Marilyn Lerner: Transcript
Leah Roseman:
I was honored to have this conversation with Marilyn Lerner, who is a unique pianist and composer, who is a powerfully expressive musician across a range of styles. She's a wonderful improviser and has performed worldwide, as well as recorded extensively as both a soloist and as an ensemble player. She's also a therapist and psychoanalyst, and our conversation moved through many fascinating and important topics, including ideas around identity and creativity. All of these episodes are available both as a video and a podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. The transcript will be published to my website, which is linked in the description. Hi, Marilyn Lerner. Thanks so much for joining me.
Marilyn Lerner:
Hi! Thank you, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
So you've agreed to play, and some guests prefer to play towards the beginning because they're kind of ready to go, but some are like, "Oh, I'll play later." So what would you rather do? Would you like to give us some music right away or you want to talk first?
Marilyn Lerner:
That's a good question. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm just going to play a little. I'll improvise for a few minutes just to warm up a little bit. How would that be?
Leah Roseman:
That'd be wonderful. Beautiful. You really ended it on a bit of a question with that last chord.
Marilyn Lerner:
Just a little wake up exercise there.
Leah Roseman:
That's the most straight ahead jazz playing I've heard you do, because you play in so many different styles.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's true. I guess I could sit and play something else for you that's quite a lot different. I'm someone who has had a lot of experience in different genres, and I guess the thing is I'm a curious person and I'm not someone who necessarily... Even though I studied classical music and I studied jazz, I'm just interested in music, so I don't know what's going to strike me at a certain moment. And sometimes I'd be playing a lot of free music and then I just sit down and I just want to play a standard, a jazz standard, a jazz ballad. And I think classical music and jazz are the two genres of music that I go back to, and I think anyone who is a jazz musician, no matter how outside, will go back and try to learn Charlie Parker heads. So sometimes I just like to improvise in that style and I sort of get hooked onto it, and then I'll study a composer and... So yes, it's true. I play very many different kinds of music.
Leah Roseman:
I heard you once live in Ottawa in a performance of The Yellow Ticket, the silent movie, with violinist Alicia Svigals, who has also featured on this podcast, for those listeners who haven't heard that yet. And of course it was a very moving experience, and actually, I think it's my only time seeing a silent movie with live music. It was very emotional and I thought the music was really successful. And I remember of course being impressed with Alicia, but thinking, "Who is that pianist? She's amazing." It was so cool what you did there. And that opportunity, you toured with her for many years with that project, led you to playing for other silent films as well.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. I'm a passionate film buff. I think there are a lot of parallels. Music is a lot about flow and I think there's a lot of parallels. I just love the arts and I love all the senses of the arts, and so I'm very attracted to film. I think I had done some silent, a little bit of silent... I had some interesting experiences with silent film when I lived in Winnipeg, which I did for 13 years. I had a chance to put an ensemble together to do a score for the Carl Dreyer 1927 film, Joan of Arc, which is a masterpiece of silent filmmaking. It doesn't need any music, actually. And I did this with people from different parts of Winnipeg, which is a small scene, but a very vibrant scene. I put together an ensemble of classical players, folk musicians, and jazz musicians, and spoken word, and we made a score for...
And I think I used a sampler with motorcycle sounds. I had all kinds of sounds. And so I had some experience doing that and I also did that film, Here. This is before The Yellow Ticket. Here is in Toronto at the AGO. Also, they screened that film and I had an ensemble of graduating classical musicians from the conservatory, from the Glenn Gould School, and they had never... Some of them had improvised, but some hadn't, and we created a score. So I had some experience with that, but through Alicia, I met a curator, Alicia Fletcher, who is a dynamo. She's a curator in Toronto, and she called me. And so for the last three or four years now, at least, I've played silent film score. I've improvised to silent film. And I love doing it. It's very intuitive for me to try to translate, to try to create an atmosphere around the image.
And I've accompanied some amazing films, and really have an appreciation for silent film because usually people, they think of silent film, they think of The Keystone Kops, and it is so much richer, of course, than that. So it was an education for me. But it really is one of those places where I can put my improvising skills to a very in-the-moment experience, and I love to do that, especially of course in front of a live audience. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Something I learned recently, which I never thought of, I've been learning about deaf culture and studying some ASL, just as a hobby, and the change from silent movies to talkies for the deaf community was horrible because they were just loving going to movies. They understood everything, and then they couldn't.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's very interesting. True. In fact, you know the film Sunset Boulevard?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
So Sunset Boulevard is a classic. It's not a silent film, but it is about a silent film actress, Gloria Swanson and William Holden, and what I read about that film was that she played that film as though it was a silent, so everything she does, all her gestures are silent film gestures. And it's true. You have to speak with your body. So that's true. That must have been quite difficult for the deaf community. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were working with these students, you just mentioned this project from the Glenn Gould, what kind of guidance did you give them to get them to be comfortable with improvisation?
Marilyn Lerner:
Well, I got them to try to make sounds, first of all, and to become more comfortable with improvising, which when people are classically trained, some classical musicians, I mean, it's an individual thing, are very comfortable with making things up, and some are not. They're so finely tuned to the page and the interpretation on the page and it's so demanding. So the first thing was to try to get to the people who are really scared to improvise and to get them to just make sounds on their instrument. And once they started to get more comfortable, then we started to go through the film and to kind of talk about mood. We did it as a collaboration. I really like to work with ensembles in a collaborative fashion to try to figure out what kind of texture can we get there and how can we ...
