Kevin Scott and Ben Laude on Piano, Programming, AI and Art
BEN LAUDE: Maybe one day we will be comparing Horowitz and Perahia's Chopin Ballade to AI's different version of it, and we can input. Well, I want to hear an AI play it with this expression. Is that coming? Should we be concerned, or what do you think? KEVIN SCOTT: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer, and EVP of AI at Microsoft.
Today, tech is a part of nearly every aspect of our lives. We're in the early days of an AI revolution promising to transform our lived experiences as much as any technology ever has. On this podcast, we'll talk with the folks behind the technology and explore the motivations, passion, and curiosity driving them to create the tech shaping our world. Let's get started.
CHRISTINA WARREN: Hello, and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. KEVIN SCOTT: I'm Kevin Scott. CHRISTINA WARREN: Now, before we introduce our guest, we wanted to take a minute to share with y'all that we are planning an ask me anything or AMA episode with Kevin in the coming months.
KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, that's right. We would love to hear your questions on any topic at all, from AI to sci-fi, to woodworking, or my latest obsession, which is pottery. Funny enough, as we are recording this, I have a kiln heating up to many thousands of degrees Fahrenheit right now firing pottery. Or we can talk about piano, which is the episode that we're recording today.
Anything that's on your mind, please feel free to reach out to us, and we will try to give good answers to your good questions. CHRISTINA WARREN: Yeah, absolutely. I'm really excited to see what questions come in. If you have a question for Kevin, you can send us an e-mail or a voice note to behindthetech@microsoft.com,
that's behindthetech@microsoft.com. Please include your name and a way to reach out if you have follow-up questions. Please keep voice notes to no longer than 90 seconds. Once again, that e-mail is behindthetech@microsoft.com.
KEVIN SCOTT: Awesome. I'm really looking forward to that. CHRISTINA WARREN: Me too. Now we can dive into our interview for today, which I'm really looking forward to. Our guest today is a musician. Ben Laude is a concert pianist who has performed all over the world, and he's also a long-time music educator, both in traditional education settings and as a YouTube creator.
KEVIN SCOTT: Look, I don't know whether I'm breaking news here, but I tend to get obsessed about very particular things, and one of the things that I've been obsessed about since I was a teenager is classical piano. I'm just super excited in general to talk to Ben because I think he's making some of the best educational content about classical piano anywhere in the world. It's just a miracle that these resources are available for folks who happen to have this particular obsession. But I think it's actually more relevant even than satisfying my desire to have a conversation with a fellow piano nerd, because we're at this point in time where people are thinking a lot about what AI means for art and artists. I think that there is a bunch of stuff that we can chat about with Ben to try to get a little clearer in our head about, what maybe things like AI are going to mean for art.
It's a hard conversation to have in general because I think if you ask 100 artists to define what art is, you would get 100 different definitions. But it is one of the most essentially human things that we have as a species is the art that we make for ourselves and for each other, and so I'm really excited to have this conversation with Ben, given that he's thought so critically about what makes the performance of classical piano a compelling thing. CHRISTINA WARREN: Absolutely. I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation. Let's go over to Ben. KEVIN SCOTT: Ben Laude is an adjunct professor of music, piano, literature and aural skills at Utah State University, and a YouTube creator devoted to popularizing classical piano content. He's an accomplished concert pianist, whose playing has been described by the New York Times as "superb in pace, tone and eloquence."
He was the head of the Tonebase piano platform for four years, and he's currently working on a video and podcast series exploring the work of composer Frederic Chopin and his relevance to the 21st century. Ben holds degrees in piano performance from Rice University and the Juilliard School. Ben, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. I've been really looking forward to this one.
BEN LAUDE: Thanks, Kevin, likewise. KEVIN SCOTT: We always start these conversations by going back to people's beginnings. You're obviously an amazing piano and music educator and a performer. How did you get onto that journey? When did you know that this is what you wanted to do? BEN LAUDE: Well, unlike some of my peers in the classical music world, I didn't come from a strictly musical family. There was music in my family, though. My dad has dabbled at the piano, but he himself is a chemistry professor and administrator at UT Austin.
I grew up in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, middle-class, and parents split up. But basically, I had a normal 1990s childhood, early Internet, lots of TV, sports, and a little bit of Chopin and Beethoven started filling the air around me. At night, my dad would come home from his lab and try his hand at the beginning of Chopin's first nocturne, and so this intoxicating melody just, I guess, seeped into my nervous system. Reportedly, I don't remember this exactly. Reportedly, I would come and stare at my dad when he would try to play and eventually, I think it was pretty clear I needed to start piano lessons around age 5.
But in terms of how I ended up here, lots of people take piano lessons, but like I usually say, you're supposed to quit around age 11 or 12. You're not supposed to keep doing it. That's weird. I got really lucky, or you can say unlucky depending on whether you think a career of music is a good idea, but I got really lucky right around high school. I got a new teacher who actually set my technique straight. I had maybe some talent before, but it wasn't really realized. Again, I had a lot of other priorities.
I wasn't being pushed to become some virtuoso. There was a turning point around eighth or ninth grade. I was starting to feel something for the music.
In fact, it was a Chopin prelude I remember listening to in the eighth grade. Suddenly, and again, this is right around early puberty. Hormones are starting. One of the many things that happened in early puberty was this music started to matter to me. I felt something new and different, and not exactly something I wanted to go brag to my friends about at school. It became this private obsession and I just became a ravenous collector of music scores and piano recordings, and I wanted to get better.
