Heather Taves Interview
Below is the transcript of my 2025 interview with Canadian pianist and writer Heather Taves. The button link takes you to the show notes, video and podcast.
Heather Taves:
In the end has caused me to understand Beethoven better, I have to say, because I find that Beethoven, he has been presented to us in classical music as a set of masterpiece artifacts that we are to learn and play well and represent well. But Beethoven was a person. And when you spent two years doing nothing but Beethoven in your practicing life and reading the books, but especially through the music, you come in contact with the person, this person's journey through their life. I'm not going to say evolution, he had changed and he became progressively much more disabled. We're talking about somebody disabled here, somebody with deafness, somebody with struggles with mental health and alcoholism, not only himself, but with his family, his adopted son, really, his nephew, attempting suicide. Beethoven was a person, and Beethoven himself benefits from you listening to the person and not just the artifact, actually, I find.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Heather Taves is an acclaimed Canadian pianist, also a composer, improviser, educator and writer.She spoke to me about her unique and inspiring Beethoven Journey, her popular weekly blog which she started in 2023 , paired with performances of all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. We talked about getting to know Beethoven as a person and her fascinating research about many women that are part of this history. We also talked about Heather’s work as an educator, developing creativity and approaching teaching music from different angles. She spoke about her mentors including pianist Gil Kalish and writer Diane Shoemperlen, and her experiences travelling around the world by herself. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript. It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website, with all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Hey Heather, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Heather Taves:
It's such a pleasure to be here, Leah. I'm in so much admiration of your project, so thank you for inviting me.
Leah Roseman:
I love your beautiful island, PEI. Of course, I've only been there in the summer like most tourists, but I've got to know the winter vistas a little bit from following you on Facebook. And I've actually had two other PEI musicians on this podcast, which is kind of weird because I've had people from over 30 countries. So Julia MacLean, I believe you know the cellist, my colleague, and Matt Zimbel.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, PEI has a wealth of musicians above our weight. Maybe it's because we don't have anything better to do in the wintertime,
Leah Roseman:
So I enjoy your writing and I was thinking why your blog is so good. I think it's this wonderful combination of the personal and accessible and just interesting research, and you tie so many interesting strands together. So although it's Beethoven Journey, it's about so much more than Beethoven. So of course it'll be linked directly, and I hope maybe you'll read a little bit even from your blog at some point.
Heather Taves:
Sure, sure.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, great. So as this is going to be released, you're coming to the end of this enormous project of learning and performing all of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. And your final concerts will be in Kitchener Waterloo and also in PEI. Is that right?
Heather Taves:
In Annapolis Valley. There's a new series there. It's wonderful. It's at the St. Luke's Anglican Church in Annapolis Royal, which is a garrison church. It's a historical, wonderful community to visit, very beautiful in summer, and it'll be Saturdays and Sundays in July. And it's run by a family who includes a professional piano technician, and he has restored a wonderful nine foot piano to have in the chapel, and it's just a gorgeous spot. So I'm really looking forward to it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you had pointed out some of the blog posts that would be interesting to talk about in terms of women in Beethoven's life, and as I started to read them, it was just fascinating to me the different aspects. So one of them was the piano builder
Heather Taves:
Nanette Streicher.
Leah Roseman:
A lot of people may not realize that the piano was being developed at this time. It was a relatively new instrument.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, that's right. So there were several different schools of pianos too. So there was dozens of piano builders in Vienna, which was about the size of Halifax at the time. And there were many piano builders in England, and there were many in France. And Beethoven had access to all of those pianos because all the builders sent him trial pianos. And he usually had a couple of extra pianos on their sides in various states of disrepair in the lobbies of his rented apartment. So it was part of the general chaos of his living circumstances. But Nanette Streicher really helped him with all of them. So if you think about the inside of the piano, the hammer faces a certain way and it comes up, but a Viennese piano, the hammer is faced the other way, so it hits a different part of the string than an English or a French piano.
And so they had a very particular kind of action, but Nanette Streicher, who was the daughter of Mozart's piano builder, it was a really established Viennese family, and Nannette listened carefully to Beethoven and to figure out what it is that he was trying to do next. And the piano was gradually getting larger, and then Broadwood from England or Erard from Paris would send Beethoven pianos and Nanette would modify them for him. So she was his technician and also his general household advisor and helped him find people to make his meals and that kind of thing. And he went over to their house a lot. And so then her son, Johann Baptiste took over the company and he was Brahms' piano builder and Schumanns, so, and when I went to Vienna, I took a flower, I took a rose for Beethoven's grave, and I went to the cemetery and Beethoven's grave was covered with flowers, and then I noticed that Nanette Streicher's grave was right next to his, so I put my flower on hers because I figured that she probably facilitated the whole thing. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Wow, that's so fascinating. You must have, I know you read all these many, many biographies about Beethoven
Heather Taves:
Door stoppers! Yeah, long winter evenings.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, where can we go with this? I was just thinking about, we were talking about your final concerts, and I know the way you've organized each program. It's not consecutive in terms of his works. You have themes, and do you want to talk a little bit about that programming process?
Heather Taves:
Yeah, I have my scores, this was a present on graduation from a student of mine. My students used to steal my scores a lot, so he thought I needed to replace it. This turns out to be a really good edition. And as you can see, I've got markers for the next three concerts, so I have them themed.
And so there's a green concert and a pink one and a blue one. And you'll see that each of these concerts goes through his life, if you can see that. So that if you are an audience member and you just go to one concert, you will get a span from early to late, works in each one of the eight concerts that it takes to do this cycle. So because I talk and I have a microphone and I talk and I have talking notes, which the audience seems to really like, I have made a name for each one of them. So there is Divine Comedy, there is Beast, there is Dedications. And so I take a theme and then I go through from early to late with that theme so that I can pick out highlights of a certain aspect of his character.
Leah Roseman:
And many of these concerts you've done at the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society, and I believe there's quite an interesting history about that series.
Heather Taves:
Oh, yes. Well, I mean, I am a retired professor at Wilfred Laurier. I took early retirement to do this project. So Jan Narveson started that series. And the Beethoven Cycle is very intimately connected to this series because Jan is a Beethoven aficionado. And it's funny because when I first got hired at Laurier in the mid nineties, I was playing mostly women composers. And I think Jan looked on me with a little bit of suspicion at first, but he soon came to really be a great supporter. He and his wife, who I must mention Jean Narveson, who writes a periodical that gets spread around Kitchener Waterloo, telling everything that's going on in the classical music community and also puts up with all of the concerts that were in his house for many years. So Jan made the acquaintance of Anton Kuerti, who was one of the first people in Canada to do the whole Beethoven cycle.