And it just starts to organically form. And so we sculpted this. It was more like sculpting this score with different sections. You start to see that there's a rhythm to a film, how it's cut, and you make some decisions about how you're going to interpret the different parts of the film. I mean, that's a film that's so intense because it has so many stills and such a close up on the face. There's a huge world of what you can do. So I work very collaboratively, and that's how I've worked in any workshops that I've done. I've been teaching at KlezKanada for a number of years, and my favorite thing to do there is to have an ensemble of musicians. Usually, they're a little more advanced, but I've also worked with people who are just sort of, I would say, amateur musicians who really love playing to create a piece, an improvised piece.
Sometimes it's based on a Yiddish tune and then we try to do something a little bit more experimental with it. But I wanted to say that the experience with the classical musicians was amazing because a number of them came up to me after and said, "I solved some technical problems. By going through this process, I solved some technical problems I was having." I thought, "Wow." It would be good if improvisation was part of classical education and vice versa. I'm not saying it should go one way. I think that improvising musicians also do well to study and analyze pieces because if you compose or you analyze, I think it does add to an improvisational palette.
Leah Roseman:
I did a workshop online during the earlier part of the pandemic with both Jesse Stewart and Ellen Waterman, the same idea and working with classical musicians, colleagues of mine, and I was one of those people who was so scared. So since then, I have been trying different styles of improvisation and just, it's really helped me a lot. It's been kind of therapy for me as a glued-to-the-page classical player.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's great. That's fantastic. I mean, you can explore... The way people make sounds on their instrument that are nontraditional sounds, extended technique. I mean, with strings, it's just amazing what you can do with harmonics. It's such a percussive instrument.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. I mean, interestingly enough, my path in improvisation, I guess if you've read up on me, you know that I was in a duo with Lori Freedman for a number of years, and then we had a violist, and then we were the Queen Mab Trio. As a duo... So we met. I think I heard her play and then we met and decided to get together and improvise. And so Lori Freedman is a virtuoso so of improvised music and she comes from a new music, classical and new music background. And playing with her, I just got very frustrated with my instrument because she was a clarinet and she could play one note and she could shatter your ear drum. She could do so much with one note. And I would play one note and all I would hear would be that, and I started to hate the instrument, the piano.
It was a very important experience for me because then I started to realize, well, the piano's not just... First of all, it's not just the keys. It's a string instrument, it's a wind instrument, it's a metal, it's all kinds of things, and so I discovered the piano. I discovered the inside of the piano, and then discovering inside the piano helped me to think about the keys. If I had to play just with the keys, how was I going to not just be rooted to... The first improvisation, that was very tonal, very diatonic. It was just sort of playing around. But what if I was to improvise without having that? I'm not going to be playing in a harmonic way. What would I do? And so I started to think about...
The piano, of course, is a textural instrument as well as percussive. And for me also, listening to contemporary classical music like... Well, listening to all classical music has always been very helpful to me in terms of improvising, like Scriabin or something, or Messiaen. So I listen to Messiaen, and then I'll just sort of... I just understand, "Oh! It's gestural," for me. Now, I'm not trying to imitate Messiaen, but it liberates me to think about piano as a gestural instrument. So it's not about the notes. It's about gesture. Is it okay if I do this, play and demonstrate?
Leah Roseman:
Of course. It's wonderful. Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
You can stop me. Stop me anytime. That's very liberating for me to be able to improvise that way and not think so much. And even if I'm playing in a jazz context sometimes, I use that kind of gestural playing and it just takes me into a different realm. And it takes me out of the realm of "You're going to play a wrong note," first of all, because it's not diatonic, it's not a harmonic, and it really opens up. It makes the piano much more of a dance to me. The interesting thing about playing jazz... The interesting thing about jazz to me, one of the most interesting things, is the harmony and the chord substitutions and trying to harmonize a piece. But the gestural playing is a completely different thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It really seems like, learning about your youth, you're really such an intuitive musician. Can you talk about... From what I understand, you started when you were about seven on the piano, but by the time you were eight or nine, you were already accompanying other children in elementary school, like the violin class and the Gilbert and Sullivan shows.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's right. Ms. Rose was my first teacher and she had big, long, red nails that clacked. You could hardly hear the keys. And I just remember... This kind of stuff. But what happened was that my parents in Montreal... I don't know if you know about the school, Ecole Vincent-d'Indy in Montreal. Somehow my parents got wind of this because we lived in Cote Saint-Luc, and they enrolled me, and so then I went into a very... A pretty heavy music school. I was taught by nuns and I think it was the music faculty of the University of Sherbrooke in those days. So then I started to play a little bit more seriously, but then at school, as soon as I could play...
I guess I must have been about 10. I think it was grade two... Well, maybe 10 or nine. I mean, the violin teacher, Mrs. Moore, asked me if I wanted to accompany the kids after school. So that was my first gig, I think, and then I was playing "O Canada." I was playing the national anthem for assemblies, and then the music teacher was a great guy and we were doing these little children's versions of Gilbert and Sullivan. I still have the score, children's version of The Mikado and of H.M.S. Pinafore. So yeah, I didn't really think much of it, but yes. And as I was playing, I was also playing for the school for various functions.
Leah Roseman:
So were you reading a score? Were you doing it partly by ear when you were doing those shows?
Marilyn Lerner:
The Gilbert and Sullivan?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
I can pull the book out if you want to see it. I can actually show you.
Leah Roseman:
You still kept it? I'm just curious.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah, no, it's a little book score.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah, and I played it. And then in high school, I did... I have the piano reduction of South Pacific. I was the musical director of that and I played the whole score on the piano. Yeah. So it's true that I was active. I wasn't just taking lessons and practicing at home.
Leah Roseman:
And you had mentioned KlezKanada, and you're quite well known in Klezmer and Yiddish music revival scene. So your dad had a radio show when you were a kid, Songs Of Our People, and you were loaned Hasidic records, so you had a little bit of that in your ear?
