Alan Fraser

A trip to Stuttgart & Montreal

alanfraser — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:33:18 +0000

It has been hectic here – in Serbia both Christmas and New Year’s are celebrated twice so we still haven’t seen the end of it – while I have been practicing more than celebrating for my recitals next week in Novi Sad and Stuttgart. After the master class in Stuttgart I’ll be visiting Phil Cohen in Montreal to pick his brain about what’s new in the high end piano technique business… It always pays to go back to your sources…

Feldenkrais and piano technique – some beginnings

alanfraser — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:05:57 +0000

I grew up in Montreal and went to Lower Canada College, still one of the best schools in Canada. The Lion, the school magazine recently did an issue on the arts and asked me to write a few words on how my LCC experience affected my career in the arts. You can read the article (beginning on page 42) here: LCC Interview with Alan Fraser . The pdf file is high resolution so it takes awhile to upload but I hope you’ll find it worth the wait.

Abandon structure to discover its function in refined form

alanfraser — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:50:59 +0000

...I mentioned to her that although I had told her to flop her hand entirely and let go of its structure, of course she couldn't really let go of its structure - those bones are in there and always will be. By giving ourselves the subjective experience of letting go structure, we're only letting go of our need to hold on to that structure...

‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ revisited

alanfraser — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:47:51 +0000

Last night giving a Skype lesson to a student in Salt Lake City we ran up against an old problem: she has learned about the hand’s arch so well that it is now causing her grief. The piece in question is the 3rd movement of the big Schubert A minor sonata Op. 143, the one that begins with a little triplet motive chasing its tail between right and left hands. Her arch was so pronounced that the the passage came out too well-defined. It lacked that wispy, secretive, elusive quality. In addition, she was still using so much gripping power to maintain the arch that the movement of its constituent parts was inhibited, making the runs uneven.

A student passes a trial by fire

alanfraser — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:45:40 +0000

Marko actually played a small piece by Bartok for a sold-out audience at his local music school the other evening. We worked daily on Skype the week before – I really put him through his paces. Again the work was clearly to get both sides of his brain involved, through rhythmic over-accentuation, through agonizingly slow but amazingly effective metronome practice, and through listening to the actually durations and tone colours of the sounds he was producing. Quite a transformation!