And Kuerti is a wonderful role model for me because he not only learned all the Beethovens, but he took them across Canada to all communities and in the most incredible conditions and often just driving his own piano around on back roads and through the mountains. And he was just unbelievable. And so Jan wanted Anton to play the complete cycle in his home, but he didn't have a good piano. So Anton helped him fundraise. So they got a diagram of all the 88 keys on the wall, and people could buy a key. And that way they raised enough money for a good piano for this series, which is still in Jan's house, and they don't have, he's too old to host it in his home. So now they're using venues around town. But I still go there to practice on his piano that he and Anton raised money for.
And then he had the Beethoven cycle. Jan hosted it with Robert Silverman playing, who is based in British Columbia, but from Montreal and Robert or Bob as he's called. And I studied with the same teacher in our early years who was Dorothy Morton in Montreal. And so we're quite close because of that connection. And so I've talked to Bob quite often about this. I also have lots of memories of Anton and played a concert with him at one point. And I have a blog posted with memories of Anton, but so I feel like I have worthy predecessors for this. They're not women playing the piano. And when I did my doctorate degree at Stony Brook University on Long Island, I chose as my topic women, the history of women as interpreters of Beethoven Sonatas, which I think is incredibly rich. It's an incredibly rich subject that nobody's done.
So I'm hoping to publish a book about it at some point, and I don't really have time to talk about that in my concerts so much. I have one concert, which is all sonatas that he wrote for women, but it's a big topic. But I theorize that there was a actual women's performing tradition during the 19th century that got obscured when the recording industry came in the early 20th century. And I show this through a lot of different evidence, but in researching the reception of these women as performers, first of all, Beethoven loved them. He preferred them to the male interpreters. And you can understand why, because he was in competition with the other males, and they wanted to play their own music and not his. Whereas the women were people who listened to Beethoven and who just like with Nanette Streicher, his piano builder, they were very alive to what he was trying to do.
And some of them had studied piano with him. So for instance, Dorothea von Ertmann, who was an absolutely, I mean all the reviewers said she was just the most accomplished pianist in town. She was just a wonderful, very distinguished lady who played everything. And she premiered many of his sonatas in public because he couldn't really play them himself after he became deaf in the early years in his twenties, and to some extent in his thirties, he was playing them himself. But after that, there was a raft of about half a dozen women who were playing his sonatas in salons and introducing them to the public. And so Beethoven worked very closely with them, and they told him, they gave him indications what they needed, how long the piece, this type thing. And then later on, women throughout the 19th century carried on this tradition, primarily Clara Schumann, of course, who brought his music to the public in a very dedicated way.
Franz Liszt also played Beethoven sonatas. But he, Clara Schumann said, was kind of complaining about Liszt because he played as he wanted the Beethoven sonata to be, which is to throw in improvisations in the middle and delve off into some the latest opera and do improvisations on Robert Le Diable. And Liszt had his persona in his, where Clara was very humble, she was very educated. She just did exactly what was in the score. And so our tradition of Beethoven playing, doing that is based on her tradition. And also the way she designed a concert was like that. Now, in the early 20th century, we had science coming up in Darwinian kind of ideas about women being weaker than men, for instance, that women had smaller brains. And so women were steered away from Beethoven at that point. And then, although in New York City, the first and second pianists to play the complete 32 Sonatas were both female.
But that was before the Schnabel, which was the first recording Artur Schnabel came out. So they were very famous. One was Olga Samaroff, who was married to Stokowski, the famous conductor, and the other one was Catherine Bacon, who was a British pianist, but they didn't get recording contracts, you see. So after that, the recording contracts went to men, and somehow in the 20th century, Beethoven became associated in a different way with heroism and with competitions, and it became male territory. So nowadays, if you think of a Beethoven pianist, you don't tend to think of a woman. And I've looked at who's done this, who's done all 32 sonatas, and why would they do something so crazy? It's kind of crazy. So I have been making a list, which starts with Beethoven because he played all his sonatas, of course, and then I have found 135, but that's after a year of looking throughout history who have played the complete cycle. They haven't all recorded it, but they've at least performed it. And 25 of those are female, many from before our time, but there are some who are out there right now, including the Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt, who has during the past 16 years recorded the Beethoven Sonatas. So that's a really big passion project for her that she's taken a long time to do. And that's been done before. Annie Fisher, the Hungarian pianist, also took over a decade to record her very wonderful set that's usually mentioned in the top 10 sets. So it takes people who want to do it extremely, very, very polished way with high production values, and it's very expensive, do this usually over a course of a long time. So Angela Hewitt has done that, and Robert Silverman has started on recording of the second time with better production values, but he hasn't gotten all the way through it. And so yeah, I hope to record at some point, of course, but right now I'm really focused on my audience. I love playing these for audiences.
Leah Roseman:
I did listen to some of your recorded work. You haven't recorded the Beethoven yet, and it's interesting with musical memory, and I want to address that with you, Heather. It makes a few connections. So you have this gorgeous recording, album, Song Without Words, and you have music of Robert and Clara, Schumann and Brahms. And when I was listening to that Arabesque in C major by Robert Schumann, it brought back such a strong memory because my brother, who's older than me, would be practicing that when I'd be going to sleep as a child, probably over many months. And I hadn't heard it in so long. And hearing your beautiful recording, would it be okay, could we include some of that in this podcast?