I started practicing more, and I went from playing with flat fingers and barely making my way through a Bach invention in middle school to playing Saint-Saëns and Rachmaninoff concertos by my sophomore and junior year of high school. There was this great leap that happened that was also happening at the same time that my interest in the art form was being stimulated, and so I was lucky to have a father and a mother who were encouraging when I told them, I want to be a pianist. I want to go study this in college.
That's how it all got started in a nutshell. KEVIN SCOTT: How important do you think that feedback loop is to people getting escape velocity into a profession? Like what you described that you started, you had a new teacher. I wonder how important the Internet was to finding community to fuel your obsession. But it sounds like the important thing is this feedback loop where all of a sudden you just started progressing faster and feeling better and differently about the things that you were doing. I felt the same way when I was young about programming.
I've got a daughter right now who's 16, who's in the feedback loop for the biosciences. It's just cool to see that hit someone. BEN LAUDE: Nothing has ever made me feel the way Chopin nocturnes and polonaises, and Beethoven sonatas made me feel, or Rachmaninoff concertos started to make me feel at high school. I don't know how to describe it. I don't feel the way now that I felt then. I wish I could go back and experience that magic again.
But I feel like the world's been a bit disenchanted for me as I grow older, and so maybe some of my videos are an attempt to re-enchant things for myself too. But at the time, I always had obsessions as a kid. I would become fixated on some aspect of culture or subject.
Piano, in a way, was just another one of those. But because it was so much deeper than say, my obsession with yoyos or juggling. No offense to those performing arts, but piano has a rich history and legacy, and it's just infinitely deep. I was also just fascinated by the fact that these encoded scores could be manifest in sound. If that makes any sense.
It's like some guy who wrote this down 200 years ago in hieroglyphics, and I'm able to decipher it and then bring it to life. That was magical to me. That was really cool to me, and so this obsession, just I think, because I got a good teacher, that teacher was able to push me and develop it. It could have just been another passing phase or fad for me. But something clicked and it's all I cared about for a bit there. KEVIN SCOTT: I'm just curious, you in one of your videos you're holding up video cassettes, of the Horowitz Last Romantic, and you're talking about the '78 performance of the Rach 3 that he did.
I had a whole bunch of those reference points when I was a kid. I think I'm a reasonable bit older than you are. Growing up in the '70s and '80s, I got connected to classical music because Horowitz was a little bit of a celebrity. Not a huge celebrity, like mainstream wise, but he had done this televised concert from Carnegie Hall in 1968, that was before I was born, but got replayed, and then I remember he did this interview on 60 Minutes, I believe, right when he was about to do his tour of Moscow, and there was a little bit of this Cold War dimension where it's like, our pianists are better than your pianists at that point in time and it was just enough to get me super fascinated by this, which was just as weird for me to be fascinated as probably was for you.
I was the only kid in my circle who was listening to Vladimir Horowitz, and Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Van Cliburn, Martha Argerich CDs or cassette tapes even before CDs existed. How did you find community? It sounds like you had good teachers, but was there anything else? Because this is one of the things I think you're doing an extraordinary job of, is giving these resources for people who have this fascination. BEN LAUDE: In a way, I'm just creating videos for my younger self that I wish had existed back then, but yeah, I probably wouldn't be here without the early Internet, which you probably feel some nostalgia for that early Internet as well. Again, my father is a professor, so I grew up crawling around his lab in the mid '90s and he had the Internet. Around then, I was probably playing video games with my brother, and we would get online and look up Resident Evil cheat codes for PlayStation, things like that.
But message boards were the main, at least for me, thing to do on the Internet in the late '90s and early 2000s, and it was around 2000 that I developed this piano obsession. Of course, I ran to get online, and dial up and look for somebody saying something about piano and I found it. I found there was an old site called the Chopin Files when I was in high school. Then it became defunct, and then I found a couple other sites.
One's called Piano World and Piano Street. They still exist. I went on there and just started talking a bunch of smack about piano, because I was developing opinions, and I would hear somebody else claim that Horowitz's 1951 Rachmaninoff concerto is obviously superior to his earlier and later renditions, and Martha Argerich's Rach 3 is too indulgent here. Of course, they're all received.
They weren't my own opinions and I was trying on different thoughts. But I asserted myself with confidence, and I found message boards to have these fun debates, and ranking the Chopin Etudes to see what was hardest. But yeah, I needed that. KEVIN SCOTT: Which one do you think is the hardest? BEN LAUDE: I think it's personal, but for me, it's either the Double-Thirds Etude or the Opus 10 Number 2 in A minor, where you have to, in your third, fourth, and fifth fingers, play a rapid chromatic scale while you also accompany yourself.
Basically, an oom-pah-pah in the same hand as this insane spidery thing. At the time, I couldn't touch these pieces. I was still getting better, and I was in awe of those who could, and I wanted to find everybody I could who had the same fascination for me, and without the Internet, I wouldn't have done that. Also, without video in my pre-YouTube era, when the Internet was helping to stimulate this interest, I needed to watch these things, and I could listen because I could go to Barnes and Noble to the CD section and buy some, or even Tower Records was around back then I could buy some classical CDs, and I would collect them with whatever a little bit of money that I had in high school.
That's what I splurged it all on. It was just CDs and scores, but I wanted to watch these things. I was lucky enough to catch something on PBS at some point about Evgeny Kissin.
I remember my teacher had a couple of VHS tapes that he let me borrow and a DVD, and one of them was a documentary called the Art of Piano, which chronicled all the famous pianists of the 20th century, and that was the first time I heard of people like Arrau, Horowitz, Serkin, Gould, and some of the early golden age KEVIN SCOTT: It's the first time I ever heard of Cziffra right? Who is unbelievable. BEN LAUDE: Yeah, but also to see it was a big deal. There was an aura around these old videos. Now, everything is on YouTube.