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. I remember we used to listen to the show. I was very young, but I remember he had all these records and he looped them on, so I was listening to the music without really thinking too much about it. It's an interesting story that he had this connection with this guy who had a record store. I do remember he used to write his own commercials outside of Cantor's Bakery in Montreal. I remember seeing his handwriting and his little... of these commercials. And so in return for plugging that music store, he got all these records. So I particularly remembered this Israeli singer Miriam Ben-Ezra, and that... I listened to those melodies when I was quite young. Yes. I guess that was formational.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Because we weren't a musical family in the sense of we didn't sit around playing. Nobody else played a musical instrument but I. But my father, because he had this radio show, and he loved music.
Leah Roseman:
So your parents were quite supportive of your musical talent, but you hadn't really thought of going into music professionally because your first year at university, you did psychology?
Marilyn Lerner:
Yes. I wanted to be a psychologist and I took a couple of music courses, but university introductory to psychology is not exactly... I remember the first year was fine, but the second year, the first day of animal behavior, I left. I walked out of that classroom and I walked over across the campus to the music department and I just said, "I want to major in composition. I want to switch." And York at the time is a very liberal... It wasn't like U of T or Humber at the time for music. It was very liberal and it was actually a wonderful time to be studying at York. So I got into the music department and left psychology behind. And in fact, I didn't... I did eventually come back to it, but...
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, when you're 47 or so, you went back to become a psych...
Marilyn Lerner:
You know my life here.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I do try to do a little research before.
Marilyn Lerner:
You did. You're well-researched. Yes.
Leah Roseman:
So you're a practicing psychoanalyst as well as a musician.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah, I am. Yes. And I find that my musical... The listening of a musician has been very helpful to me, and also the fact of working with another human being, just like working with a musician, even though they're different, of course, in many ways, you never know what you're... You're in a spontaneous meaning-making at all times in some ways. So I felt comfortable enough with that through encounters with other musicians that it fit.
Leah Roseman:
I actually know a couple of musicians who were a little bit not so young and they went back to school during the pandemic to become therapists, and I actually myself considered that quite seriously because at the beginning of this pandemic, I think our industry was very uncertain in terms of being performers.
Marilyn Lerner:
Oh my god.
Leah Roseman:
And I think a lot of us felt like we want to help people, so I think it's interesting that... And I think as music teachers, a lot of us end up... Can be quite... You're supporting people psychologically and it's one on one, so you want to maybe get some training.
Marilyn Lerner:
In some ways, those are the most difficult. The most difficult aspect is the psychological aspect of music in many, many ways, whether it's fear of playing in front of people or fear of promoting yourself or just feeling like you can explore your instrument or feelings of your own limitations or feelings of your own talent and what you feel is owed to you or all kinds of things that we work through as musicians. So I think that it's a natural. I mean, for me, it was always something... I didn't think I was going to be a musician. That's the irony of it. I wanted to be a psychologist from the time I was little. That was what I wanted to be, but because I... Music was not incredibly difficult for me. I mean, my parents enrolled me in ballet. That didn't go very well.
So they were looking, I guess, for some, which I really credit them, they were looking for some extracurricular and I guess I just took to music instantly. So it's a very strange relationship. It's not like I grew up feeling like, "Oh, I want to be a musician," like many of my colleagues. I wanted to be a psychologist. So I think over the years of being in both worlds, both have really fed... Each has fed the other for me. I feel very fortunate to be able to have both of those. I can't always do as much music as I would like to. I've had to give up some, but I continue to learn as a musician, I continue to listen to music, and I continue to play whenever I can. I'm much more discriminate. I have to be very careful with my time and energy. But I think that it's a very natural thing to be, as a musician, and of course the pandemic was incredibly devastating for musicians.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking about identities in terms of I think most musicians I know identify first as a musician and then as a person almost, and if they can't play due to injury or they're forced to retire, whatever happens, it's just so devastating for so many people. And it's very useful to not have those labels or think of yourself as a person first and then that you play different roles. What do you think about that, since you, as you say, wear different hats?
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. Well, I think it's very fluid that we need to, that we want to belong somewhere or identify somewhere, and I think it's true. It's funny because I devoted a lot of time to the training, therapy training and the psychoanalysis training, a lot of time, and I think... When I think about the energy, and it is my full-time profession now, but when I think about it, it's like, "Yeah, but I am a musician, or am I a musician? Or am I still a musician?" Or what makes a musician? Is a musician someone who is always playing or is the musician something you feel in your body? And what if I couldn't do this? What if I couldn't practice as a therapist? I mean, there's all kinds of things that can happen to us in our lives that take us away and we no longer can do the thing that we thought we were born to do.
And how are we going to adjust to that? Are we going to become despairing or are we going to find some way of living with the loss and continuing on no matter what it is? So thoughts about that are that our lives eventually do become limited, more limited, and how are we going to live our lives with dignity if that happens? But it's easy to say. I mean, your living is what's important. You have to make a living. And I think that's what's been so devastating. I'd recently played in... I was in New York on the weekend. I was saying that he made more money during the pandemic. He had more money during the pandemic because there were income supplements. And this is a musician, a master musician talking. Making a living as a musician is so difficult, period.
And that's, to me, one of the sorrows, that we live in a culture that doesn't... I mean, I say sorrows. I just wish we could fight harder for it to be recognized, what the arts contribute to the health of our society and how badly treated musicians are, and in the jazz world. I mean, I think the thing... I think about a classical musician. If you get into an orchestra, you kind of have a... It's decent, right? You have benefits. You can retire. Is that true?
Leah Roseman:
True, but I think there's a misapprehension in society thinking that most classical players end up in that world. That's far from the truth, where the... I'm the extreme minority of people in the classical world.
Marilyn Lerner:
Right. But in the jazz world, there isn't even that percentage of people who have any of that.