Heather Taves:
Absolutely. That's actually a favorite. Many people pick out that one as one they like. So yeah,
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear a clip from Heather's recording of the Arabesque in C Major by Robert Schumann on her album Song Without Words, which I'll link in the show notes for you. (Music)
Heather Taves:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And then I was thinking about your musical memories, and I understand you heard Beethoven's Archduke Trio growing up was one of your few recordings, and this made a huge impact on you.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, it did. So my parents were the children of refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the so-called Russian Mennonites that were actually living in Ukraine. So they were in the dirty thirties on the prairies, but they always had a musical background, which they kept going in the household. And my aunt in particular, aunt Mary, she was a very colorful character and took her younger brother, that's my dad, Victor, to the Winnipeg Symphony. They would have to, she used her egg money for that. She sold eggs, she bought tickets, she took him there. She dressed in her fox fur that had the head of a fox and put a big hat on. And he was a little embarrassed. He was younger and took him to the symphony and really promoted his love of music. And so she wrote on her vinyl albums what she thought of them, and I have a few of those, but, so Dad bought the Archduke Trio. I don't know why or how, but it was one of four classical records. He had a suitcase recorder in our little bungalow. We had a VW Beetle. We were living in Winnipeg. This is how I was born and raised until I was eight years old. And then we moved to Prince Edward Island. So I listened to that Archduke Sonata.
Leah Roseman:
You said recorder, you mean like a
Heather Taves:
Sorry, record. A record player, yes.
Leah Roseman:
So I was curious, you had left, then you moved to Prince Edward Island as a young child,
Heather Taves:
1968,
Leah Roseman:
But you left as a teen and hadn't lived back there until very recently, until the pandemic.
Heather Taves:
My whole family is here. So I was very frequently here and often for the entire summer because I was a university professor, and my daughter spent a lot of time here and has many cousins here. And so my friends here, I have a very large circle of friends and family, and they go back 50 years.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's lovely. I was just curious about that because
Heather Taves:
Yeah, I'm very much regarded as an islander here, absolutely regarded as an islander here. And of course, I played many concerts here over the years, and not only classical, I should say, but because I went to high school with sorry musicians in many genres. So for instance, Scott Parsons, who is a Blues guitarist, is a very old friend, and we've done Blues concerts together, and it's small here, so it's more likely for the genres to mix up together.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I enjoyed your East Coast Suite, which I found on YouTube.
Heather Taves:
That's a mixed genre one.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I particularly like the Toccata on that.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, that was an experiment with the Fibonacci series. So if you listen to the, it's like all fast notes, but there's, so it's 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then it goes on like that. And eventually, of course, I get these long chains of scales because I have many notes in the Fibonacci series. And the reason I used it is because it's called Waves Play. And I'm watching the waves after a storm on the ocean and thinking about people's theories about when the big waves comes in, there's little waves and then there's big waves. And so I thought, well, what can I use? Bartok used that Fibonacci series that occurs in nature to structure a piece of music so that it resembles nature. So I used that, and it was really fun to write, really fun to write.
Leah Roseman:
Could we include that in this podcast?
Heather Taves:
Yeah, sure, sure. Absolutely. Yeah (Music)
Leah Roseman:
You should put it, I just found it on YouTube. I couldn't find it on other streaming services or Bandcamp or anywhere. Sometimes these older recordings,
Heather Taves:
Eventually I have to get things on Bandcamp.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you should.
Heather Taves:
Yes. One of my next projects, yes, I'm coming off of being a professor where I didn't have time to do a lot of those things, especially in my senior years as a professor where I was on many committees and coordinated programs. So that's one reason I took early retirement, so I could just be a musician again.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was going to ask you about, because I know when you were teaching, you developed this Creative Projects and the impetus for this, I heard you tell the story about the student who was in pain and sort of came out of that, but it developed into something pretty big, right?
Heather Taves:
That's a really important project to me. So that came out of, in my early career, I had a pretty, you might say, a hotshot early performing career where I was doing the winning the competitions and going to the big schools and having a big, when I won that coveted university job, I won a tenure track job right out of my doctorate degree. So I had been at Indiana McGill, Indiana, Stony Brook, job. And as anybody who's been through high level performance knows they don't teach you how to teach really. So there I was in a small college, it was Brock University, well, you call it a university in Canada. And my students were at very scattered types of levels. And I spent my four years of teaching there becoming increasingly frustrated that I could not teach them my high level playing approaches and trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, that they couldn't just get it.
And I was completely off track of what I should be doing because teaching is about the person, it's about the student. And after a while, I began to notice that the students were on their own journey, regardless of how I was trying to help or harm them. And so it would be better if I helped them. And so that was a learning process. And I got to Laurier in 1996 and spent the first four years trying to solidify my tenure. And so I had to very much do work with the curriculum that was given me, which was very performance oriented. But as soon as I got tenure, I said to myself, look, I've got to develop, I've got to design something from what I'm learning here about the students, was my first one who really could. She was an advanced pianist. I mean, she had come in as a first year student already having performed Beethoven concerto with orchestra, and she just came apart, she couldn't play.
I mean, obviously I sent her to the doctors and the people who help with ergonomics and so on. And I have very good ergonomic background. I've never had tendonitis because I have a good background in that. But I saw after a while that it was about what she wanted to play and what she was blocked with being able to play, and her voice needed to come out, and it wasn't coming out in Beethoven. And so I had to open up a space for her in our very intensive performance curriculum. And when I opened up that space, a voice emerged. That was lovely, that was compositional, that spoke to her Japanese heritage that was mystical and beautiful. And she began to play. She began to play things that didn't hurt her. And she was such an inspiring example. I started to develop some techniques for how, because I think this is a problem.
We have so many problems now with trying to be the perfect pianist. I'm sure you're aware of that in classical music. And the teachers, bless their hearts, the professors, the piano professors, they're all trained in a very high level of performance, and they don't know how to make room for the voice. And so I realized I needed to create some very specific tools for them to step back from themselves and let the student guide the process. And so we developed these creative projects, which were marked only on effort. They were not marked on external values. They were a small part so that professors didn't freak out about, oh, they haven't learned their whatever this classical music you're supposed to learn. So the student was off the hook, this was up to them, and it was completely open. We gave no guidelines, but we gave a lot of possibilities. They could use media, they could use any genre. They could sing if they wanted to. They could bring in a couple of other people. They could do whatever they wanted to with this one creative project. It was a tiny piece, of course. But the thing is, and all of the professors, no matter if they've never taught this before in their life, suddenly saw the voices of their students. And it was very impactful. I had no problem selling this to the other professors because when they heard their students' voice, which was just by itself without the overlay of trying to do the classics, they were blown away. They were just blown away, and the student felt validated. Once the student felt validated, they were much better able to interact with the rest of the program. So the word kind of went around about that. Greg Sandow picked it up in his blog, and then he's a Julliard professor who's married to the Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette.