Every day I get recommended a new, this is not video, but a new Carnegie Hall recital from Horowitz from the '40s. He played there probably a handful of times every year. There's dozens of these things that exist. But as a kid, just to have one live recording of Horowitz from Carnegie Hall would make me flip out.
I really needed the Internet, and I needed video and a couple of years before YouTube. YouTube was such a game changer for this obsession. It came right at the time I was in college when my obsession was peaking. But in the years before that, I found random websites. One was called rareclassicaldvds.com. I needed it in particular because I wanted to get my hands on a particular Horowitz performance that apparently was a total bust.
In Tokyo, he was mixing medications, and he just completely. But I was fascinated by the fact that Horowitz screwed up. I was like, I have to hear this performance. Before it was available, I ordered some Horowitz in Moscow, DVDs like that. I had this obsession.
Again, nobody, except my piano teacher, maybe in his younger years, cared about this. There was actually nowhere I could find anyone. I wasn't going to school and trying to convince people to like this thing.
I played on the basketball team. Again, I was just, whatever. It was something I tried to hide, to be honest. The Internet was a place for me to go and find a community of like minded people.
Actually, it was amazing when I started my channel, I got an early Patreon supporter and the guy reached out and he's some business or finance guy about around my age. He said, hey, I remember you from the piano forums in the 2000s. I was Alkan88. I was like, I remember that. These people I met at the time with these pseudonyms are coming back into my life now and finding my work. It's coming full circle, I suppose.
KEVIN SCOTT: If you're playing Rachmaninoff Concertos, when you're in high school, you're super talented, it sounds like you had all the passion that you need to decide to go to school to study. How did you think about this as a career? Were you just purely driven by the passion for this thing, or did you have these rational thoughts about, this is what the odds are of being a concert pianist in this world. BEN LAUDE: For better or worse, my dad raised me with an almost American dream mentality of you can be whatever you want to be in this country. While I don't think that's exactly as true as maybe he was making it seem, I was lucky that he thought that.
But also for that reason, I had no rational calculus at all. It was a matter of first getting a taste of the fact that this does go on in the real world. Remember, I'd only been on the Internet. Before I was going to commit myself to this, I had to meet people actually doing it. Luckily, between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to New Orleans, Piano Institute, camp. There's a competition that happens at the same time.
I went there and it was like, me and a couple of other high school age people, but a lot of college age students, a couple of years older than me, who were studying piano in college. I felt like I was on their level or at least near their level, and I loved it. I finally could just like, talk about my passion and my hobby and share it with them and go to international competitions every night and watch amazing pianists, maybe five, 10 years older than me, do their thing. That made it real. That's when I was like, people, you can do this.
There is a major in college. You could major in music. You can major in piano. I still find it totally bizarre that that's a thing and yet the moment that it became real to me, I think it was just instant.
I was like, this is what I'm doing. College, again, it was sold as a time to explore. It was a time to not have to decide. Even though music majors are the ones - at Rice where I went, who had to commit, we actually had to declare our major before we got there. Everybody else got a year or a year and a half or so.
We were the ones who knew it. At the same time, there was this feeling of, well, I could always change my course. I was interested in math and other things. I even got into Northwestern for a double degree in math and music and ended up going to Rice. I knew I had other interests and skills and could always turn. But I wasn't really thinking about that.
I was just so happy that this career path existed, and I was so at the beginning of it that I wasn't thinking longer term. KEVIN SCOTT: It's a super interesting profession and a practice. Someone asked me one time, I was actually at a computer science conference with fellow PhD students. We were in Vancouver, and I went to some Virgin Records in Vancouver, and I actually found the Art of Piano, that DVD there and I bought it. They were like, why are you so fascinated with piano? Like you're a computer scientist? I was like, there's some part of it, I can't explain at all.
I have no idea. But part of it is I love this idea that pianists and programmers share this struggle that they have, where you've got this machine that doesn't really want to do what you wanted to do, that you have to sit down at and conquer. You just have to figure out its complexities and figure out how to extract out of it, what you have in your head. It's a little bit of a solitary activity, that act of mastering this tool like no one can do for you, and there are very few shortcuts for accelerating it.
You've just got to put the hours in. I even heard, I think, on one of these Horowitz VHS tapes that I watched, Horowitz's manager described it. He was like, pianists sometimes can have this strange psyche because what they do is a solitary activity.
They sit alone in a room and wrestle with this great machine. BEN LAUDE: First of all, you really know your stuff. You know all of these great documentaries and performances of classical piano.
I'm impressed and flattered to know that that you like a thing I like. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think Martha Argerich once said that, her solo recitals just felt like the loneliest time in the world.
That's not every pianist. Arthur Rubinstein was very much present with his audience, and he said that he would even imagine a pretty girl in the audience and play for her, but he loved to share live performance. I think I'm more on the Argerch or even Gouldian side of things. Because of frankly, it wasn't concerts that got me into music.
It was recordings and it was a very private activity. In fact, I still feel uncomfortable when I go to a live concert. Everybody is around me.
Can you guys leave? Can I just be in here alone? Because it is a private experience for the listener as well. But as a pianist, just sitting in a room for hours on end. It is, I suppose, similar to programming. There's an input and an output, and the output is not always what you want. There's something going on on the inside, and there's probably bugs in there and who knows? But I like piano because compared with other instruments, which I never got into.
Although, now I regret that. I wish I were more diverse in my instrumental skill sets, the way musicians used to have to be, but I am a pianist. Only one week of string camp. Can't remember any of that. But I like
that the pianist is detached from the production of sound. That's actually invisible to us. Now, this could be a trap for pianists who start approaching piano too much like typing or a button pressing activity.