Leah Roseman:
Well, they teach at universities, so I would say it's similar. Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's correct. That's correct. And that's not something I was drawn to do. I'm fairly introverted. I don't mind one on one, but the energy to... When I teach an ensemble, I've got to really muster it, and I can get into it, but I don't thrive. People who teach and love to teach, it's wonderful to see that, but part of my life was that I didn't want to do that. And so it's true. So many jazz musicians, if they get a teaching gig, then they can survive and support themselves and play. And it's also a great place to meet other musicians. I mean, it can be very helpful for a musician to be teaching. But I wonder how many would teach if they had to.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
If they didn't have to. That's what I wonder sometimes. Aside from being, it's important to impart knowledge and to contribute because you can't be young forever. You want to be regenerative of your knowledge.
Leah Roseman:
Just because we were talking about the psychological thing, so when the lockdowns first happened in 2020, and of course, I'm sure you were busy as a therapist online, I'm assuming, but did you go to the piano more? Did you find yourself playing more because you were isolated?
Marilyn Lerner:
Well, I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was just too freaked out to do much of anything. I did not... I don't even remember. It's hard to even remember it now. I was so focused on "Go home and stay home" that it wasn't something I reached out. And also, my piano at that point, this piano here was at my cousin's in her basement, and she had... I used to have a studio done at Artscape, and the piano, which was wonderful... And then the city, of course, sold the space for condo development or I don't know what they did, but they kicked out the artists, which is a very common thing.
And so the piano went to my cousin's place with proviso that I could play anytime I wanted, but when the pandemic happened, I wasn't going to go over there and play. So I didn't have access to this piano for a long time or I didn't feel safe going. We decided no. So I have an electric piano. It's not very appealing to sit and pour out your heart to an electro piano. So I wouldn't say I did a lot of playing in those early days. I might have listened, though. I'm always listening to music. But how about yourself? Did you?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I appreciate that you asked. I was terrified to stop. I felt like if I stopped, I might not start again, and so I didn't take a day off in probably 18 months of playing.
Marilyn Lerner:
A day off in practicing, you mean? A day off.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Just really kept going. And my husband, he's a violinist as well with the same orchestra. And I'm not a big practicer, I never practiced hours a day, but I just did my thing and I started obsessively making YouTube videos. On this channel where this interview will appear, I have over 1,000 violin videos I created during that time mostly. Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Wow.
Leah Roseman:
It was super obsessive of me and it just was a reason to feel... It was goal-oriented. I was helping people out who wanted recordings of various things. I was doing lots of these international master classes over Zoom as outreach and made tons of interesting connections. That really was my therapy. It really, really helped me, all that stuff. And then since I started the podcast, speaking to you, it's just over a year since I've started, and I've done... Maybe you're my 45th interview or something. And that's been a wonderful way of just feeling... For me, it's a mission to bring to the world, to show people the depth and breadth of what a life in music is and can be, and to connect with fellow musicians in a different way. And I started it when we were quite isolated, and it was really wonderful. I thought, "Well, I already have Zoom calls with people. We could just do this sort of thing and record them."
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. I think the first time I did a Zoom meet, I mean, I think that in the beginning, those Zoom connections were very precious, even though they were so... The time lag and the echo. I got together with Matt Brubeck to play, to improvise over Zoom, and it was just the most primitive early thing, and it sounded terrible, but I was so happy to just do something. I was on my electric piano and there was some kind of a delay. But it's funny because it's like it sort of throws you back. It threw you back to a time like it was a little more primitive. But that connection was so... That was quite incredible.
And then the other thing that really was quite moving was there was an improvisation that came out of New York that a bunch of musicians played in that we just... I don't know how we did it. It was about 10 minutes. We were supposed to play something over 10 minutes and a bunch of people did it and there was a shape. Start like this at this minute, go like that. That was incredibly moving, and that was just all about... It was for the healthcare workers. It was a very moving thing to do. I remember feeling very emotional. So there was that feeling of being isolated and then coming together. So I think that this technology, which as we were talking before, that this particular platform we're on... Can I say it?
Leah Roseman:
Riverside, yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Riverside is a game changer. It's a game changer, as you said. You said that. And so it's also allowed for the technology to allow people to come together in different places. That's one thing I can say that's come out of this that will forever make it more accessible for people who are isolated to connect, because some people are very isolated. But it does make me think about what you said though about different communities and how if somebody is not... I'm not always sure exactly how to express it. I say if someone is deaf, but for us of the hearing community versus the community that does not... What they do. How has the platform helped them? Or for someone who is not sighted. I can't say... I'm saying not, but...
Leah Roseman:
Visually impaired or hard of hearing.
Marilyn Lerner:
I'm not sure exactly how to express... Yeah, but you can just say impaired. The community of the deaf is a community. We're the...
Leah Roseman:
Right.
Marilyn Lerner:
What I hear does not mean... It's that whole idea of a disability.
Leah Roseman:
Well, one thing that's interesting is you'd think that people in the deaf community would just be texting for communication, but actually, they use these video chats for signing because it's more expressive and quicker for them to send messages back and forth.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You had mentioned KlezKanada. Now, you had a very close musical and personal partnership with Adrienne Cooper and you wrote a song cycle for her with the...
Marilyn Lerner:
Oh yeah. Well, that's still to be released. Yes. So I wrote a song cycle. So I guess poetry is another love of mine. And the collaborator that I originally worked with is Dave Wall, singer Dave Wall. We did a recording called "Still Soft Voice Heart." How it came about was he gave me, one day, a recording of Fritz Wunderlich doing "Dichterliebe." All right. And I started listening to it and I just fell in love with Lieder. I like short forms and I love the wedding of poetry and music, and so it's a natural thing for me to want to do some settings of poetry to music, which is very similar to silent film. I love to do that kind of... What do you call it? Try to express this in music, try to express film in music, try to find a way of expressing word in music.
