Welcome to The Piano Pod!

Welcome to The Piano Pod. I'm Yukimi Song.

I am Eric Hunter.

And I'm Clara Zhang.

Welcome to our introductory episode, and I'm the owner and director at Yukimi Song Studio, a private piano studio based in New York City. Here we have my friends Clara Zhang, who is also a piano instructor and owner and director at Rational Music Studio, and Eric Hunter, who is also a piano teacher, composer, and owner/director at Hunter Music Studio, and both are also based in New York City.

Hi guys! Hello!

So before we officially take off next week's, our first guest, we wanted to just to give you an introductory video where we want to introduce you who we are and and also why we do this podcasting show. So Clara, you want to go first? Sure. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Okay, great. Thank you so much, Yukimi. So hello everyone. My name is Clara Zhang. I'm a classical concert pianist and as Yukimi said, owner and the founder of Rational Music Studios based in New York City, Upper East Side. We opened studio in 2012., and we have students age 3 to 81 and from all around New York. And this is March of this year, the whole studio has transformed, uh, into an online teaching and it's been going great actually. So I just want to tell you a little bit of myself and why I joined these two amazing people on this podcast journey. Um, so originally I grew up in China, mainland China, and I started training when I was 3 years old. My grandmother gave me a little keyboard and I just fall in love with it. I had this vision that one day I'm going to use music to brighten up the world. That's what I have been doing. Throughout the years, I've been to the conservatory in China for a little bit and I moved to Midwest of US. The training was a little different from most pianists because I've been to the university and learned a lot of different things. I was always very interested in psychology, philosophy, you know, and the science between, you know, on top of playing piano. So when I moved to New York City and opened up my studio, I met lovely Yukimi and Eric, and we had this open forum, and we talked about, you know, how we teach piano and how, you know, as piano teacher nerds, right, like, we really want to dive in deep, see how can we help our students and ourselves as performers. And so that's how we all met up. And then recently when we all started teaching online, Ms. Yukimi had this brilliant idea and then she invited the first guest and, you know, a psychologist. And I was so intrigued by that idea. So that's how we got started. And I believe, truly, truly believe that with all of our energy and all the expertise from all these upcoming guests, we're going to make this piano teaching a really fun place for us all. So thank you so much.

Great.

I'll hand the mic to Eric.

Yeah. Thank you, Clara. That was very, very interesting. And I really can't wait to start working with you very soon. So thank you. So Eric, so can you introduce yourself to us?

Definitely. Thank you, Yukimi. Thank you, Clara. So my name is Eric Hunter. I am also a pianist and teacher based in New York City, also composer. You can hear some of my works at erichuntersmusic.com. I've been living here for about 10 years now. I'm teaching all ages, performing locally, and developing my composition career. A few years ago, I felt that I needed to get in touch with more piano teachers because I was working in isolation, like we often tend to do, and I wanted to know what everybody else was up to, and I wanted to bounce my ideas off of other piano teachers. I also felt like as a teacher, I needed to do that in order to continue to develop and grow. So I started a program called Open Forum, which Clara mentioned, which is very simple. We just meet once a month to talk shop, and that's where I met Yukimi and Clara, and we developed into good friends, and I respect their opinions very much. And so when Yukimi came to us with this idea recently to start a podcast where we talk about everything related to piano, I thought it was great, and I wanted to come on board.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, and thank you both of you to say, uh, for saying yes, uh, when I brought this idea. So I really appreciate it. I really trust your expertise and all of your past experiences, and I also trust our friendship that we, uh, kind of grew together over the several years in the past. So I'm very getting excited. So, speaking of that, so I really wanted to share this with you, why I came up with the idea of podcasting. Let me just go back several months ago. I had several piano students who are kind of going through this transition from, you know, being elementary school students to teenagers. And they were kind of going through this performance anxiety because they were involved in piano competitions and so many other performance opportunities. And I really wanted to help them, and I did my best. You know, I have been teaching piano lessons for 20 years, and I am myself a piano performer, so I kind of know how to deal with my nervousness and anxiety. However, just wanted to kind of Google a little bit more and then kind of get more concrete, more detailed kind of information, and kind of wanted to talk to an expert. So I Googled and I came across with this article which was published 3 years ago on Klaviyo Companions. Then the article was talking about this one, three actually performance coaches, and one of them whose name is Dr. John Skidmore, who happens to be our first guest of this show. I just had to Google him and then I had to kind of get in touch with him. He very graciously replied to my email. And then he also happened to kind of Google me and found my, my another podcast that I am actually doing for my own piano studio. It's called Conversations with a Piano Student. So in that episode, I, uh, in that show, I actually invite my students to talk about their piano journey and everything. So then Dr. Skidmore wanted to be the guest of that podcast. However, I told him, I said, well, let's just not limit ourselves in that podcasting show, but let me talk to my really dearest friends, Eric and Clara, if they would be on board and interested. So that's how I actually brought the thing about podcasting. So yeah, what do you think, Eric? Well, what's the— why are we doing this? What's the vision here?