So he featured that. And then because of that, I was asked to give a Ted Talk at the summit, the 21st music summit of the College Music Society, which was down in South Carolina. So I did that and met a lot of people that way, and somebody from a Arizona State University came up and studied our program for a week. And it was just really, but I mean, of course the value was in seeing what happened with the students. So that was remarkable. And it helped me too, because again, you take off the gloss of, I mean, I'm Ms. Mrs. Beethoven lady now, but I'm also a composer and I also do electronic music, and I work with paintings, and I work with differently abled folks, and I love all that stuff, but I'm not perfect at it. Not even necessarily very good at it, but it doesn't matter.
I am expressing my voice, and that is just a part of my life that in the end, has caused me to understand Beethoven better, I have to say, because I find that Beethoven, he has been presented to us in classical music as a set of masterpiece artifacts that we are to learn and play well and represent well. But Beethoven was a person, and when you spent two years doing nothing but Beethoven in your practicing life and reading the books, but especially through the music, you come in contact with the person, this person's journey through their life, I'm not going to say evolution had changed, and he became progressively much more disabled. We're talking about somebody disabled here, somebody with deafness, somebody with struggles with mental health and alcoholism, not only himself, but with his family, his adopted son, really, his nephew attempting suicide. This is Beethoven was a person.
And when you listen, Beethoven himself benefits from you listening to the person and not just the artifact. Actually, I find. So I've learned many things about Beethoven through this idea that it's the person who is expressing something. And with Beethoven, you realize that really we shouldn't be using him to judge and criticize others as we do with Beethoven being a required audition piece, a competition piece. I mean, it's a form of respect in one way, but unfortunately it's a little bit damaging to the idea that Beethoven wrote all of these things to be in a dialogue, sometimes a dialogue with the person he wrote it for other times, a dialogue with what he conceived of as the divine, which he did many readings about the divine, many across religions he wrote, I mean, he read Hindu texts, and Beethoven was always in dialogue, and that's why we don't have any definitive Beethoven Sonata performance ever.
So I have felt enabled to enter into a dialogue with Beethoven, but in order to be in a dialogue, you have to have your own voice. And so I go, oh, okay, you're doing that with your composition. I could try something like that. I am peanuts. The guy was amazing, but I can still be in dialogue with him. And he's actually very amenable to that. He wrote things not only to frustrate you and to joke with you, but also to really be your friend. And it's wonderful to see that friendship that emerges if you are in a genuine dialogue with the men.
Leah Roseman:
Many of the classical musicians I've spoken with on this podcast have gotten into composition later in life or improvisation, and it's definitely a positive trend, but certainly the way we were trained, I think is still very siloed that you train in performance and that's it. Right?
Heather Taves:
I was talking to some university students here. I was giving a workshop and we're talking to 'em after a concert, I can't remember what, and I was talking about how important it is to know your chord changes in Beethoven, and one of them said, why isn't there an edition that has the chord changes printed like a lead sheet? And I'm like, that's a fantastic idea. Why doesn't somebody do that? Maybe I'll do that. If you know the chord changes, you know the basis, and we don't teach the chord changes. What we do teach is a lot of memorization and fingering, and I want to say this, that I have learned all 32 sonatas without putting in one fingering. And I know that this will be shocking to some, and people might not agree with it, but Beethoven himself didn't put in fingering. And I think that's remarkable because he was extremely precise about his articulations.
He wrote in staccato and sforzatos and all kinds of things, slurring and things regularly ignored, but that they're there, but not fingering. And I asked myself, because Beethoven was an improviser. Not only he was a good improviser, he was a stunning improviser, and that was his main claim to fame until he became too deaf to do it, which was terribly sad. But he still improvised to him himself in his home with out of tune pianos because he couldn't hear them. But I mean, in his twenties, it was the improvising that put him over the top. And there were even little salon competitions, but it was always improvising and people would be sitting there in tears. But I asked myself, well, if you're improvising, you first of all have to know the chord changes. Secondly, you have to also, he could play things in different keys, right?
He could transpose them to different keys. So you have to know the chord changes for that. But also, you cannot rely on fingering when you're improvising. You have to have your fingers connected to your thought and your thought goes directly to whatever finger's available. And so I said to myself, I'm going to learn the sonatas that way. I am going to learn them with thought, with seeing what the chord changes are with communicating with Beethoven and whatever fingering occurs to me at the time, I'll do it. And somehow I hit the notes that way. It's a very fascinating thing, and so many things about this have caused me to question the way I taught Beethoven for many years. But anyway,
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, are you performing sometimes from memory or always?
Heather Taves:
I'm performing always from memory,
Which I don't think is necessary. I mean, I studied with Gilbert Kalih, my doctorate, who never performs from memory. He has some kind of special need where he can't memorize anything, and it's made him one of the world's great performers of contemporary repertoire. He premiered Elliot Carter and all kinds of things, just never from memory. But he also performed Haydn sonatas. He did all the Haydn sonatas. He performed at Tanglewood classical music, always with the score. And in terms of current performance practice, there's four people doing the Beethoven Cycle this year. I'm one of them, but another one is Jeffrey Swan, and then there's Boris Giltberg, and there's Fabien Muller in Germany. And Boris Giltberg, who is a competition, he won the first prize in the Leeds, has been doing the complete Beethoven at Wigmore Hall in London. And he is using a score, he's using an iPad. He has it inside the piano, and he has somebody off stage turning his pages for him.
Leah Roseman:
Really?
Heather Taves:
Yeah, it's really quite fascinating. And the audience, because it, Wigmore Hall is kind of a platform set up, so they can't see that iPad, but you can see it on the live stream. And some of those are live streamed, and he is not turning his own pages. So that's the way he's doing it and more power to him. But I like memorizing, so
Leah Roseman:
I'm just trying to wrap my head around that. I guess it makes sense, because normally physically you'd have a page turner as a pianist, so it's just the same kind of anticipation.
Heather Taves:
Yeah. I mean, why not?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Heather Taves:
He's figured out some way to do it and works for him. Richard Goode, who performed the cycle for many years from memory, very distinguished version now performs from the score. He's getting up there in years, and he just gave up the memory. Maybe I'll do that one day too. I don't think it's necessary. And then I think I would also say that many people who play from memory are missing stuff. They're missing slurs and usually getting the notes, but they're missing a forte. And I do too. It's not a perfect science. This is 650 pages of music. You can't remember every dot all the time. So it's a bit of a trade off to play for memory, actually. And I think Beethoven wasn't that enamored of the, it wasn't commonly done during his time, and I think a few people did it and he thought they were show offs, but
Leah Roseman:
As we have this conversation, just last night, I finished editing my episode with Canadian pianist, Katherine Dowling, so that'll be out.