So Adrienne had done some research on Anna Margolin for her dissertation and I started reading the poetry of this woman, and it was very... It's very dark, very sensual. She was a troubled soul and she also wrote at a time when women were not exactly... She had to write under a... I think she wrote under a male name. She submitted her manuscript. She wrote one book. Anyway, I thought, well, it would be great to write some songs for Adrienne of this poetry. And we got as far as we did a really nice demo at Canterbury Sound here in Toronto, and then when she passed away, I had this demo and I have not... I'm working on releasing it right now in collaboration with Joshua Horowitz from Veretski Pass. And I don't know if it's a song cycle yet. It's certainly a collection of her poems that I set.
And it's going to be called All Silent Things Speak Today, and the style of these pieces are quite varied. Some are a little bit more on the jazz side. Some are a little bit more in the Brahmsian side. There's a piece that's a bit more free improvisation. So I tried, as I like to do, because of the scope of what I like to listen to, to... And over the years, the distillation of all the styles that I like into my style, this collection of songs is quite varied. And Adrienne's voice is just magnificent when she sings. So that should be out by the end of the year. It's going to be a limited edition CD and the proceeds from it are going to go into the Dreaming in Yiddish fund.
And Dreaming in Yiddish, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but when Adrienne passed away, her daughter and... Sarah Gordon and Frank London and Michael Winograd started the idea, floated the idea of having a memorial concert once a year and to give an award to someone who is creating something or has created and contributed to Yiddish culture, and then I joined the group and we've done over 10 concerts, and we call it Dreaming in Yiddish. It's the Dreaming in Yiddish yearly concert. And so the proceeds from that are going to go to help, just again, to support artists so that they can work. So one artist gets a prize, a cash prize every year, and then can work on a project. So that's really a wonderful thing and I want to contribute with this recording.
Leah Roseman:
So the recording won't be available for streaming on...
Marilyn Lerner:
Well, I could sort of talk this through with you. It will be, but I want it to be a collector's item. Nobody uses CDs anymore, and in a way, if I put it out in streaming, it... I want something I can hold in my hand. I want something that I've kind of... I want the cover. So I'm going to make a CD and then it will be available.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, later.
Marilyn Lerner:
I think after that, it'll be available for streaming. But I think it's one of those things that I want to make as a testament to that as a concrete form rather than only on streaming. But it will be, yes.
Leah Roseman:
So I think you're like me. We're the generation where our parents would speak Yiddish at home so the children wouldn't understand the sort of secret language.
Marilyn Lerner:
That's right. And you know what's funny? It's very funny that, again, when I was in New York, I had dinner with Lou Grassi, who is the drummer in the free jazz trio that I also am in with Ken Filiano. He's Italian American and his parents didn't want him to learn Italian. So I can talk about the Jewish... I think it's a bit of an immigrant, on one hand. The immigrant parents come and they want the kids to kind of assimilate. They want them to be Canadian or they want them to be American. And they're different. I mean, every culture has so many differences and every family is so different. But I don't know if they didn't want us to stand out, but also, I think they wanted a secret language. I think they wanted to be able to talk without us understanding what they were saying.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Of course, it backfired somewhat. I remember these phrases like "iz nisht far zey," and almost anybody could figure out what that means. "It's not for them." And it would be like, if they said that, it means something you want. So I mean, in spite of... But I never learned to speak it. I just remember them talking.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
So you have the same experience? Yeah. I'm reading right now The Books of Jacob, which is by Olga Tokarczuk, and it takes place... It starts, anyway, in the 1700s in Poland-Lithuania, and sort of understanding a little bit more about the empire, the Polish-Lithuanian empire and how big it was. And of course, the Jews were there and welcome there at a certain point, and then of course not. I was very fortunate in, with Adrienne, we traveled. I traveled and performed with her quite a bit. I mean, my world really expanded through knowing her, and that's how I became part of the scene in New York that's so important and precious to me and the friendships and the collaborations that have come out of that. But we went to Warsaw, and then when we were there, we played at the Singer Festival, which is a festival of Jewish music in Warsaw, which is already kind of amazing, and went to the...
They provided a driver and went to my mother's hometown, which was unbelievable. And we went to the cemetery and saw the graves that had been knocked over and that they were just starting to restore, and just having a sense of what that might have been like, which is impossible to know. Similarly, I've been to Kyiv and to Moscow and had a chance to go and meet people who didn't leave. There were many people in the Soviet Union, of course, at the time, who didn't leave as my parents had in the early part of the century. So these were not the... They were not the Russian side of it. A lot of those people obviously survived, did not go to the concentration camps. Ukraine was a bit of a different story, but still, unbelievable to meet people and their experiences as opposed to my parents who came and what their experience was like.
I mean, how they came when they were... My mother was three in 1926. So during the whole Holocaust, during the whole war, she was just a young adult, and what they knew and what they didn't know. That's kind of a... That's a very strange thing to be here as opposed to there and your family is already all here because they came before. They just came just before, my mother's family. Just before. So yeah, it's mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing. And going back there is mind-blowing and I know there are many other people who have had that experience, both families who are survivors' kids and those who were fortunate enough not to have gone through the Holocaust in that way.
Leah Roseman:
We had talked a bit about your Jewish music connection. Would you be willing to play something for us?
Marilyn Lerner:
Sure. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what I'll play. Let's just see.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. That was beautiful.