But actually, your connection, it's such an ingenious design from the early industrial revolution that your actual physical activity is immediately triggering this, hammer at this complex hammer action and escapement on the inside of the instrument. But you can't see that. All you have is this interface, and you have to develop a connection with that.
It's really hard and I'm still trying to do it better, and I'm trying to help other people do it better. But I think the biggest difference between piano and coding because otherwise, they have a lot of interesting similarities, the solitary nature, it's just the physical and athletic requirement. At the end of the day, piano is an intense physical activity. We're all injured. We don't like to
talk about it, but we're all injured. Maybe you coder types get a little injured sometimes, maybe a little like, my neck hurts or something. You need some occupational therapy. But pianists actually we need serious help sometimes with this. KEVIN SCOTT: I forget what the story is. Didn't Schumann wreck his hands because he made these little exercises? BEN LAUDE: They didn't know much about piano technique in the 19th century.
The people who did it well, I think, figured it out naturally. They had all these ridiculous ideas like he was trying to get independence in his fourth finger. The fourth finger is conjoined.
Chopin said it was the Siamese. These are the Siamese twins of the hand and they're conjoined right here. What he thought was that he needed a contraption to learn how to isolate each finger.
Well, it turns out, we know this now, also from research in the 20th century that isolating your fingers is basically a ticket to having a career ending, debilitating injury. That's what happened to Schumann. He came up with this contraption to try to help isolate the fourth finger, and it ended up ruining him, contributing in part to his misery, although it's good to have miserable composers because of the music... KEVIN SCOTT: He squeezed some beautiful, beautiful stuff out of the misery. BEN LAUDE: I don't want too happy a composer. Chopin was just so melancholy all the time, and would we have wanted him to be different? Maybe we want Chopin to be happy, but we're okay with the results he put into his music.
But yeah, for sure, there's a lot more knowledge now about what to do and what not to do with the hand. Although I still think not enough, and it's not standardized, and there's still a lot more research that needs to be done into it. There's a lot of gurus and a lot of schools of thought, and they all have their dogmas. Actually, part of my work at Tonebase was just trying to collect these people and say, let's get what these different experts are saying about piano technique, and what's interesting is how often they disagree with each other.
It's still a heated debate, but at least we know that we shouldn't be putting our fingers in these contraptions anymore. KEVIN SCOTT: It really is interesting. I'm not surprised at all that you have people having wildly different opinions about interpretation. One of the weird things... God bless YouTube. I do think it is actually one of the most wonderful things ever, not just for piano nerds, but any nerd you want to go obsess on something. But I watched just this morning, preparing for this.
I want to talk about the instrument and the art as like two different things because when you think about something like AI, like if you think about AI as both instrument and art together, you just are getting confused. But if you think about AI as an instrument for an artist to use to go make something, it becomes altogether interesting. I was watching this morning Murray Perahia doing a master class in 2022 on the G minor Ballade, Chopin, which is my favorite piece of music. Murray, one of his performances is my very favorite performance of that. The part of that Ballade that moves me the most is the leadup to bar 106. When you release all of the tension, it's like that double fortissimo.
It's the big dramatic moment in the middle of the piece. What he was asking this student to do is, there's this chord in the leadup to 106, and he's like, what does death sound like? He's like, this is death. He's like, you need to have this passage, this line that you're playing be foreboding, and as if death is chasing you. Not everybody has that in their mind, like when they're playing that particular passage. I know Zimmerman's got a different thing. I've seen Steven Hough do a master class on the same thing.
That's the thing that's just super fascinating to me. It's like you can have the same instrument and the same score and get something fundamentally different out of it for you, the performer, and it lands on the audience in a different way. Murray's performance of this, it sends goosebumps up my spine every time I listen to it. I've listened to it hundreds of times. Zimmerman's performances are very, very good.
It just doesn't do the same thing, and I don't know why. BEN LAUDE: Is interesting that there's almost no spoilers in classical music. It's almost the reverse. It's knowing what's coming that builds the anticipation and the goosebumps, and for me, it's knowing a piece really well that makes, if it's a great piece, that makes repeated listenings so meaningful. But yeah, it's interesting to compare what you're describing to AI, and you would know much more about this than I would. But at least from what I can tell, classical piano and the literature and the art of interpreting it, these are expressions of human consciousness.
Chopin's first Ballade is an expression of his organized consciousness, and he's expressing something. The only way we can agree about the piece is if we just speak in generalities. Well, it's dramatic. It seems to tell a story, whatever. But the moment you get into details and you want to talk about how this phrase should be rendered, it's death for Murray Perahia. It's life affirming for somebody else.
It's dark for this interpreter. It's bright. It's dry for Glenn Gould, it's wet for Horowitz. There's just suddenly the interpreter's consciousness is then mixed with the composer's. You get a new cocktail of whatever thing we can't describe. Maybe one day we will be comparing Horowitz and Perahia's Chopin Ballade to AI's different version of it, and we can input "Well, I want to hear an AI play it with this expression."
I don't know. You might have a comment on that. Is that coming? Should we be concerned? KEVIN SCOTT: I've had this conversation with people, and I don't think it does, because I think the point of a thing like classical piano is, you have something inside of you that you're trying to express that's difficult or impossible to express any other way. It's like part of your humanity.
It has meaning if you just play it for yourself, and it has a different meaning if you play it for an audience who are going to receive it in probably a different way than you are maybe even intending when you play it. Like I'd never thought of death before hearing Murray's performance until I saw him teach that Master Class. That's not the thing I'm thinking of. It's like just this incredible emotional response that I get to it that I can't really put words on. I think that's a beautiful connection that you've made, even though maybe that's not even what he was intending to do. BEN LAUDE: Well, the whole question of composers intentions is vexed, but I think it's interesting what you said because I could also change your mind.