Heather Taves:
Oh, she's such a wonderful pianist.
Leah Roseman:
She is.
Heather Taves:
I love her playing.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's interesting because she memorizes absolutely everything and for her own reasons, which she explains also,
Heather Taves:
She also studied with Gil, who did
Leah Roseman:
Exactly. We discussed him quite a bit. I had a very short interaction with him that was very memorable. When I was a fellow at Tanglewood, he coached, and I really, what a wonderful coach he was. So I asked her about him. So I'm going to ask you the same question. What about his teaching was memorable?
Heather Taves:
I'm sure that anybody you asked that question to is going to get misty-eyed, because I came to Gil, well, I had been freelancing for a few years in Montreal, but my last teacher had been György Sebők a very distinguished teacher, and I'd learned a lot, but Sebők had a completely different approach from Gil. And I was trying to decide whether I should do my doctorate with Sebők or with Gil, and they were both at the Banff Center one spring. And I went there and I talked to them both, and it was just so funny, the contrast between them, because Sebők was wearing a European bespoke suit with lovely designer socks and cigarette in the holder, and Gil was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and Sebők would teach with these eloquent analogies, sometimes very comical, but eloquent. And Gil would sit in on his classes. Sebők didn't sit in on Gil's classes, but so Gil was almost like the Bernie Sanders too. I don't know. Then he would come to the cafeteria and go, well, I could have said that. But so he was very down to earth. He was one of us. He was down to earth, but he was very respectful, unbelievable teacher in terms of respect. He had high levels of respect. He thought carefully, he got so engaged in what he was doing in his studio. He had pictures of his wife and kids, but he had a big rocking chair, and he sat in that rocking chair when you were playing and you felt, I don't know, enveloped in his warmth when he would rock and listen. And then he would get up and he'd be so engaged and he'd be just demonstrating, even if he didn't know the notes he would demonstrate anyway without knowing those.
And so he was determined that we would function in the world as it was the messy world as it was. We would be able to take anything. We would be able to just go out there and stand up for music in whatever circumstance and not worry about being the competition winner, being the prize winner, being the perfect person, being this and that whatever we were asked to do, which was actually a lot of times play other people's new compositions. So you have to be of service to that, and he was in favor of that. And so that's what Katherine Dowling does so well and what I hope to get back to. But I feel like I'm doing that with Beethoven from just a unique angle. And then I will also do my own compositions and get back to, so in Gil's studio, he had all these pianists who loved contemporary music and were hotshot pianists, but they could play, but they just loved learning new music.
Simon Docking is another who runs a concert series in Halifax. Wonderful pianist too, of contemporary music. So Gil has his little seed sewn in Canada, but very respectful towards Canadians and just empowering. I had some performance anxiety when I went there after being in Indiana. And Stony Brook was, which Gil helped design, was a completely empowering place. Everybody had their own studios. We all gathered together. It was small program, we all knew each other. We had potlucks talked music, and all the professors would be game to teach any kind of esoteric new music. It was just completely colorful and very different from Indiana. So I loved that. And I'm not surprised that somebody as great as Katherine Dowling would come out of it. She's just wonderful. I once booked a flight to Ottawa just to hear her play in the Ottawa Chamber music festival. She was playing all new music, which I wanted to hear. She's worth it. Go hear her.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Katherine Dowling, Madeline Bruser, Cheng2 duo, Anthony Brandt, Jeeyoon Kim and Samantha Ege. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mubs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
So back to your Beethoven blog. When I was reading about women in his life, a couple of names came up, I didn't know, and one of them, it is just interesting where you're talking about new music. So Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, early 20th century American said she always included women composers, but also loved Beethoven. And it's interesting to me, a hundred years ago, someone was just making a point to have gender equity in their programming, and now it's like this new idea. What if we tried to make things more equal?
Heather Taves:
I don't know if it's a new idea actually. I think probably women composers were played a lot by women. So like I say, women had a different performance tradition from men. And during the 20th century, it kind of hid off where suddenly men said, okay, well, you guys can't play this stuff. This is the male stuff. You can go on playing your salon pieces, with many of which were written by women. And I should say, there were also female critics and philosophers such as Margaret Fuller, who believed that music was universal and that anybody of any gender could play. But there was a lot of sexism. There's a funny passage from my blog, if you want me to read a passage, I could read that
Leah Roseman:
Great.
Heather Taves:
At that time period,
Leah Roseman:
Please.
Heather Taves:
Okay, I'm going to start from Margaret Fuller. This is week 22, women playing Beethoven, part three, Margaret Fuller, a journo-editor for publications such as The Dial and The New York Tribune, countered the individualism that was emerging at the end of the 19th century by emphasizing Beethoven’s universality, denying that there were gender differences in music, and advocating equality for all. Fuller was influential in establishing Beethoven's reputation in America after his passing (this was all during the 19th century, actullay). She argued that the music represented abstract beauty, and she admired Beethoven's ability to create form. She opposed a Romantic-era sentiment that Beethoven was an intuitive composer. So by this I mean to say that not all women were playing Beethoven because it was poetic and charming. There was serious philosophy going on. There were lots of American women playing Beethoven, Julie Rive-King, Amy Fay, Madeline Schiller, Helen Hopekirk (was a wonderful one) – but there was no star bigger than Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler.
Her concert format was to juxtapose large works by European male composers with music by women. Her 1915 New York recital included Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, Chopin's B minor sonata, and pieces by four women: Amy Beach, Signe Lund, Marie Prentner, and Cecile Chaminade. A reviewer didn’t bother with the women composers though, he said that, in the Bach, “she struck a less heroic and more intimate note than most pianists find in it”, and also that her playing was well known for "the power of beautifully enunciating a melody."So women actually even today, are often described as being sensitive players or melodic players. So by the end of the 19th century, people generally were on side with Margaret Fuller's argument that Beethoven's music was universal, however went the trending point of view, the greatness of his abstract forms was best appreciated by men because it was about at this time that a scientific theory that women had smaller brains than men and were therefore less intelligent, was circulating, supported by none other than Darwin himself.