Marilyn Lerner:
Thank you. That's "Romanian Fantasy." And I think a lot of us learned music from the old recordings because at a certain point in the early 20th century, there was the advent of... I guess they were wax cylinders. And so during this Yiddish revival, what was key and important was the rediscovering of these cylinders, and then they were put onto cassette tapes. Kurt Bjorling of Brave Old World fame, which is a very well-known, amazing klezmer band, he was quite instrumental in putting these recordings onto cassettes and CDs later, and so a whole generation of musicians could listen to the original recordings of these tunes. Original as in the first time they were recorded.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to mention, I loved your album "The Pieces Broken" with Yoshie Fruchter. Really, I enjoyed that album a lot.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. I mean, that's the other sort of aspect of the continuing of coming together of all the influences into what I actually want to write. And that's the beginning, that duo. That's our first, our maiden recording, as they say, our debut, and that's both of our compositions that are not traditional, but that have Yiddish inflections and interpretations. Yeah. And one of those tunes is called Ozarow, which I wrote for my mother's hometown. Yes, that's right. "The Pieces Broken."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. He's an interesting musician too, Yoshie. It's interesting getting to know.
Marilyn Lerner:
Interesting musician and a great human being, very lovely person. Yes. We had the opportunity to play together a couple of times, and then as musicians often do, let's go into the studio and lay down a few tracks and see what comes of it. That's a collaboration I'm looking forward to playing a lot more with him.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I just wanted to circle back to your education at York University because you studied the Mridangam, a South Indian drum, when you were there?
Marilyn Lerner:
Yes. Yes, I did. I did for a couple of years. I mean, I was not a serious devotee, but it was Trichy Sankaran who was... The mastery of that in terms of Indian Carnatic music is... It's one of the, I just think, the highest forms of music. Yeah. And so just the experience of being around somebody who is so... I don't want to use the word incredible because it seems like a dumb word to use for someone like that. But when you study with a master who has really devoted so much of their life and has mastered the... And that instrument. I like a simple instrument with which people do incredible things. A tabla is another instrument like that. The speaking quality of it. And I loved listening to... I really like listening to Indian Carnatic music a lot.
So I think the thing about my education that was so fantastic was that York was not... And this has sort of probably shaped me as a musician. I went there, I studied jazz. I studied classical music with Reginald Godden, who he was a very well known pianist in his day, classical pianist, and he was a Bach scholar, and I think he knew Glenn Gould. He knew Harry Somers. They were all buddies. And I studied Bach with him and I studied Mridangam with Sankaran and I took courses on ethnomusicology and I took a course... One of the greatest courses I took was music of the Americas, in which we were sitting and listening to Hopi songs and Cuban, Afro-Cuban music, mambos, and then music from the '20s. And it really opened up my ears to music.
Ethnomusicology, which is, it's fraught in its own way, but the idea that there's no limits. It's such a bridge. It's a cultural bridge. And so my appreciation, when I think about what I've got in my library sometimes, and if I just sort of shuffle things around, the stuff that comes together is quite... I just love the cornucopia of sound, and I think York was responsible for really opening up my ears to music of the world and giving me a sort of basic starting point of how to listen to music when I'm listening for the sound ideal, for example, of the voice, all kinds of different ways of listening. So in terms of Mridangam, I just remember sitting in these concerts and the tala, getting the tala, which is the time, the way beats are divided up, and just sitting there with people and listening to the music, the consciousness expanding.
Leah Roseman:
Did you vocalize the rhythms a lot?
Marilyn Lerner:
We had to... I think it's called solkattu, where you learn to articulate. There are different syllables for the different sounds that you make and you learn to say the pattern, and it's incredibly fast when it's done, when you hear people. You hear this in concerts all the time. Somebody will then start to vocalize what they're playing. And considering a music, it's not harmonic music, and that is not a limitation. It's not a limitation at all. Every music is its own. The sophistication of that music is beyond, and the improvisation, the quality of improvisation. And I listen to WKCR, which is the Columbia University radio station, which I think is amazing, and they have Indian music concerts. There's a couple of shows that I've been listening to recently and it just blows you away. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was going to mention that about, because as a pianist, and a lot of what you do is so harmonic, and then to do this music that's about rhythm and melody and a completely different kind of improv, it must have been so different.
Marilyn Lerner:
And the other music, another music that I've been very, very, very fortunate to play, which really is a piano music, is Montunos in Salsa. When I lived in Winnipeg, there's a guy there, Rodrigo Munoz, who is from Chile, and he started a Salsa band. And so I was playing piano in that band and I really got into the music. I'd always been into Cuban music. And in fact, at York, that was what I did my first sort of thesis on, was American Cuban music and how it influenced American popular music. And there I was playing Salsa, and for a piano player, it's brilliant because you're basically one of the rhythm instruments and you play these Montunos, and I could have spent my life doing that. I could have spent my life playing that music. It's so incredible.
Leah Roseman:
And you played with Jane Bunnett for many, many years.
Marilyn Lerner:
Yes. I played with Jane. That was another experience. I met Jane in Toronto. We were both studying jazz. We became friends and we kind of put together this little duo and we used to play in restaurants six nights or five nights a week, and I learned the repertoire. That's how I learned a lot of jazz tunes, playing with her. And then her and her husband, Larry Kramer, had been to Cuba and they started to do all these... Their lives completely changed and they started to become involved, and it's incredible the musicians that have been in the bands that she's led. Anyway, in '97, I decided I wanted to do a recording. I had a bunch of compositions and I thought Larry, he's a great producer, I wanted him to produce.
And he listened to the tunes and said, "Why don't we go to Cuba to record them?" So I guess that's another experience of music that changed my life. Went to Havana and went to this old RCA recording studio, which was called Egrem, and we recorded there with Cuban musicians. That's the story that comes back to... I'm in Cuba and I'm playing with these musicians who have classical training and are so incredibly well know... They know their own music so well. And it's a culture where music is just so part of it, part of the life. That's what made me interested in Jewish music because I had played in wedding and bar mitzvah bands and I had listened to my father's music when he had that radio show, but there was a big gap where it was just not part of my life.
