challenge, and that's a little unusual for someone like me to do, but why not? I mean, you know, I can see in the future that Greenwich House would be, especially since I would be not just a teacher, but the head of that department, have a lot of say in what is the future of that school. The future of that place is terribly important to the City of New York, obviously. It's kind of a flagship neighborhood music school. So it will affect an awful lot of people and their relationship with great music if I'm helping to direct how things go. I'm a little scared to do it. I've never really headed anything. I'm not particularly a good organizer, or a well-proportioned person in terms of paperwork. But I thought, okay, look, let me try it. Let me try this. This is kind of important. You know, it's one thing to feel that your teaching is important, but this is sort of on a whole different level in a sense, like to running something, sort of like dictating the course of things. Hope I can do something, do something good with it.

Oh my goodness. It would be such an amazing thing in such a neighborhoody, you know, place in New York City, West Village.

Oh yeah, well, it's connected, of course. The, the Greenwich House is a much larger social service organization. Yes, they have a dance school and they have social services for the LGBTQ community. So, so there's a lot of personal reasons why it makes sense. Someone someone like me would be involved with that. So, so I hope I bring some knowledge and expertise to bear there. Oh, I know, sure, I'm sure.

So, uh, you have all concerts lined up, I'm sure. So if my viewers and listeners can check out your website, sarahdavisbuchner.com, and, uh, they get the latest news about your concerts, upcoming events, concerts are all listed there.

I have to update some other things in that website. I'm not so good with that technology. There's, there's like, you know, recent articles and there's stuff from 2019. I, I've got to do something about that, but, uh, we'll take care of that ASAP. And the schedule is all up there. Yes. And so that, that will tell people where I am and what I'm playing.

Wonderful. Thank you. So this has been a really great, fun, inspirational conversation, and thank you so much for for really staying here with me for this long time. And before I let you go, we have one more thing to do. It's called The Piano Pod with rapid-fire questions. So each question may sound really silly, but your answers may reveal who you truly are.

Uh-oh.

Okay, now you got me terrified.

So ready or not, please answer them with the shortest responses possible. No explanation is necessary. Okay, let's start with the easy ones. Question number 1: What is your comfort food?

Mac and cheese.

How do you like your coffee in the morning?

Absolutely hot, black, steaming, direct, 3 cups.

Oh, great. Cats or dogs?

Oh, cats for sure.

Sunrise or sunset?

Oh, both. I'm gonna cheat on that one. I love both.

Summer or winter?

Winter, for sure.

Now, level 2. What, what skill have you always wanted to learn but haven't had a chance to?

Mastering Spanish.

What is your word or words to live by?

To thine own self be true. Shakespeare.

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

Sincerity.

Okay, now level 3. Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead.

Malcolm X, Leon Trotsky, And Albert Einstein.

Oh wow, great, thank you. Now name one piece in your current playlist.

MacDowell, To a Wild Rose.

Oh beautiful, such a— yeah, sweet piece.

Yes, perfection.

Last one, fill in the blank, please fill in the blank: music is blank.

Life.

Music is life. Beautiful. Ding, ding.

That was easy.

Yeah. Oh, great. So that wraps up this episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Dr. Sarah Davis Buchner. Thank you, Dr. Buchner, for joining us today and sharing your beautiful stories and insights and expertise. And your authenticity and joyous energy have truly inspired our conversation. You can learn more about Dr. Sarah Davis Buchner and her amazing work through her website at sarahdavisbuchner.com. You can also, uh, listen to her recordings on all major streaming services, and you can watch her past presentations and performances on her YouTube channel at Sarah Davis Buchner. All the links are listed in the show notes. 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 this episode on YouTube. Follow TPP on social media to get the latest piano news. I will see you for the next episode of Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. Thank you, and thank you, Dr. Buchner. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Yukimi Song.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.