And so there was a New York critic named James Huneker who mentioned this theory in his article called The Eternal Feminine. He concluded that women should therefore attempt only the shorter, earlier, lighter works of Beethoven, forgetting that Opus 101 was written for Dorothea von Ertmann and so on. He wrote, "illuminative in Bach or Beethoven, women are not, though delightfully poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the Hammer-Klavier Sonata, Opus 106 of Beethoven with force lucidity or imaginative lift. Then WJ Henderson, eminent critic for the New York Sun waxed even more colorful saying, "Woman. Woman in the singular adores the nocturnes, fantasias, etudes and some of the other works of Chopin. She waits patiently for them at every recital she bears up bravely against the Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or Schumann, with which the pianist persists in beginning his program". Somewhere, he had misplaced the fact that Clara Schumann had established that very programming style. This called for action. According to Smithsonian Magazine, on the morning of June 10th, 1898, one Alice Lee marched into the all male Anatomical Society meeting at Trinity College in Dublin and pulled out a measuring instrument. She then began to take stock of all 35 of the consenting Society members' heads. Lee ranked their skulls from largest to smallest to find that lo and behold, some of the most well-regarded intellects in their field turned out to possess rather small, unremarkable skulls. As she later wrote, J. Kollman, one of the ablest living anthropologists, has absolutely the smallest skull capacity."
Pianists like Ethel Leginska also took action since many women were hampered in their piano technique by restrictive dress, especially corsets of whalebone. Ethel Leginska adopted a comfortable, functional costume. She had low heels and a baggy dress, and her hair was short, and it was not styled, in which she invariably appeared. In 1916, her recital at Carnegie Hall, which included only works by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms inspired the following reaction in the New York Times:" in a program which might almost be called severely classical, she seemed to be less happy than on some occasions, the result was neither the best Beethoven nor the best. Mme. Leginska has gifts so unique along certain lines that they should be displayed even at the expense of things that might be left to six foot male pianists with heavy arms." So I just had a lot of fun during my doctorate degree looking up this stuff. It says a lot about what women were dealing with trying to stay in the Beethoven game at the beginning of the 20th century.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I find it interesting. Obviously, you go down all these wonderful rabbit holes of curiosity in your blog.
Heather Taves:
I do. That's my chance to do it.
Leah Roseman:
So I do read Substack for a couple of things, but it is kind of dangerous because there's so great stuff on there. You could just lose your whole day, and I don't have time. So how do you manage?
Heather Taves:
Actually, I'm thinking of leaving it, especially now. There's a lot of people jumping on there because they're disillusioned with other social media. I, yeah, I dunno. I feel that my approach is to find something interesting that helps people in their day. And a lot of people tell me that they read my blog for comfort in there. It's a little bit of a comfort piece when you have all these gloomy essays going on on Substack right now. So I would like to go to a newsletter based just sent out by email period. But I am getting subscribers on Substack, and they are lovely people. There are people interested in the arts, very educated people that are now reading the blog because they found it on Substack. So I don't know what to do about that. I really don't. If you have anybody can give me suggestions about that. I am not good at the media, but I like to be there. Just throw in my little word.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, what I find with the podcast is I just try to be as many places as I can because there's different communities. But I was curious in terms of engaging on Substack. If you don't engage, then maybe people don't know about you. But then the cost of this engagement is precious time. This is kind of what I was getting at.
Heather Taves:
It absolutely true. And I am fortunate to be independent of having to make my living because I'm a pensioner, so my substack is free and come and join the party. I don't do anything to augment it. See, I have a thing about people being treated as numbers. I think that there's so much of that going on. I have a 22-year-old who's in university, and I think that people are very daunted by this thing of constantly being counted, ranked. And I think all of these social media tools, they're great for reaching people, but they also rank people and they regard people as your conquests type of thing. Like, oh wow, I've got 103 names now where I had 102 names last week. Oh, what happened? Somebody left. So I started this project by doing house concerts and house concerts on the island involve a lot of people that just don't normally listen to Beethoven piano music at all. And we just had nice parties, and I kind of wanted to bring that spirit. Let's have fun here into that. And so I'm there as long as I have fun.
Recognition is a serious problem for me because I have a lot of barriers to accessing the music industry. One, I'm on a small remote island, even our local community orchestra, the conductor has to be flown in, and that's four times a year there. It's not well paid for anybody. And that's basically all that is going on for, well, there's a music department that's a very good one, and I have participated in it, but it's a very small one. And then there's the rest of the island. There's like 140,000 people or something like that. And there's the tourists in summer, and this is much of Canada is like this. It's very remote. There used to be community concert series. There used to be Anton Kuerti, bless his heart, maybe I will get back to doing this type of concerts. Janina Fialkowska was instrumental with the Piano Six, getting people out.
But I live in one remote community, and not only that, but my province doesn't have any money. There's no money for the arts here. So I can't apply for provincial grants. I can't provide, there's no Ontario Arts Council. There's nothing like that here insofar as there's any money at all. It's for the folk music of Prince Edward Island, which is appropriate. But I mean, this is nothing for me here except my mother who I'm taking care of, and that's very important to me. So I have that barrier. I have the barrier of being one of the 25 women out of 35 playing Beethoven, and I don't have time to play other composers right now who might organize concerts for me. There is no agent who wants to try to deal with the way plane flights work in and out of this island when it's not tourist season. It's a very difficult process so I can organize my own concert. So there's many, many barriers to an island being an island pianist, and I just have to go inside. Beethoven also had many barriers. He wanted to travel to England. He couldn't because of his adopted son, because of his health. And he went inside. He had a dialogue with nature, he had a dialogue with the divine. That's what I'm doing.Just do what you need to do. I am not a media person. I live on a small remote island, and I don't have the infrastructure around me to gain recognition. So I just focus on being who I am and putting out what I can in a very small way. Small is beautiful.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious about your writing mentors. You have studied writing formerly, and then I go down my rabbit hole. So last night I was looking at Diane Schoemperlen, and then I found her books in my library, and then I started reading her very fascinating memoir, actually. I was like, who's this Canadian writer I haven't heard of? So what's it been like for you studying writing as an adult? Obviously you've written over your lifetime, but
Heather Taves:
I started writing with my doctoral essays where I definitely went well beyond what any performer is supposed to do. But I put those aside. And then I came back to writing later on in my career where I had a sabbatical and decided to write, I enrolled in the Humber College postgraduate diploma. This is in Toronto for creative nonfiction. So I decided I would focus on creative nonfiction. I thought I had a lot of stories to tell being in the, but I wanted to do it in a more literary way. So through that program, I studied with Karen Connelly. She's a Governor General's award-winning memoirist. She's written some amazing memoirs about her travels overseas. She's also a poet. So I did, this was on an online program before the pandemic. I did an online program and I wrote 400 pages together with Karen. And at the end, then the program was over and she said, you still have a lot of work to do.