Yeah, and well, we're all very excited to be here. And yeah, so we talked about it some more. And basically, you know, a few months ago when the pandemic started, it was a very scary time for all of us, for everybody in the music entertainment industries. You know, everything just got turned upside down and job security is a big question now. And we realized basically, in order to survive, we're going to have to adapt and continue to evolve. And so I felt that it was really important to have a community in order to be able to support each other, which we already have through Open Forum a little bit. And, and we see this as a way to reach out to many different Ghanaians of all ages— students, teachers, and even parents of students. Potentially across the world. So that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring community, and Yukimi, like you mentioned at one point, we want to be a kind of pub or coffee shop where people can discuss all different kinds of ideas related to playing and teaching piano.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we bring guests to kind of shake up the world, you know, like new ideas. But basically, obviously, we are teaching something traditional, and we're not trying to break that, or we're not trying to be disrespect— of that— disrespectful of that. But we can also have this more modern and contemporary approach to something old and something that we can kind of relate to because we're not from 300 years ago, obviously. The— where this is the year 2020, and obviously this, especially this year, changed the way we communicate to each other. Everything has really changed. So I think this platform gives us kind of things to kind of discuss without judgment and bring topics that are really shocking to us.

Exactly.

Absolutely. There's also just a lot of new opportunities available now because of the nature of everything being online. For example, the three of us are all based in New York, and Dr. Skidmore is based mainly in Utah.

That's true.

So we might not have had any contact with him naturally before this, but because everything is online now, it's the most natural thing just to reach out, send him an email, bring him in on Zoom., and then we can offer this content to you, our viewers. And his content is really incredible. We're all super excited for this first episode.

Yeah, absolutely. Clara, anything?

Yeah, I just want to say, you know, it's something I couldn't even imagine when I was younger. You know, I was always sort of like a book nerd, and when I was in the conservatory, the first year, 11, 12 years old, living in the dorm with all these pianists, I was really just into psychology. And I remember climbing up the stairs of this library to find the one book, you know, and then has to have translated all that. And now, you know, Dr. Skidmore was so amazing and he met us all. And I just imagine how many other more experts that, you know, we have all these hosts lined up and everybody's so interested. And the students too, a lot of the students, 35 years old, you know, I had them start using iPad. Now they are all experts with Zoom lessons. So I think we literally, we're living in the best time of our, you know, of the year. So 2020 may be something to be grateful for.

Sure, sure, definitely. Thank you. So that's what we are here— that's why we're here, and that's what we're trying to do. So I wanted to announce you— so our first guest, like I said, it's going to be Dr. John Skidmore. He's a psychologist, he's a performance coach, he himself is a musician, he, he's a singer, I think, and he currently lives in Utah. And we had this interview a couple weeks ago, and we're in the process of editing and about to publish on YouTube, as well as we're trying to do broadcast it on Facebook Live and as well as Instagram TV. So stay tuned. Then the first part of the interview will be available on September 8th. Which is Tuesday right after Labor Day weekend, so please stay tuned. So, um, this is it. So, um, this concludes the introduction of our podcast, and thank you so much everyone for watching or listening.

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If you have any feedback for us, you can email us at thepianopodnyc@gmail.com, or you can leave a comment on this video.

Thank you.

Great.

So play— please tune in on September 8th, Tuesday, for first episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song! See you then everyone!

Bye everybody!