And then to come back to it, first of all, through a knowledge, a little bit more study about, again, I say the ethnomusicology, but just world music, to be able to think about it and then to reconnect with it. And then that's how eventually I got tied into the New York scene because I had a group in Winnipeg called From Both Ends Of The Earth, and we were invited to play at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto, and at that festival, Adrienne was performing and I was hired to play piano with her. And so all these things start to come together. So it's interesting how that Cuban connection resulted, ultimately, in me becoming tied into the Jewish revival, klezmer revival scene.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And the Cuban musicians had Russian training, if I understand?
Marilyn Lerner:
Well, because Russia was so part of it. It was a communist country, so yeah. They had serious, serious stuff. I mean, there are hardly instruments... Getting instruments was difficult, but I remember going to some rehearsals of children playing in these orchestras. It's serious and heavy there, and the musicians that come out of there that I've gone through both those are just formidable. I mean, they've got it all happening. Unbelievable. So yes, the Russian. They learn through the Russian method, which is pretty rigorous.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I heard Jane Bunnett with some Cuban musicians in Ottawa many years ago. I think it was in the '90s. I know it was in the '90s. Yeah. And that was just starting to get in our ears, that sound, that music.
Marilyn Lerner:
I know. And now she has a group called Maqueque. It's all women and incredible musicians. They're all over the world playing. So she's just grown and grown and grown, developed, and again, created so many opportunities, brought young musicians to Canada who have then... I mean, I can't even begin to tell you the list of people that have come through that she's played with. And the drummer on my recording, which was called "Birds Are Returning," was Dafnis Prieto, who was won a Grammy, and he's one of the foremost drummers, percussionists in the States now of Cuban music and jazz. So yeah. It's interesting.
Leah Roseman:
So do you still play Latin tunes for fun? Or like you mentioned, you love Salsa. Is that something you go to?
Marilyn Lerner:
You can't play Salsa yourself.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
It's a group effort. So sometimes I get the opportunity to play. I think in New York one year, there was... I don't know if it was a concert, but it was certainly... Frank had organized something and asked me to play piano on it, and it's New York, and so the musicians that he had playing were a number of Latino players who... So I got a chance to play. But I don't get a chance to play it very much. No, I don't. That's a sadness of mine, that it's not something that I... Once I moved from Winnipeg back here, I think I played once or twice, but I never got into the scene here.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Do you ever improvise in a really classical way, sort of like Beethoven? You know what I mean?
Marilyn Lerner:
If I've been listening to the music more. I mean, Beethoven has been a sort of passion this year because a lot of stuff has come out on... What just came out is a fantastic book by Laura Tunbridge. Just came out. It's called Beethoven in Seven Pieces. And so I'm sitting there and then I'm listening. "Oh, the octet. I'm going to listen to that. I don't know that very well." Or the chronology, his first stuff, to think about it in chronological order. And so then I might sit down at the piano and look at this a sonata and think, "Oh, I really like this." I really like Schubert's voicings, so I'll look at Schubert's voicings, the way he plays the... Or Brahms as well. I'm a big lover of Brahms, the Intermezzi. So I'll be looking at... If I'm playing them, I'll start to try to figure out, what's he doing here that I think could be interesting in what I'm doing and what I'm not doing?
You always want to try to expand to get out of your comfort zone, so what is this about that I would never do if I'm improvising, and is there some way I can incorporate something? An intention. Not the notes, but the intention, especially the left hand because I don't have the biggest hands in the world. So if you're playing Brahms, you've got to stretch them pretty far. Or if I'm playing Bach, which is the other... I play the fugues and preludes. If I have no time, that's what I play. During the pandemic, that's all I played practically, was Bach because Bach is the kind of music, for me, that just... It's like a brain massage and it never bums me out. Baroque music is really great for just... The way it fits together is so satisfying to me. It just lifts me up. That's one music I can almost always listen to. I can't always listen to Rachmaninoff. That's for sure.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
Whoa. But I can almost always listen to baroque music. And so with Bach, if I'm playing, and then I started getting aware of the voicing, the voices, and don't think about things vertically when you're playing jazz. Don't think about chord to chord to chord. Think about it as moving voices, just like Bach, and you have a very different visual, a very different conception of how to play, especially with piano, which is moving voices. So I will, if I've played enough Bach and I sit down to improvise, I'll be very mindful of the voices. And in one of the pieces on that "Romanian Fantasy" album, I did a kind of counterpoint. It wasn't a formal counterpoint, but it had a contrapuntal kind of feeling in terms of that I'm very conscious of voices moving.
So I would say that's how I would adapt and improvise in the style of a composer that I'm really fond of. Shostakovich preludes and fugues are really favorites of mine. Messiaen, I find incredibly hard to penetrate. I mean, this music is... There's just so much. It's like saying Africa. Africa. Yeah. It's just so varied and big. So I like to take... Just to look at one thing and see, "Is there something that I could expand my consciousness in the way I play?" Yeah. I'm a big listener to classical music. I listen to it all the time. I really, during the pandemic, one of my favorite things was to listen to the BBC Record Review where they have a piece of music and some expert comes in and talks about all these recordings and picks their recommended recordings. I don't know if you're familiar with that show, but it really expanded my horizons. I go back to class classical music a lot for food. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking, the type of therapy you do with people relates, if I understand, to the unconscious quite a bit?