I mean, you got to do a lot of writing when you're a writer. I didn't go the route of submitting to a lot of different publications because I was too busy as a piano professor and trying to get concerts. So I then went to a book festival where I heard Diane Schoemperlen read from her wonderful memoir. So I met Diane at the book festival. She was reading from her memoir, and she was just a lovely person. She's very low key as a person, very much like Gil Kalish was very down to earth. And she said to me, she'd be delighted to use the format of Humber College to teach me privately, because she had taught through Humber College. She knew what the format was, but this was a private arrangement. So I studied with her for the next several years, and Diane was much more detailed than Karen had been. Karen was a bit of a philosopher about how to do memoir, but Diane is picky. She's an editor and everything has to be in place. I remember the first manuscript I got back, you have to have the capital T in YouTube, the picky details. And at first I was like, oh, she's so detail oriented and I have these big ideas. But I realized that in writing, the devil is the detail.
You have to have the organic interest in every sentence, in every word. And so with that said, I wrote another 400 pages with her. None of that stuff's published, but when I started the blog, the idea was actually not to be so picky because I had been very picky with learning how to write.
And now I was like, well, what happens if I go up there every Sunday morning to my desk upstairs and just write whatever's on my mind and publish it quick before I have a chance to apply the Diana Schoemperlen detail to it? It kind of worked. I mean, we know this from classical music too. We are very detailed, but at a certain point you have to find the flow. And so that helped me find the flow. And then now I'm going back and I'm correcting my first year, and I want to make a book out of this. I do want to make a memoir out of this Beethoven Journey, so I will correct in detail. But I wanted the flow and I wanted the spontaneity, and I wanted the fun. And so I write for an hour or two and then I throw it out. That's it. Put links onto Facebook and different things. But it's on substack. Yeah. Yeah. I don't decide in advance what I'm going to write about because with writing it is so interesting. Even it's just like this podcast is that it's better sometimes not to decide in advance. You see the flow, you see where it's going, where you're going to connect that day. So this is very immediate feel. And I wanted the immediate feel because I'm on an island. I wanted to tell people The mud road is impassable today. I can't go out. And I wanted to tell people things like that and how it affected me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, there's definitely a feeling of immediacy and you're very candid, your blog voice. I've really enjoyed things about your childhood and just kind of the tangents you go on. I did have some other notes about some of the women in Beethoven's life that Dame Myra Hess was a name I knew, very famous, I didn't know anything about her. And then I learned through you and looking so these wonderful daily concerts she was performing during the blitz during World War II.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, Dame Myra Hess was probably the woman, the woman who first inspired me to look into women playing Beethoven. She said that Beethoven was her favorite composer, but she had hardly recorded any Beethoven. And I asked myself, well, why was that? And I kind of figured that out. But her story is so moving, right? Because she was of Jewish ancestry, she was raised in England, and during the second World War, she was already a famous pianist and she was offered a tour in the US to get out of the hole, be safe. And she said, no, kind of like Zelensky," I don't need a ride. I need ammunition". Except in her case, her ammunition as it were, was concerts. So the National Gallery in London had had all of its paintings removed and taken to secret places in the countryside. And so it was empty. And she decided, figured out through powers that, that she would play concerts there for a low, very low.
Anybody could pay the fee and people would came and they would sit on the floor. I mean, the place was empty and she would play, and sometimes in a fur coat if the heating was out and cold fingers and she would play, and she played every day at lunchtime. People took their lunches and sometimes there was an alarm and she kept playing. And so she eventually, this became really well known in other pianists. So then, sorry, other instrumentalists came. So it became like there was chamber music, there was different things going on, but she kept organizing the whole thing. She did this all the way through the war. That's why she was given the title Dame at the end of the war, and she made famous the Bach, and everybody knows that. Nobody knew it before the war. That was the lesser known work of Bach.
She was the one who made it famous in her piano version that she always played to calm people down. It's a beautiful calming piece of music. And this famous story that somebody was sitting in the tube in London and humming that, and somebody else said, oh, that's Bach, you're humming. And they said, no, no, that's Myra Hess. It was so associated with her. So I learned that piece and oh, interesting story. I was hired at Laurier the same year Jamie Parker was hired, and we worked alongside each other for four years. And Jamie was just out of Julliard and I was just out of Stony Brook. And now we were starting at a Canadian institution and we decided that we would not compete. We would have students do exchange lessons between the studios and to represent that in the welcoming faculty concert. We played that piece together in a forehand version that Jamie owned, that he had played with his brother, John Kimura. And we played that together. And so that was the first thing that either of us played when we worked together at Laurier. And then when I left many years later, Jamie had changed institutions and Anya Alexeyev had come there, Anya and I played it as my last concert.
Leah Roseman:
That's really meaningful. I was thinking it might be interesting to reflect on your life as a composer. Obviously you haven't had that much time over the years, but you wrote a song cycle based on a poem your dad had written about his struggles with Parkinson's.
Heather Taves:
Yeah, so he had a long struggle with Parkinson's from age 65 to his death at age 80. And he was a poet on retirement from a school teaching career and published several books. And the last one was a set of poems about his last statement as it were. And I wrote it for tenor and piano because my dad had always been wonderful tenor. He was that prairie boy. He had the tenor voice. And so the tenor, Brandon Lee, from my workplace recorded it with me, and I'm so grateful also to Timothy Corlis who produced that album. And that album was nominated for a Juno, partly based on the things that Timothy had put in of his own composition. But we did concerts around that and it's four pieces. And those two guys working with those guys, they were so gentle and respectful of my father's work.