One of the things about my videos is I think I've converted a few people to Glenn Gould, who would have never thought they would want to listen to him, but also I made these videos about Yunchan Lim, and even though KEVIN SCOTT: Except for Seymour Hoffman. You didn't change his mind. BEN LAUDE: Seymour Bernstein, yeah. KEVIN SCOTT: Bernstein, sorry. BEN LAUDE: Well, Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP. But Seymour Bernstein still kicking at 97.
Didn't change his mind, but he did respect my longer Gould documentary that I made a few months ago. I was able to have an exchange with him. I loved having that debate with Seymour because we were able to distill two perfectly valid conceptions and approaches and ways of regarding the playing of Mozart Brahms and Bach. He gave the argument on personal feeling.
For him Glenn Gould fails in terms of connecting with his sense of the way one should touch and turn these phrases so that they speak from the heart. I said back to him you're absolutely right. He doesn't speak from the heart. Gould is up to something else. I mean, he's trying to design these almost sonic aural landscapes that are organic and speak on their own terms and aren't related to our personal feelings, but somehow float above us. They're part of the cosmos.
They're hypnotic. They're often, they have a regularity to them, and it feels like the universe is pulsating and that we're just attaching ourselves. It's a very different aesthetic experience, listening to music than wanting to be touched, wanting to be moved, and feel. That's what's great about it. You can feel all kinds of things up here and here and here. Then when we have discussions and debates, it's not about being right. It's about learning more about what it means to feel something personally or what it might mean to experience art in a different way.
Just the comments on those videos about Gould, and I'd say about Yunchan, too. I mean, not everybody thought Yunchan's performance was the greatest Rachmaninoff of all time, and they let me know it in the comments, but it became even more interesting because I got to see: what did I hear that made me like it so much? Then I had to examine my own biases and my own influences, and I realized some people are expecting something completely different from this piece. That's where it becomes about this human interchange and human exchange of ideas.
Perhaps if an AI interfered with that, they would be just a nuisance. KEVIN SCOTT: A couple of things what you just said made me think. Like, one is I think artists like Glenn Gould, Horowitz is the same way, part of what makes them exciting to me is, they're not consistent across their performances of the same repertoire. There's this Glen Gould performance of Bach's Italian concerto, where, third movement he's playing, like at this rip roaring tempo BEN LAUDE: Bat out of hell, yeah KEVIN SCOTT: That's the one that I love. I find it incredibly compelling.
Then later on in life he plays it at like, what must be just half the tempo that he was playing in that younger recording. And it's like, I don't care for it. But he's evidently had some reconceiving of what it is he's looking for in the score. BEN LAUDE: He did it with the Italian Concerto, but most famously with the Goldberg Variations. That's what he launched his career with, but then he reflected on his own interpretation, and he realized: This isn't so organic. It doesn't add up.
He says, it just sounds like 30 independent variations with a mind of their own. Gould had a modernist sensibility. He believed in the autonomy of art. He believed that it should somehow all operate on its own logic on its own terms. To have a variety show was something too much out of the mundane world. He wanted the Goldberg Variations to somehow, again, float above our human engagement with it, and therefore proceed from one variation to the next with a mathematical proportionality.
He mapped this all out, and for some people, they can hear that measured quality, and it's totally alienating. Sounds like maybe that might have been your experience. I love that. I think that the fact that he starts with one pulse and he takes it for an hour, and he travels through this whole spiral of variations, and then he comes back to the beginning, and somehow you felt like it was one thing. For me, that's just a towering achievement. KEVIN SCOTT: I love his Goldberg Variations as well. Horowitz, for many years, was by far and away, my favorite pianist.
He's still, my single favorite piece of music, my single favorite performance of it is his. It's Scriabin's Opus 8, No. 12 The D minor etude. BEN LAUDE: D#, D# Minor. Not a key
you want to touch. It's very prickly. KEVIN SCOTT: D#, sorry. His performance in that 1968 televised concert is I think, the most compelling thing I've ever heard. BEN LAUDE: That performance is part of the reason I'm a pianist. I mean, that exact performance of that exact piece, when I first saw it, also just there was something about the color of that old, CBS live performance from behind the piano, and he comes out with the strong bass.
It's one of the most rhapsodic, passionate pieces I ever, I'd never heard of Scrabin before, and I was an immediate convert when I saw that. Sorry to interrupt you, but I have to just because it relates to something you said before. That piece, I had to learn it because it's just like I had to learn. KEVIN SCOTT: God help you. BEN LAUDE: Well, yeah, and actually, I thought there's no way I can play it. But in college, again, I had the time to be crazy enough to sit down and figure out how to make all those left hand jumps work.
It's good that it's in D sharp minor, because that means you're almost exclusively playing black keys, which on the page looks frightening. But if you just look at the keyboard, and you forget about how all of this is notated, it's actually more comfortable in certain ways to use the black keys that way. These jumps started to fit, and I realized I could redistribute some with my right hand. I just needed to basically master a couple of challenging octave parts, and I was starting to do my best Horowitz interpretation or impression.
I took this piece to Jerry Lowenthal, one of my teachers at Juilliard. He hadn't heard me play it before, and I was about to play it on the radio somewhere, and I just wanted to run it for him. I come in and I start with the Horowitz just bashing the left hand octaves, ba-dum, dee-da-da, you know, just cacophony. He stops me, "Stop! Why does everyone have to try to play this like Horowitz?" He showed me. He said, "You know, first of all, there's no dynamic indication at the beginning.