Marilyn Lerner:
Well, I mean, I think we all try to protect ourselves in the pain that we experience in our lives, and sometimes when that pain is too painful, we try to find a way of putting it somewhere where it won't cause us pain, and one of the ways of thinking about the unconscious could be that way that we kind of put things to go underground and they emerge in ways that we are not really aware of. The unconscious is somewhat of things that are happening that are out of awareness. And another way of thinking about it is childhood, as a child, there's no inhibition, so whatever you think, whatever you feel, and those feelings that you have sometimes go underground as well, and then you become an adult and you never kind of worked through those early feelings. So yeah. I think there's many ways of thinking about what that word means, but certainly stuff that's going on outside of our awareness but that is impacting our lives, and sometimes in a very destructive way, maybe that's a good thing to try to make meaning from and understand and explore.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm guessing it was much better for you to go back to study to be a therapist later in life as opposed to if you'd stuck with it in your twenties.
Marilyn Lerner:
I don't think I would have had a whole bunch to contribute as a therapist in my early, earlier years. But I know a lot of people through the training that start to train when they're... You can't really start trained to be a therapist when you're 20, easily, I think. I'm not saying that you can't be very helpful and do something, but I think that mature... This is the one profession that maturity adds, as long as you remember what it's like to be younger and not just see things from your own age all the time. It's the art of empathy, which is to try to put yourself in the other person as much as you can, to try to imagine what someone else's experience is. So I think I'm grateful that I waited.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
I would have rather do this than have been a psychologist and then started studying music than the other way around.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
For sure. I'm glad that I played music as a young person. I don't know when you started, but it's so natural. I don't have to think about the things that I would have to think about if I started to play now, so I'm glad of the order.
Leah Roseman:
And when you were a child, Marilyn, and you were improvising and writing music, did the women who were teaching you at Vincent-d'Indy, did they not like that or did they know about that creative side coming through?
Marilyn Lerner:
They didn't know about that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Marilyn Lerner:
I don't know what they would have... I had a great teacher. I think she might have been very... I might even have played something at some point and she probably found it very cute or whatever, but it was so focused on the repertoire we had to learn for our exam at the end of the year that... But I remember my teacher saying to me, "Love those notes. Love those notes when you play." And the way she tried to get me to produce tone. She taught me more about making a sound out of the piano, and just that, "Love those notes," I never forgot that. That's such a beautiful thing to say because that is what it is with the piano.
It's coaxing, because it's a mechanical instrument. It's an instrument of illusion. It's not like a string. I play little guitar, and so I know the sensitivity of a string, and when you strike a string, it has so much nuance. But with the piano, you touch the note, but you have to imagine with the piano. You have to imagine. That's what opens up the sound. And that was a big focus. I'm not a hard player. I'm not a heavy player. I'm not a loud player. I'm not the most virtuosic player. But when I'm feeling best is when I'm really tuned into the sound production, the tone. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Is it easy for you to switch tracks and just have that kind of special focus you need when you're playing music well, as opposed to the busyness of your professional life? You know what I'm getting at?
Marilyn Lerner:
I think it's hard to focus. I think it's hard in terms of all the demands of life. And I think one of the things is that I can be focused, but I think one of the things that's led to my playing different styles is a certain restlessness, and I like to move. So I have to sometimes tie myself down. And I think in this day and age, the other thing that's apparel is we're bombarded with these short bursts of information all the time, and that's very seductive. And so to sit down and read a book or to do things that are very time-consuming and slow are not as appealing as something that you get the feedback immediately on.
And I don't know what it's like to be a young person in that and growing up with that because we grew up before the internet, and I think it's hard to imagine for some people what that would be like. But you left a phone message or long distance or dialing. Even dialing a phone, it takes so long to dial a number. But in those days, it didn't. You just did it. So I think it's also hard to focus in today's day in age, and yet look at the technology. We wouldn't be meeting. So it's different aspects of this technology. So yes, it is hard sometimes to focus.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, no, I was curious. Something I've realized is that I'm one of these people, I do a lot, and that I don't allow my brain enough time to just wander. And if I can allow that, then when I go to play music or do other things where I want to focus in, I'm able to do that better. I need to have that sort of outlet of just the mind wandering. It's sort of our default. Does that make sense?
Marilyn Lerner:
Yeah. What I find is hard is that I don't get... Because I was talking about my practice is pretty full time and it really does absorb me, and sometimes when I'm not doing it, I don't want to do anything.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Marilyn Lerner:
I need silence. And so sitting down and playing, I really have to get into the head space where that's going to be something that's going to contribute something to my wellbeing and not just need to just be in silence, which is not to talk to anyone, just to really just unpack. So I think the thing that I remember about being a musician is anyone who freelances has to learn how to do that because your time is your own and that can be really... You can put things off, and if you're a procrastinator. Your time is your own. So in a way it's hard to structure "I have an hour, I'm going to practice for an hour" and get into anything creative. I remember liking the stretch of time. You have to come back and you have to learn how you're creative. Maybe I have to do it in 10 or 15 minute chunks and get up and walk around.
I'm not someone who can sit there for four hours and do that. It's just not me. But in order to do that, I can't be scheduling creativity. That's the hardest thing to do. And some people can do it, but I can't. I need the time. Unless something has happened that's absolutely compelling that I write something, that I write some music and I have to, and then I'm just drilled onto it. Or if I have a gig, right? If you have a gig, then it's great. It's so structured. Okay. I have to practice. The rehearsal is tonight. That's where having a regular musical gig is so fantastic. And I remember any theater stuff I've done has been just so focused and so intense, and that's all you can do, and it's not... In some ways it's very calming to have that. I don't know about you because when you know you have to learn this music for the rehearsal, there's no question, right? You're doing it.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to thank you so much for your time today and your wisdom and your beautiful music. It was really beautiful to hear you play.
Marilyn Lerner:
Thank you. Oh, it's a pleasure for me and it's nice to talk to you, and I'll check out the... I don't know when I'll be in Ottawa next, but it would be great to hear you play too. And thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you.
Marilyn Lerner:
Okay. Great.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives in music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