And I put in music that my father had enjoyed little quotes from (singing) Der lindenbaum, which he had sung me to sleep with when I was a little kid. He loved Schubert songs he loved Goethe, Heine, all these German sort of in the blood. So I quoted those, but it's also very contemporary because my dad was very modern guy in his ideas. He had innovative ideas about education and so on. So there's a lot of modern stuff in it, but it was fun to do that project. And dad, I think he was already too far gone to really appreciate it fully, but he was glad that I was using his poetry. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
He came from this Mennonite religious upbringing, but I'm just curious about his ideas about education. You said he was,
Heather Taves:
Well, this is the reason we moved to Prince Edward Island is that he was doing in Manitoba. He had become an educator. Both my parents were, but my mom was raising kids. So he started out in one room, school houses in northern Manitoba, and then he ended up in Winnipeg and teaching in a big high school where he pioneered closed circuit TV education in the sixties. He was on the cover of the Manitoba Educator for that. And then they recruited him in Prince Edward Island to help develop the school system here, because it was mainly one room school houses here, and they wanted to consolidate into larger schools where they could have vocational education and they could have gyms and libraries and that they could offer this type of thing. He was in favor of vocational education and having it be integrated with academic education. So I heard a lot of those kind of talk around the dinner table. It was a tough call though, because the one room school houses were very central to the little communities of Prince Edward Island socially. And when they got bused out, a lot of things died in the community. So it was difficult. It was quite bittersweet, I would say his ideas and his work.
Leah Roseman:
Heather, we've talked a lot about sense of place and returning to your roots in PEI and all this sort of thing, but I know you took this huge world trip on your first sabbatical in 2000. If you'd like to talk about that a little bit, that might be very interesting.
Heather Taves:
So I started out my world trip because I was questioning my Canadian identity. I had a friend who was Indigenous, actually Mi'kmaq from this region, their territory here. And there was a big fisheries conflict going on at the time, and this was around 2001 at a place called , which is a lobster fishery dispute, and I won't go into it, but it caused me to question what it meant to be to be a Canadian at the time. There was no reconciliation talk, there was no, was no TRC, there was no missing and murdered women. There's nothing to grab onto for me. And my students were also pushing me to see if I could bring non-Western music into the curriculum. So I decided I would do this round the world trip. I thought it'd be kind of give me perspective, and I wrote about it in my Humber College program.
I have never published that stuff. I started out from Mi'kmaq territory and I flew to Europe, and then I spent some time in Western and then eastern Europe and then over India, which I skipped because I had just divorced from an Indian guy, but I kind of knew. Anyway, I went to Singapore and then I went to Australia and New Zealand, came back through Hawaii to Vancouver where my mother was, and then took the train back across Canada having been through the rest of the world just to see on the Canadian, which was what the name of the train is, the passenger train to see Canada from this other perspective. It was just remarkable trip. And along the way, I tried to listen to street musicians, so I document that. I also stayed in the home of the New Zealand string Quartet and Anton Kuerti was visiting.
So I did touch base with the classical music world at various points, but I collected at the time, there was a lot of paper around because it was before social media, so everybody advertised things by leaving little pieces of paper around cards and brochures, and they were just everywhere and they were beautifully designed. Graphic design of cards and advertising was huge at this period. So I collected a lot of it, and I still have it in a couple boxes upstairs. I thought, oh, that's really interesting. People will want to see what was going on in 2000. So these are papers from around the world in the year 2000. And if anybody wants to look at them, I had them upstairs. I haven't opened those boxes since. So I don't know. But I think it would be very interesting actually to see, because it reflects what the music world was doing in 2000. And I came back definitely committed to indigenous reconciliation. I wouldn't have used that word for 20 years After that, I became the faculty of music liaison to the Indigenous office at Laurier and learned a lot, listened a lot, listening. That's what we do as musicians. We have to listen. And so I think listening is the skill that we bring to that. That's the most fundamental skill we bring to that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Are there things that surprised you about traveling by yourself?
Heather Taves:
Yeah. So I was fairly recently divorced and I had been through kind of the steps. I was 40, so it was sort of a midlife thing. I'd been through building my home and car and that marriage, and that hadn't worked out for me. So I was searching and I would say that I definitely found answers. I think it was a pilgrimage, and I definitely found answers. I felt I became confident in myself, in my ability to not only survive, but feel comfortable, feel comfortable talking to people. Ever since that trip, I was very introverted. As a kid, I was shy. But when you travel alone, you have to meet other people, and you do and you enjoy it. And ever since then, I've felt really comfortable with people. So it's kind counterintuitive that you have to travel alone in order to feel really comfortable with other people. But I guess it's just knowing yourself and seeing that you're just a part of this grand design and that so many situations I was in where I was kind of saved at the last minute by some sort of synchronicity caused me to think that there is goodness in the world and that there is, if you listen carefully to the universe, you can find what you need. And that has made me much less competitive as a person. It has made me able to come to the island and go, okay, come to the island. I don't have to live in New York. I don't have to live in Toronto. There are people here. I can listen to them and play for them.
Leah Roseman:
There's a beautiful post I was reading actually just this morning about where you were driving across Confederation Bridge and it was a windstorm. It was really scary, and you had that feeling of panic, and then you talked about how you generated your focus out. And it's the same way we can do that in the concert hall. And I love the way you talked about how somebody took care with creating acoustic space and the people who appreciation for the audience. Can you just speak to that a little bit?
Heather Taves:
Absolutely. Well, as an islander, I've always been maybe a little more attuned than most to audience, because we know everybody around here. And so it never really feels separate.
But of course, I have had to encounter the music industry writ large, and it has been panic inducing on many occasions for sure, in terms of all the people who you work with backstage and in the hall and all of that kind of thing. I was really influenced by being the pianist of the orchestra for les Grands Ballets Canadiens, because James Kudelka at the time was choreographing piano concertos. So I was doing those. So I was going back and forth between working with the solo dancers on their page and so on and working. And I became aware of this huge that I was. It was a very big gig for me, but I need not feel fear because with the dancers, it's so delicate for them that they have a lot of supports. So if you work with the dance company, you find a lot of supports around you and people who are very gentle and who see if you're nervous and who help you. And from that, I always took that into whatever. The first thing I do when I go into a new place is find all the techies, learn their names, talk to them for a while, and then they're behind me because it's all about the audience. It's not about you. You're just a part that's so important. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for this today. Really appreciate it.
Heather Taves:
Thank you, Leah. I am so happy to be here, and I'm so thankful that you were doing this project.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