You can start very quietly. It's extremely effective." Later on, I saw there is a later Horowitz performance, I think in London. We he plays the same piece, and he begins at almost Pianissimo.
Even Horowitz did the opposite. Here I was imitating Horowitz, but I was actually just imitating one performance that he gave. Wow, we're really nerding out about this. I hope your viewers are down. If you don't know what we're talking about, guys, go watch Vladimir Horowitz play Scriabin D# Minor Etude, Opus 8 No. 12, immediately from 1968.
KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, it is incredible. Which brings me to Yunchan Lim, which I think is a thing that folks are not familiar. Like, they should definitely go to YouTube or to their favorite streaming platform or whatnot and start listening to some of the work by this kid. Yet again, one of these things that really makes me believe that, that there's just something very deeply human about this art form that I think people can get very confused about because you've got a technical instrument and a technical discipline of playing. But, like, the thing that's miraculous about it is like the human piece of it. What I'm talking about, like Yunchan Lim is, like, he's 20-years-old now.
Maybe 21. BEN LAUDE: Just 20. KEVIN SCOTT: A couple of years ago, at the Van Cliburn Piano competition, which is one of the world's, like, big piano competitions for young musicians to go prove themselves to the world. He wins the competition. There's a concerto performance at this competition, and like everyone was performing the Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto.
He comes out and delivers this performance that was unbelievable. Like, one where the conductor is, like, wiping a tear away from her eyes the orchestra that was playing with him had this crazy reaction to the performance. It's just unbelievable. Up until that point, like, that 78 Ormandy performance that Horowitz had given was, like, my high watermark.
I changed my mind. It was this thing for 50 years was, test of time, so many people thought it was the best, and then all of a sudden, they're changing their opinion. Part of it was like the whole performance. Like, watching him play it was part of what made it compelling. Look, so everyone should go watch your analysis of this performance. Because I think it's the best one on the Internet, trying to explain why it is that this young man had done something extraordinary with a 100-year-old score and a multiple hundred years old instrument that has been played a million times, recorded thousands of times, analyzed within an inch of its life by very smart people and very great artists.
Yet here he comes and he does something new and surprising. He's amazing. BEN LAUDE: There's an old romantic notion that music is ineffable. It expresses things that can't be expressed in words. I think we agree that there's truth to that.
You even said something that's similar, but it also, I think has led to a deficit in good analysis and commentary, at least in the popular mainstream of music. There's a fear of talking about what makes a performance great or an interpretation great. It's almost like explaining a joke. It's like don't do that, it is supposed to hit us and then leave it alone.
I remember in college, somebody giving a lecture recital, and there was somebody grumbling next to me like, Can't we just let the music speak for itself? That's the thing you're supposed to say about it. I remember being puzzled because I was always overly analytic about everything. Here I am not letting music speak for itself, but speaking way too much about music, but people really appreciated that.
I just took his performance, and first I clarified it for myself. What made this connect with me? Then when I listened back and took all these notes on everything, I realized, Oh, he was listening to Horowitz here, or just he discovered an inner voice there. It helped that I just heard countless performances of this over the years that I could listen anew and hear somebody on the one hand, synthesizing certain older interpretations, but also integrating them into his own new new take on it. What was fun about what I did, and I think what people really appreciated is they had this moving experience that they couldn't quite explain. To have somebody else help clarify for them, what was so special about it made them want to re listen.
Then when they re listened and it got to those passages, they heard more. They actually heard different, it was a different experience. I mean, we think, I've heard that piece before, or even I've heard that recording before. But this music is way too rich.
There's too much going on. There's too much polyphony. There's tens of thousands of notes. There's infinite ways that you could, a variety of ways of approaching it and phrasing it, that even just listening to the same recording, you're going to notice a new detail. Or if you do know a detail's coming, you're going to enjoy it again in maybe a new way.
I was actually showing people that there's a way to listen to classical music that they hadn't experienced before, one that necessitates re listening, one that requires that you notice things, become aware of them, and appreciate when others point things out to you. Because that's how I got into it. I had others be like, "listen to this moment. Wait for it. Did you hear how they..." so I loved
that kind of engagement with others. YouTube is just for me, the greatest opportunity to platform, to create that. It also allows me to indulge my longstanding interest in just creating video, creating content. I've been editing videos since high school projects and finally, it's coming to good use.
Now I get to design these things where I both clarify things for myself in these video essays and analyses, but also I get to design the way it looks and how the score appears on the page, and I love editing the music, so it's like one performance will sync up suddenly with another performance. Almost you didn't hear it, but now that helps you hear the difference. Like putting Horowitz and Argerich and Yunchan back to back. It sounds like one seamless performance, but you can hear.
It helps just bring into relief what's so different about them. I think I'm just getting started. I'm just starting to experiment with these techniques, and think other people should do it, too. I want there to be a bigger ecosystem of media and classical music content creators.
There's some great ones out there. But for the most part, what I'm doing, I just feel like, again, feel pretty lonely about it, like I used to when I was just practicing Chopin by myself in the ninth grade. It's an exciting time, I think to bring this otherwise thing we're nerding out about to a broader public. I think a lot of people are interested in it.
KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, everyone, I've shown that Yunchan video that you made has I think done exactly what you were intending. They've gone back and re listened to the performance, and they've heard something that they wouldn't have heard before? I've been listening to classical piano 40 years now.
It's even influenced the way that I'm listening to things, which has been amazing. Have you heard he just recently made his Brahms debut, and he did the Emperor. Like, I think his encore was Bach's Siciliano.
The Emperor was amazing. I've listened to the Emperor, like, a bazillion times. My default tactic, before I'm going to sink a half an hour into this thing is I jump forward to the third movement, and I'm like, are they going to disappoint me here? If they don't, like, I'll go back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing. BEN LAUDE: We have a lot in common. I used to actually, you mentioned the Horowitz Ormandy recording.
I used to just fast forward to the last minute of that because he has the most thrilling last page ever, and the audience is going nuts before he finishes. In a way, it's like it's totally wrong to experience the music that way, but at the same time, I didn't care. It's like fast forwarding to the game winning home run, the walk off home run at the end and reliving the highlight. I haven't heard his Emperor yet.
I'm excited to. I've heard his third and fourth concertos. KEVIN SCOTT: I will tell you again, you should go listen to it, draw your own conclusion. I won't say too much about it, but it is now my favorite performance of the Emperor.
By the fifth bar of the third movement, he's already doing something unusual. He completely ignores the fortissimo dynamic marking on the fifth bar. Usually, it's done and it repeats. On the repeat, he plays the piano. I'm like, what is he going to do now? Then I'm just ready to be on the ride. BEN LAUDE: Yet it feels organic.
It doesn't feel gimmicky. I was lucky enough to interview Marin Alsop for a video that hasn't come out yet, but she said something to this effect. His rubatos are always surprising and yet they seem right. They seem organic and natural.
There's a lot of surprising rubato, the taking of time, and musical phrasing that's not organic. That sounds affected or it doesn't communicate or express itself exactly how the pianist imagines. It's hard to know how to feel a phrase in just a way that's going to communicate with the audience, especially to do it in a new way. Most of our rubatos are just the conventional things our teacher tell us to do.
Yunchan just barely stopped being a teenager a couple of months ago, and he's discovering new ways of articulating what's so great about his performances, especially in the fact that he's champion of Beethoven and Bach, not just Liszt and Rachmaninoff, but he goes back to the classics. He can play baroque counterpoint like you've never heard before. That allows a clarity in the bigger romantic concertos that I think separates him.
I'm interested to hear his Beethoven. He has such fantastic, rhythmic drive and tautness that anything he does, there's a sense that landed exactly where I wanted it to. It's just extremely gratifying to hear him because I'm getting to know him better also as a pianist.
I feel like I know him personally because I've heard him interpret so many different pieces, and you're right. It's this sense of I can't wait to hear now what Yunchan has to say about this piece. You know you've made it as a pianist when people want to hear your version of a work that's been played a million times. KEVIN SCOTT: I am dying at this point to hear him do the G minor Ballade. He'll record it at some point. BEN LAUDE: I'm sure.
KEVIN SCOTT: It will be interesting. BEN LAUDE: Well, next year he's playing the Goldberg Variations in Carnegie Hall, and so I look forward to that. I got to hear his 24.
Actually, he played all 27 of them, Chopin Etudes. He did the extra three as well, in Carnegie. It was phenomenal. KEVIN SCOTT: I haven't heard him play live yet, but I listened to the recording of those Etudes. It's just pretty incredible the new things. You did an interview with Manny Ax, where he was talking about Horowitz, where Ax was saying, hey, I think Horowitz could hear things in a score that we couldn't.
He chose to put highlights on different things or to bring your attention to things that other performers don't. I feel like Yunchan does that a lot with the Opus 9 No. 2 Nocturne, which you know - I can play that piece but not like he did. [LAUGHTER] BEN LAUDE: Well, he finds secrets in it that nobody ever knew about before.
A lot of this does come back to Bach. I'm wearing the T-shirt for a reason. When you play enough Bach, you start living inside different voices in a new way. We're trained in our culture to listen for melody.
There's melody, and then there's the band. The band is accompanying you. There's a rhythm and bass section. Anyone who knows music and wants to be a musician and they get into music often they gravitate towards the base because they realize the secret is the bass is actually what everything grows from. But in Bach's time, there was still a parity between voices. He wrote every voice with integrity and autonomy.
When you practice enough of that, you have to learn how to give life to inner voices because they are just as independent as the top voice. If you're playing fugues or canons or inventions or anything that Bach wrote, there's always this sense of, well, I have to. There's no hierarchy here.
There's just interplay of equal voices. Unfortunately, Bach is not, I think, taught enough. It's not stressed enough as a real art form pianists should aspire to be able to play in the highest way. It's more seen as like broccoli, you're supposed to eat to be more nutritious. But Yunchan, he takes the three-part inventions of Bach, and he makes them into little miracles. He's able to create art out of this otherwise seemingly archaic Baroque counterpoint.
That gives him a foundation for playing all of this romantic music or more recent music because he has control over every element, every input that's going into a texture. Therefore, if it's an otherwise pleasant Chopin Nocturne that's what just oom-pah-pah on the left hand and the melody in the right, he's discovering and showing you through his expert finger independence and ability to balance on just the right notes to voice them in a way that suddenly allows them to emerge from a texture. That comes from his Bach training, and it allows his Chopin to speak in an absolutely new way. These are all things I want to make videos about, by the way. [LAUGHTER] I need to write these down. But this is the stuff that I want people to hear because I have so much pleasure myself discovering them and hearing it for myself.
Do you have friends who also like piano this much in your world? I don't know. Maybe it is a thing in the tech world. KEVIN SCOTT: I have friends who are obsessed about different things. I don't know anyone who's quite as obsessed as I am.
[LAUGHTER] This is why I was excited to talk to you today. [LAUGHTER] But look, so here's maybe the way that I will say it. I think that if you look at Martha Argerich playing a Liszt piano concerto or Yunchan Lim doing some of these beautiful things with Chopin Nocturnes, or you're watching some other great feat of human performance like Alex Honnold free soloing El Cap.
I think there's just this beautiful thing about watching human beings do things that are right at the ragged edge of human performance, and then doing them in a way where they show everybody else the art of the possible and something new and nuanced and interesting that you've never seen before. It's the thing, in my world, where we get into these debates about what the role of technology is in making art. I always come down on the side that art is about the artist and the audience, it's not about the instrument. Because piano was new technology at some point. The art that comes from AI is only going to be as interesting as the artists who are able to say something new and interesting and human with it. Absent that, it's like a phenomenon that you're observing and it just doesn't have a human element.
I think things that don't have human elements are very different than things like a performance that does. BEN LAUDE: I think the instrument, in that sense, is somewhat trivial. It's what humans do with it.
On the other hand, there's something special about the particular mechanical invention of the piano, and I would say the perfection of that instrument in the late 19th or early 20th century right around the same time the bicycle was being perfected and has never changed. Even if we have motorized bikes or AI riding bikes for us, self-driving bikes, we're also still going to get on it and pedal because there's just something perfect about how that technology is integrated into a human form. There's something so human about riding a bike. There's something so human about playing the piano.
In that sense, that older technology really did peak in terms of mating with human beings. You don't need some singularity to achieve that. I do want to say that perhaps some technology doesn't need to be improved on. Some things did reach a pinnacle. I don't know if you agree with that.
That's a little sidetrack there. KEVIN SCOTT: I think, obviously, there hasn't needed to be an improvement to the form factor of the piano. One of my very favorite stories, I tell this to engineers all the time, is, you must have seen the performances of Josef Hofmann, I think there are two videos of him, one playing the third movement of the Emperor, funny enough, and one of him playing C# Minor, and it's just unbelievable to watch.
One of the stories that I've heard about, yeah. BEN LAUDE: He comes at you really high. KEVIN SCOTT: Really high. BEN LAUDE: He knows exactly where those keys are going to be.
KEVIN SCOTT: One of the awesome things about Hofmann is he was an inventor. I think he invented the shock absorber. My understanding is he had a smaller hand than some of the performers like Rachmaninoff who were his contemporaries. One of the things that he did was he had a keyboard manufactured where the keys were just a little bit smaller so that he could more easily cover a tenth with his size hand. It is just a reminder to me that you don't always have to take the constraints of technology as given.
There's nothing holy about a piano that says that the keys have to and you're just **** out of luck being a performer if you weren't born with a big enough hand. That's a solvable problem. BEN LAUDE: By the way, there's a movement that's developing in the conservatories that I know a few pianists are pushing for every music school to have a slightly sized-down instrument the way Hofmann ordered. It's funny that Josef Hofmann was the dedicatee of Rachmaninoff's third concerto because he never could play it actually, despite being Rachmaninoff's favorite pianist, one of the greatest pianists of all time, his hands just weren't quite big enough. Speaking of Rach 3 and bringing this back to Alex Honnold, I do think that we're fascinated by the types of people whose brains are configured in whatever way that they have enough guts to train to climb up El Capitan with no ropes on.
Although I don't want to push this metaphor too much, there is a similarity in getting up on stage and climbing a Rachmaninoff mountain with no music. It's similar to that not having any aid. It's the sense of extreme occasions. My wife plays Rach 3. I play Rach 2 and Rach 4. We're a Rachmaninoff family.
We're totally nuts. It's still crazy when we're walking on stage but do one of these things. We're questioning our life choices every time we're pushed on stage, and yet we do it, and we're drawn back to it, and audiences are drawn to observe it. I just wonder how much of that is, we live lives that are just filled with so much banality [LAUGHTER] that we need extreme occasions, whether we're the ones engaging in them and performing them or we're just experiencing them vicariously.
We need this sense of transcending that just ordinary everyday junk that we're used to having to wait for it. KEVIN SCOTT: I think that's true. At least I do. I have a real appreciation for people who do hard things.
I feel like I've kept you too long. But another impossible piano thing that I was thinking about recently was Maria Joao Pires had this famous incident a whole bunch of years ago where she was called in to sub in for a pianist for a concert at the last minute. She showed up thinking that she was going to play Mozart's K.488. What the orchestra started playing when she was at the keyboard was 466. She's sitting there at the keyboard, it's on video.
She's like what? [LAUGHTER] She's talking to the conductor saying I can't. He's like, you played it last year, and she plays it. Not only does she play, it's really good.
It seems impossible. How could that be? You look at it, and it's a miracle of a thing, and you're like, oh, my God, I'm glad to be a human being because I can't do what she did, but at least I'm in the same species. [LAUGHTER] BEN LAUDE: I feel lucky that I've gotten to see some of this up close. You mentioned this Chopin Podcast, which I'm launching in anticipation for the big Chopin year next year. We've got the national competition in January. We've got the international competition in October, so I'm going to be making lots of Chopin content.
I just released this video with Garrick Ohlsson, where he breaks down all of Chopin's innovations at the keyboard. He actually demonstrates from, actually, more than 20. It's 20 different inventions of Chopin but dozens and dozens of examples in which Chopin was the first to cross the second finger with the fifth finger or to have unrestricted use of the thumb on black keys. All these cool, just technical innovations at the piano.
He breaks them down one by one and demonstrates them. KEVIN SCOTT: That's awesome. BEN LAUDE: No. But I went in there to his home just thinking, well, he's got all the scores by him if we need to reference those. We had not had a real meeting where I told him you need to be ready for these 42 excerpts from not just the beginnings of Chopin works, random passages from inside of him. He just unassumingly sat down and I called them out one at a time and just off the top of his dome, he gave it to me, not just memorized, he remembered it, bu
2024-09-12 08:22
